Conversation

Haiti and the Fictions of History with Kaiama L. Glover

Wed, Apr 17, 2024

6:00 PM–7:30 PM

Room 4202 (French Student Lounge), the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC. Please register below.

Join Kaiama L. Glover (Yale University) for “Haiti and the Fictions of History” a broad comparative meditation on modes of storytelling Haiti’s past, specifically in the wake of increased and sudden mainstream attention to that history on such platforms as the New York Times (“Haiti: The Ransom Project”) and HBO (Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes). Thinking through both Edouard Glissant’s engagement with History/histories/stories from an Antillean perspective and Saidiya Hartman’s fraught encounters with The Archive, Professor Glover considers the prose fiction works of three contemporary Haitian women writers – Evelyne Trouillot, Edwidge Danticat, and Myriam Chancy – as historiographic interventions of a particular order. The conversation will be moderated by Sophie Maríñez, Borough of Manhattan Community College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Click here to Register and attend this event.

PARTICIPANTS:

Kaiama L. Glover is Professor of African American Studies and French at Yale University. Professor Glover’s research, writing, and teaching are situated at the intersection of French, francophone, Caribbean, and Haitian literary studies. Her work explores phenomena of border-crossing, marginality, gender, and canon-formation, querying––through rigorous textual study––the shifting categories of ‘center’ and ‘margins’ as they are constituted across the postcolonial Afro-Americas. Her work has been supported by fellowships at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.

Sophie Maríñez is a Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she recently won a Distinguished Teaching Award. She is also an affiliated Professor in the Ph.D. Program in French at The Graduate Center, and regularly teaches as a visiting faculty for the M.A. in the Study of the Americas at City College’s Division of Interdisciplinary Studies.

Her research lies at the intersection of the francophone and Spanish-speaking Caribbean and their diasporas with an emphasis on decolonizing thought and aesthetics, subaltern orality, collective memories, and literary and musical work that transcend dominant notions of race, ethnicity, gender, and national identity. Her new book Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Penn Press, August 2024) has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

This event is co-presented by Africana Studies, the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC) and Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. Co-sponsored with the American Council of Learned Societies.