Skip to content

Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

Kaiama L. Glover: Storytelling the Haitian Past

Apr 17 – May 4, 2023
Spring Semester 2023: The Arts of Haiti
Learn More

In this three-day seminar, participants will consider works of prose fiction that nuance contemporary representations of Haiti’s fraught past. Reading together short stories and excerpts from novels by Haitian authors like Marie Chauvet, Edwidge Danticat, René Depestre, Evelyne Trouillot, and others, we will explore key moments in Haiti’s extraordinary history as seen through the writer’s prism of memory, intimacy, and imagination.

Schedule
  • Seminar 1

    Mon, Apr 24, 2023
    6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
  • Seminar 2

    Tue, Apr 25, 2023
    6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
  • Seminar 3

    Wed, Apr 26, 2023
    6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
  • Lecture: "Haiti and the Fictions of History"

    Thu, Apr 27, 2023
    7:00 pm
About Kaiama L. Glover

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Barnard Digital Humanities Center. Having received a B.A. in French History and Literature and Afro-American Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University, Professor Glover joined the faculty in 2002. Her teaching and research interests include francophone literature, particularly that of Haiti and the French Antilles; colonialism and postcolonialism; and sub-Saharan francophone African cinema. She advises students in French, Africana Studies, Comparative Literature, and Human Rights. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP 2020) and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP 2010). She has published articles in The French Review, Small Axe, Research in African Literatures, The Journal of Postcolonial Writings, and The Journal of Haitian Studies, among others, and has co-edited several works, including New Narratives of Haiti for Transition magazine (2013), Translating the Caribbean for Small Axe (2015), Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine for Yale French Studies (2016); The Haiti Exception (2016), and The Haiti Reader (2020). Professor Glover has translated several works of fiction and non-fiction from French to English, notably Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (2014), Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano (2016), René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (2017), and Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, Feminism (2019). She is an awardee of the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the New York Public Library Cullman Center. She is the founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis, the founding co-organizer of “The Caribbean Digital,” and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. In 2018-2019 she was a resident Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, France where she began work on her new book project, “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life” and she is also working on a book of essays, “‘Blackness’ in French.”

Seminar Readings
  • Jacques Stephen Alexis “Of the Marvelous Realism of the Haitians”

  • Michel-Rolph Trouillot “The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean and the World”

  • Marie Vieux Chauvet Dance on the Volcano [excerpts]

  • Evelyne Trouillot The Infamous Rosalie [excerpts]

  • René Depestre Hadriana in All My Dreams [excerpts] and selected poems

Semester
Apr 17 – May 4, 2023
Spring Semester 2023: The Arts of Haiti
Learn More