Open Spot: Reading the Other Americas with Kaiama L. Glover

The ‘With Books’ option includes all titles required for this group at a 15% discount.

Meeting Dates:
Wednesdays, 2/24, 3/31, 4/28, 5/26
7-8:30pm ET via Zoom

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

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.