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Public Lecture ‘On Blackness and Borders’ University of Glasgow

Tuesday 19 March 2019, 4-6pm

Professor Kaiama Glover, Columbia University

Public Lecture: ‘On Blackness and Borders’

Launch event of the new Arts Lab theme

Decolonizing Glasgow and the Post/Colonial

Led by Rachel Douglas, Christine Whyte, Stephen Mullen

Yudowitz Lecture Theatre, Wolfson Medical Building, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ

Abstract

This lecture considers the ways in which phenomena of refugeeism, exile, and other coerced displacements are constitutive of the “Afro” on a global scale. Taking as point of departure the extraordinary multi-continental peregrinations of Haitian essayist, novelist, militant Socialist activist, and erotic poet René Depestre, Glover examines a story of generative movement that pushes against the more typical narratives of abjection that tend to attach to black – especially Haitian – bodies in motion. What forms of storytelling most responsibly and compellingly translate (carry across borders and render legible) these narratives? What possibilities exist for representing and perceiving black movement otherwise?

Bio

Professor of French & Africana Studies at Barnard College, Kaiama L. Glover is author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool University Press, 2010); co-editor of Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine for Yale French Studies (2016); and translator of 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 (under contract with Duke University Press). Professor Glover is an awardee of the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She is founding co-editor of the journal sx archipelagos: a small axe platform for digital practice and founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. Her most recent monograph, Disorderly Women: On Caribbean Community and the Ethics of Self-Regard, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. She is currently a Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, France where she is developing her new book project, “René Depestre: For the Love of Revolution.”

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