Reading Groups

Haitian Fiction: The Story of a World with Kaiama L. Glover

$120

4 Sessions via Zoom

Out of stock

Once a Month Thursdays, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:30 pm EDT September 24 to December 17, 2020

Meeting Dates:
9/24, 10/22, 11/19, 12/17

Although known throughout the world for its seemingly never-ending struggles, the first Black Republic of the Americas has long been a site of exceptional creativity and insight. Its writers and authors have consistently offered narratives of Haiti that tell the story of a world well beyond the space of the Caribbean—a story that implicates the United States, Europe, and the wider Americas.

Participants in this reading group will explore four provocative Haitian novels that evoke the complexity of Haiti’s culture, the persistent radicalism of its people, and the drama of its history. Through the schizophrenic dreamers, lust-struck virgins, recalcitrant zombies, and survivors of unspeakable trauma they present in their pages, these works of prose fiction attest to the marvel of the Haitian literary tradition and propose revolutionary ways of thinking about the whole of our modern world.

Week 1: Ready to Burst by Frankétienne
Week 2: Love by Marie Chauvet
Week 3: Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre
Week 4: Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

Led by

Kaiama L. Glover

Kaiama L. Glover

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies and Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, among other publications, and prize-winning translator of three works of Haitian prose fiction. Her most recent monograph, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Kaiama is currently at work on two projects: an intellectual biography titled For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life and a collection of essays with the working title Black Diva Saves the World. Kaiama has been awarded grants from the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She has contributed regularly to the New York Times Book Review and been a host on the PBS program History Detectives: Special Investigations.

About this series

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