29 March 2014, 4:00pm – 6:00pm

New York City Building
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Queens NY 11368

The term “Coolitude” was originally coined by Mauritian poet Khal Torabully,the aesthetics of which are defined as the articulation of the imaginaries of mosaic India and other human and cultural spaces. Starting from the derogatory word for indentured South Asian laborers, “coolie”, which he revitalized, Torabully extended it to geographical and cultural migrants throughout the world. His poetry voiced the need of relation between the descendants of the emancipated slaves and the indentured, allowing interplay with other cultures, thus clearly constructed far from essentialism or an exclusive “nostalgia of the origins”.

The Queens Museum is proud to explore current Indo-Caribbean writers and artists who are turning to the history of indenture as muse and subject for interrogation in their own work. The multi-media event combines a reading from Gaiutra Bahadur’s book Coolie Woman, sculptural performance by artist Andil Gosine, performance poetry by Rajiv Mohabir, and a screening of Ian Harnarine’s short film “Doubles with Slight Pepper.” The presentations will culminate in a panel discussion with the artists moderated by Lisa Outar, a scholar of post-colonial literature focused on Indo-Caribbean representation.

About the Presentations Continue reading Coolitude: An Afternoon of Indo-Caribbean Art and Literature

On 7 March, from 6p-8p, ARC Magazine will present an artist talk at 82 Mercer Street, in the Talks Lounge at VOLTA NY‘s location.

The artists include:

• Olivia McGilchrist, feature prize winner of the Trinidad & Tobago film festival and ARC Magazine New Media Prize (Jamaica)
•  John Cox, fine artist represented by Popop Studios, and artistic director of Baha Mar, Nassau (The Bahamas)
• Ian Deleon, social activist, educator and artist (Cuba/Brazil/Boston)
• Jayson Keeling, artist (Jamaica/USA)
• Joiri Minaya, artist (Dominican Republic/USA).

The dialogue generated will explore the ideas of intimacy, collaboration, process, and social accountability.

8 March, 2014

Grace Exhibition Space and Gallery

840 Broadway 2nd Floor

Brooklyn, NY

Beginning at 8pm on 8 March, ARC Magazine will present a one-night exhibition at Grace Exhibition Space under the same title.

The exhibition will support a selection of works by:

• Kwesi Abbensetts (Guyana/USA)
• Steeve Bauras (Martinique/France)
• Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow (Jamaica/USA)
• Allana Clarke (Trinidad & Tobago/USA)
• Gilles Elie Dit Cosaque (Martinique / France)
• Ian Deleón (Cuba / USA)
• Jeannette Ehlers (Denmark)
• Antoine Hunt (Bermuda)
• Jayson Keeling (Jamaica/USA)
• Davina Lee (St. Lucia)
• Carolyn Lazard (USA/Haiti)
• Manuel Mathieu (Haiti)
• Olivia McGilchrist (Jamaica)
• Michael McIntosh (USA/Jamaica)
• Joiri Minaya (Dominican Republic/USA)
• Nile Saulter (Jamaica)
• Nyugen Smith (Trinidad/Haiti/USA)
• Rodell Warner (Trinidad & Tobago)
• Antonia Wright (Cuba/USA).

Broadly, the works selected will engage issues of labour, traumatic histories and their revisions, as well as the holistic development of an experiential moment or group of moments that create new narratives, linear and otherwise, through poetics, agency and play.

This exhibition is co-curated by Holly Bynoe and Yasmine Espert with production assistance from Laura Blüer. For more information about ARC Magazine collaborators, please visit the Facebook event pages for the artist talk and the exhibition.

This announcement adapted from email.

Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas & the Caribbean (IRADAC) presents:

“(Mis)Translations: Toussaint, Modernity, and the Postcolonial Present”
by Natalie M. Léger, Queens College, CUNY

Respondent: Jeremy Glick, Hunter College, CUNY

28 February 2014
4:00 – 6:00 PM
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
ARC Conference Room – 5318

This event is part of the IRADAC Works in Progress Series, which showcases research by CUNY faculty who are engaged in research on the African
Diaspora worldwide. Dr. Leger’s paper is available for pre-reading here.

