Haiti and the Fictions of History with Kaiama L. Glover

• Event date:
  April 17, 2024 at 6:00 pm
• Event end:
  April 17, 2024 at 8:00 pm

“Haiti and the Fictions of History” is 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, I consider the prose fiction works of three contemporary Haitian women writers – Evelyne Trouillot, Edwidge Danticat, and Myriam Chancy – as historiographic interventions of a particular order.

Speaker: Kaiama L. Glover, Yale University.

Moderator: Sophie Maríñez, Borough of Manhattan Community College and The Graduate Center, CUNY.

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.

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