This project seeks to remember the life and work of Dr. Cliff Lashley who was a pioneering Caribbean literary scholar, librarian, poet and aesthete. Lashley attended UCWI in the 1950s at the same time as key Caribbean scholars such as Edward Baugh, Velma Pollard and Frank Birbalsingh and others and contributed in the 1960s and 70s to the project of developing Caribbean archival, critical and theoretical paradigms. He was part of a generation of Caribbean intellectuals who worked across a range of fields and endeavors. In the case of some of Lashley’s scholarly and creative contemporaries, such as Rex Nettleford, this wide-ranging cultural dynamism made them central to Caribbean Studies and cultural production more broadly. In the case of Lashley this contributed to the sense of his work as disparate and as an unfinished project. Lashley’s tragic and brutal death at the age of 58, has also lent to this sentiment and feeling of his work as unfinished interventions.  

The project represents an ongoing struggle to recollect and reengage with his archival remains in order to articulate a fuller understanding of Lashley’s critical and cultural projects. It also aims to fundamentally resituate him as part of a transformative reimagining of Caribbean studies in the mid twentieth century, one that was queer and expansive and subversive and shifted the understanding of what might be possible.