Cultivating Belonging: The Haitian Revolution and Black Struggles Today! An Interdisciplinary Dialogue 4/7

Friday, April 7th 2017  4:30 p.m.
Russell House

This program will bring together a panel of three scholars from three fields of inquiry to engage in conversation about the Haitian Revolution, (the only successful slave revolution in the history of the West) to assess its complex formations, meanings and gendered representations, as well as its possible implications for Black struggles today. Professors Alex Dupuy (Sociology, Wesleyan), Jeremy M. Glick (English, Hunter College) and Kaiama L. Glover (Africana Studies and French, Barnard) will gather to discuss their specific works, which focus explicitly on the Revolution and its aftermath. The timeliness and timelessness of this conversation could not be more exigent as we contemplate how to best envision new futures with “maximalist” potential when detrimental echoes of the past reverberate in our present.

Panelists:

Alex Dupuy is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Wesleyan U. He is the author of Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment Since 1700 (1989); Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution (1997); The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti (2007); Haiti: From Revolutionary Slaves to Powerless Citizens. Essays on the Politics and Economics of Underdevelopment (2014), and more than three dozen articles in professional journals and anthologies. He is particularly interested in issues of Caribbean political economy and social change. He is a well-known commentator on Haitian affairs.

Jeremy M. Glick is Associate Professor of African Diaspora literature and modern drama at Hunter College, English Department. He is currently working on long-form essays on various topics including Frantz Fanon. His first book, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution, is the 2017 recipient of the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. It was recently reviewed by Slavoj Zizek in the L.A. Review of Books.  His second book project is entitled Coriolanus Against Liberalism/Coriolanus & Pan-Africanist Loss. He is also the Hunter College Chapter Chair of the PSC-CUNY Union. 

Kaiama L. Glover is Associate Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, first editor of Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine (Yale French Studies 2016), and translator of Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (Archipelago Books 2014), Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano (Archipelago Books 2016), and René Dépestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (Akashic Books 2017). She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PEN Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation.