co-sponsored by the Slavery & Freedom Working Group Continue reading First Seminar Meeting

Welcome back to all Caribbean Epistemologies Seminar participants! And welcome to any newcomers for Fall 2011. We have a full schedule of events for the Fall. See the schedule below (also always available in by clicking “Schedule” at the top left of our site). Our first session will be on September 23, 2-4pm with Herman Bennett. More details and reading to come. Please visit the Center for the Humanities’ new website to (re)register for the seminar. We look forward you joining us for these generative conversations on the Caribbean:

Fall 2011

All Fall 2011 events will take place from 2-4pm at the CUNY Graduate Center (rooms TBA), unless otherwise noted. Copies of readings can be accessed on the blog or here (registration required – and very helpful in enabling funding).

• September 23, Herman L. Bennett, Department of History, The CUNY Graduate Center
  “Slave Insurgents and the Political Impact of Free Blacks in a Revolutionary Age: The Revolt of 1795 in Coro, Venezuela”
• October 3, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert – “Gade nan mizè-a m tonbe: Vodou and Haiti’s Environmental Catastrophe”***
  

  ***This event will take place at 7pm and is part of the City SEEDS Lecture Series on“Aesthetic and Cultural Expressions of African-Derived Religions”

• October 18, Deborah Thomas, Department of Anthropology, U Penn
  “Caribbean Studies, Archive-Building, and the Problem of Violence”
• October 21, Yarimar Bonilla, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University
  “Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment”
• November 4, Kaiama Glover, Department of French, Barnard College
  “The Audacity of the ‘I’: Narcissism, Community, and the Textual Feminine in Francophone Caribbean Prose Fiction”
• November 22, Frank Guridy, Department of History, UT Austin
  “Neither Race, Men nor Tragic Mulatas: Afro-Puerto Ricans and the Imperial Transition, 1898-1917”
• December 9, Pablo Gomez, Department of History, Texas Christian University/John Carter Brown Library
  Title TBA

Schedule also available on “Symposium” page above.

Continue reading The Caribbean Epistemologies Symposium, April 15 2011

Our next seminar meeting will be on March 25, from 2-4:30pm. In this session we will be discussing a selection from Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and a screening of Glissant in the film Utopia Station. Rose Rejouis, Assistant Professor of English at The New School, will offer comments on the reading and Michael Dash, Professor of French at New York University, will present on Glissant’s life and ideas in connection with the film.

Details:
Friday, March 25, 2-4:30pm, Room C197, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Flyer available here. Reading available here and at The Center for the Humanities site.

Our first Spring seminar session will be on February 18th and we will be reading selections from Belinda Edmondson’s Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure, Culture and the Middle Class (New York: Cornell UP, 2009).

The selections can be downloaded here (until February 18th) or on the Center for Humanities website for the remainder of the semester.
Selections: Introduction and Chapter 5

We will be meeting in the President’s Large Conference Room (8201.01) from 2-4p.

I look forward to our discussion!

The fourth session of the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar will be:

Friday, December 10, 4-6pm, Room 5111

 Our guest will be: J. Michael Dash, Professor of French at New York University. He is the author of Literature and Ideology in Haiti, Haiti and the United States, The Other America, and Culture and Customs of Haiti, and has translated a number of Edouard Glissant’s works, including The Ripening, Caribbean Discourse, and Monsieur Toussaint.

 We will be discussing Professor Dash’s paper:

“Hemispheric Horizons: Confinement, Mobility and the “bateaux-prisons” of the French Caribbean Imaginary”

Our discussants for the paper will be Professor Alessandra Benedicty, City College, and Professor Kaiama Glover, Barnard College. 

Note: This paper will be available via the link above through the end of December, but it will remain on the Center For Humanities’ website for the duration of the seminar.

The third session of the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar will be:
Tuesday Nov 23, 2-4PM, Room 7314 Continue reading Third Session: Richard Turits

The second session for Caribbean Epistemologies Seminar will be on Friday, Oct 29th, 2-4pm in Room 8301 at the Graduate Center.

The readings for this meeting are (links to readings will be removed after 10/29):

Reading 1: “Chapter 3” from David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity
Reading 2: “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” by Derek Walcott

Also suggested: The “Appendix” to C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins and “Lectures on the Black Jacobins” by C.L.R. James.

Lunch will be served.

Save the Date: Nov 23, Tuesday, 2-4PM, Room 7314: speaker Richard Turits, Professor of History at University of Michigan and author of Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime and Modernity in Dominican History

Judging by the turnout for our introductory Seminar session (and by the scholars who could not make the first meeting but registered for the Seminar), there is quite a lot of interest in Caribbean Studies at CUNY and surrounding institutions. There is a demand for this type of intellectual space from faculty and graduate students across various disciplines. 

After some discussion, we chose the following readings for our next meetings:

• “Conscripts of Modernity” David Scott (Chapter 3 in Conscripts of Modernity [Duke UP, 2004])
• “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” Derek Walcott (The Nobel Lecture)

Registered Seminar participants may download the readings from the Center for Humanities’ website.  We look forward to a stimulating discussion of these texts on October 29, from 2-4p in room 8301 at the Graduate Center.