Paper description (quoted from PDF draft): Continue reading (Mis)Translations: Toussaint, Modernity, and the Postcolonial Present

Dark and Dangerous Fiction: A Reading and Conversation with Edwidge Danticat

Wednesday, 26 February 2014
5:00pm (***rescheduled from 6pm)

Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall
The New School
Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street (formerly known as Tishman)
New York, NY

The New School presents a reading and conversation with Edwidge Danticat.

Danticat is an award winning, Haitian born author who has published many celebrated novels, short stories and essays, some of which include Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); Krik Krak (1996), The Farming of Bones (2003), Brother I’m Dying (2007), and Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010). She will be reading from her latest works: the novel, Claire of the Sea Light (2013), and the collection, Haiti Noir 2 (2014). After her reading, Ms. Danticat will be joined in conversation by Rose Rejouis of Eugene Lang College.

This event is co-sponsored by Gender Studies at the New School, The School of Writing, and Women of the African Diaspora Reading Series.

*This is a free event, no reservations required.*

For more information please visit: the event announcement here.

Above adapted from email announcement.

The Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center presents a day with Ian Baucom. there will be two events: A seminar at 12:00pm and a public talk at 4pm. Details from the circulated announcement below. The readings will be available for download here until 7 December.

Friday, December 6th
Ian Baucom works on twentieth century British Literature and Culture, postcolonial and cultural studies, and African and Black Atlantic literatures. He is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (1999, Princeton University Press), Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005, Duke University Press), and co-editor of Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (2005, Duke University Press). He has edited special issues of the South Atlantic Quarterly on Atlantic Studies and Romanticism, and is currently working on a new book project tentatively entitled The Disasters of War: On Inimical Life. Prof. Baucom received his Ph.D. from Yale University and taught there before joining the English Department at Duke. Prior to assuming the post of the Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute, he was Chair of English at Duke for three years.

12:00-1:30 – Seminar with Ian Baucom Room 5109
Please join us in discussing a portion of Prof. Baucom’s new book project in conversation with several readings which have shaped its development. The readings for this seminar are as follows (click on each to download):
1. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses” in a 2009 issue of Critical Inquiry.
2. Ian Baucom, “The Human Shore: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Natural Science”
3. The Introductory chapter of Tim Morton’s new book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.
4. Ian Baucom, “History 4˚C: The Youngest Day” (which is his working introduction to his new project).

4:00-6:00 – Ian Baucom, “History 4˚C: Search for a Method” Room 9100 (Skylight Room)

“The current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming,” Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently argued, has effected a collapse of the long-standing division between human and natural history. Where it has been the enduring conviction of the historical profession that the proper study of history begins at precisely the point at which human life organizes and separates itself from animal, natural existence, the planet’s looming ecological catastrophe, Chakrabarty indicates, has made that distinction void. Human history, human culture, human society have now come to possess a truly geological force, a capacity not only to shape the local environments of forests, river-systems, and desert terrain, but to effect, catastrophically, the core future of the planet as we enter into the long era of what the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and other climate researchers have called the “anthropocene.” As scholars across the disciplines have increasingly begun to argue, addressing the deep time of the anthropocene (both its deep history and its deep future) implies a fundamental interrogation (or re-interrogation) of many of our core concepts (“nature,” “politics,” “sovereignty” and the “human” key among them). As the coherence and plasticity of those concepts—particularly of the human–come under renewed pressure so too are there allied shifts toward a range of posthumanist understanding of the “task” (or tasks”) of the humanities and, consequently, of the relation of the humanities to the life and other natural sciences.

In this talk I take up some of those challenges, particularly as they address the question of framing a critical method adequate to the “situation” of the anthropocene. In so doing, I will argue that despite its enormously rich considerations of the multi-scaled temporality of the anthropocene, Chakrabarty’s recent work also sometimes bends the time of climate linear in the progress toward catastrophe, thereby bypassing the full possibility of a multi-temporal ontology of the present that would include the persistence into the anthropocene of History 1 and 2. I suggest, therefore, that while drawing on his recent work, we need to continue in a search for method adequate to the situation of our time; a time that knots together (minimally) Histories 1, 2, and 3; a time that I am provisionally calling History 4˚.

This event is co-sponsored by the following entities at the CUNY Graduate Center: the Advanced Research Collaborative, the Center for the Humanities, IRADAC, the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar, the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change.