Free
4 Sessions via Zoom Wednesdays, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:30 pm EDT February 24 to May 26, 2021
This reading group has reached its capacity. To join the waitlist, please email Allison Escoto at [email protected].
Meeting Dates:
2/24, 3/31, 4/28, 5/26
Although situated just a few hundred miles off the coast of Florida, the Caribbean archipelago is a relatively little known place. Seen primarily as either a sun-kissed tourist paradise or, conversely, as the source of unwanted migration to the U.S., the “other Americas” are rarely considered as sites of literary production.
Participants in this course will read and rethink the Caribbean archipelago. We will explore the region’s contribution to American and global literature through discussions of five provocative works of prose fiction that feature daring, disorderly, and otherwise unforgettable Caribbean women. Each of these novels presents powerful, intimate stories that reflect – and interrupt – the grand narrative of Western history.
- Session I: I, Tituba…Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé
- Session II: Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre
- Session III: The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid
- Session IV: The Book of Night Women by Marlon James
Led by
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Kaiama L. Glover
Kaiama L. Glover
Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies and faculty director of the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, among other publications, and the prize-winning translator of several works of fiction and non-fiction. Kaiama is currently at work on several projects: For the Love of Revolution, an intellectual biography of radical Haitian writer René Depestre; an essay collection on “Blackness” in the French Atlantic; and a documentary film series focused on Black performing women’s political utopias. 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
Reading Groups
Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.