The role of Latin in Britain’s eighteenth-century Caribbean colonies was multifaceted. The ability to speak the language was a status symbol for the colonial elite, and Latin texts often served as attempted validations of the colonial project; for example, John Maynard wrote a lengthy Latin poem aiming to justify the slave trade in Barbados. But there was also the Jamaican poet Francis Williams, who achieved international fame as a writer of Latin verse and used his work to defend his right to be taken seriously as a Black poet. In this week’s episode, Dr John Gilmore of the University of Warwick speaks to Shivaike Shah about the light Francis Williams’s one surviving poem sheds on the lesser-known functions of Latin in the British colonies. He shares how Latin poetry became a conduit for arguments about the intellectual capacity of people of African descent and, by extension, about the illegitimacy of the slave trade.

To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/latin-poetry-in-the-caribbean