Conversation with Eleanor Shearer: Filling the Archival Gaps in Caribbean Storytelling

Conversation with Asha Lovelace: Caribbean Film and the Question of Agency

Asha Lovelace is a filmmaker, CEO, and Director of the Caribbean Film Festival, and the daughter of Earl Lovelace, one of the most defining literary voices of the region. In this conversation, we move beyond the ease of legacy and into demanding weight of it. Asha reflects on finding her own voice while adapting her father’s work across mediums and generations, and what it means to create in a moment where reading cultures are shifting and visual storytelling is often seen as the future. But that assumption doesn’t go unchallenged. We also sit with the structural realities of Caribbean film: funding, distribution, and the persistent language of “support.” Asha questions whether that language still carries colonial logic (offering visibility without real infrastructure) and what it might mean instead to build an industry grounded in Caribbean agency. This is a conversation about authorship, inheritance, and the unseen tensions behind creative work in the region. We went there.

Conversation with Eleanor Shearer: Filling the Archival Gaps in Caribbean Storytelling

In this episode of Go There with Tresha Lionel, I sit down with Eleanor Shearer, author of River Sing Me Home. In it, a runaway slave moves across the Caribbean in search of her children taken from her.  We dive into the challenges of writing about lives erased or reduced by history. What does it mean to rebuild stories from records that saw people as property or numbers? And what responsibility do writers have when imagining the undocumented? Instead of just “filling gaps,” we explore the risks and power in speaking for those silenced, and what it means to write with care after erasure. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, we explore how this approach has evolved to consider the space of possibility within the gaps of historical narratives, where imagination does not distort truth but insists on the humanity that official records denied. We also talk about oral storytelling, not just as a supplement, but as an archive itself. In the Caribbean, memory thrives in spoken stories passed down through generations. This isn’t just a literary conversation. It’s a call to look closer, question what we accept as history, and face the cost of what’s been lost.