Category: Northeast US Events

Édouard Glissant’s Tout-Monde: Transnational Perspectives

12:45pm – 7:00pm
16 November 2018
Elebash Recital Hall and The James Gallery
CUNY Grad Center

The year 2018 marks what would have been the 90th birthday of Édouard Glissant (1928-2011), the eminent thinker of Relation and the All-World (Tout-Monde) who taught for sixteen years at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Since Glissant’s passing, the influence of his thought continues to grow as his works are now taught not only in Europe and the Americas but also in India and China. This symposium, organized by the Henri Peyre French Institute and co-sponsored with Americas Society, the Center for the Humanities and the Ph.D. Program in French at the Graduate Center, CUNY celebrates the transnational reach of Édouard Glissant’s ideas and the continued sustenance they provide to activists, artists, scholars and writers world-wide. It underlines his call for all people to abrogate the walls, real or imaginary, that separate them for all communities to achieve equality and solidarity and embrace the “Poetics of Relation.”

Édouard Glissant’s humanist project influenced and engaged colleagues and students alike during his years as Distinguished Professor of French at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (1995 to 2011), a city in which diverse ethnic and religious groups share a space that allows “Relation” to thrive, be reformulated and constantly rediscovered. The symposium includes academics whom Glissant mentored as well as those who have been inspired by reading him and have applied his thought to their own work and in teaching their own students.

The symposium brings to the fore scholars and artists who apply Édouard Glissant’s theories to shed light on inter-communal relations, expose the power dynamics of the privileged versus the marginalized, advocate against boundaries while acknowledging difference, contest dominant hierarchies of race, ethnicity, and gender, and show how texts normalize some groups and make others “other.” The symposium celebrates the many perspectives of the Tout-Monde and brings the “periphery” back to the center of discourse, mindful of the powerful Glissant-inspired motto “Les Périphériques vous parlent!” (The Periphery is speaking to you!).

Free and open to the public, but to attend, please click here to RSVP. 

Speakers include: Mohit Chandna, Nathalie Etoke, Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François, Jarrod Hayes, Sylvie Kandé, Cilas Kemedjio, Barbara Webb, Christopher Winks, Pedro Zylbersztajn, and others.

SCHEDULE:

Continue reading Édouard Glissant’s Tout-Monde: Transnational Perspectives

Seminar Series on Édouard Glissant

1:00pm – 4:00pm
9th to 30th  November 2018
French Department Thesis Room
CUNY Grad Center

This Fall semester, the Henri Peyre French Institute, the PhD Program in French, and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY will host a series of seminars honoring the legacy of Édouard Glissant, who taught here from 1995 to 2011. Each of the informal seminars—held in the French Department thesis room where Glissant taught––will be led by one of his former students on a topic of their choosing, ranging from their personal experience with Glissant to the themes in his work and its ongoing influence across disciplines. Offering an intimate at-one-remove experience, these one-hour seminars will be open to 10–15 participants. To attend, participants must RSVP on Eventbrite (see links to RSVP below). Maximum capacity is 10–15 persons due to the size of the seminar room.

Weds, October 24, 2-3pm: Paul Fadoul, Lecturer in French, Queens College, CUNY [FULLY BOOKED]

Friday, November 9, 3-4pm: Led by Chadia Chambers-Samadi, Assistant Professor of French, University of the Bahamas. Click here to RSVP for this seminar.

Tuesday, November 27, 1-2pm: Led by Hamid Bahri, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies, York College, CUNY. Click here to RSVP for this seminar.

Friday, November 30, 1-2pm: Led by Eric Lynch, Assistant Professor of French, Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, TX. Click here to RSVP for this seminar.

These seminars are in tandem with the exhibition Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking at the Americas Society (Oct. 9, 2018–Jan. 12, 2019), and the symposium “Édouard Glissant’s Tout-Monde: Transnational Perspectives” at the Graduate Center, CUNY (Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 12:45 PM – 7:00 PM).

Co-sponsored by the Henri Peyre French Institute, the PhD Program in French, and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY. 

Above text adapted from webpage. Above image adapted from email.

The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present

6:00pm – 7:30pm
30 October 2018
NYU Center for the Humanities, Fifth Floor
RSVP here

In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines—history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies— and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary (Fordham UP, 2018) seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field: universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; politics vs. culture. The essays reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments, doing so under four interrelated analytics: postcolonial temporality; deprovincializing the global south; beyond Marxism versus postcolonial studies; and postcolonial spatiality and new political imaginaries.

Join us to celebrate this new volume and to reflect on the project with the book’s editors, Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder, and several contributors.

Featuring:

Continue reading The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present

[ Decodings ] exhibit by Pascale Monnin

Exhibit Opening 
4:00pm – 9:00pm
2 November 2018
Rogue Space #9 E-F-G
508-526 West 26th Street
Between 10 & 11th Avenue
Chelsea, NY 10001

RSVP for the opening: info@galeriemonnin.com

The exhibit will be on view from Saturday November 3rd to Saturday November 10th Open every day from 10am to 6pm.

Pascale Monnin last exhibited in Manhattan 5 years ago. This November, she returns to the city with [Decodings], a solo exhibit organized by GALERIE MONNIN NYC.

[ Decodings ], both a celebration of the world and an evidence of Monnin’s estrangement from it, presents more than a hundred paintings, mobiles and sculptures. Punctuated by Monnin’s obsessions: history, politics, debt, myths, complexity, animals, plants, life, childhood, time, movement, the sacred, faces, vertigo…, it reveals many facets of her artwork and displays a world of warring births, dazzling impulses, hybrid forms, with reckless nuances of a childhood spreading sometimes cast in stone, sometimes lying on the frame as the art spills over.

Continue reading [ Decodings ] exhibit by Pascale Monnin

Queer Trouble in Caribbean Art & Activism

A Conversation with Rosamond S. King & Angelique V. Nixon

6:00pm – 8:00pm
23 October 2018
Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality (CSGS)
285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor


Rosamond S. King, English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York


Angelique V. Nixon, Institute for Gender & Development Studies, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad

Two award winning artist-scholars reflect on the intersections of LGBTQI and feminist arts, activism, and politics in the Caribbean. King and Nixon address how their own work moves between these different registers. They also discuss how they see contemporary queer Caribbean performance, literature, and visual art engage and resist the ongoing violences of colonial and postcolonial histories, and how these works offer us vibrant models of desire, embodiment, and collectivity.

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Roxane Gay in Conversation with Katia D. Ulysse

7:00pm
8 November 2018
CUNY Graduate Center 


Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay, award-winning author of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017), Difficult Women (2017), and Bad Feminist (2014) and Katia D. Ulysse, Haitian poet, essayist and author of Drifting (2014), among other works, will join us for a reading and conversation in the Critical Caribbean Feminisms series. Following the reading, Gay, Ulysse, and BCRW Associate Director Tami Navarro will discuss various forms of writing–including novels, memoir, and social media interventions–and examine how these create space for conversations around and advocacy for social justice.


Katia  D. Ulysse

This event is free and open to the public. All advance tickets have been claimed. A limited number of tickets will be available and released on a first-come, first-seated basis. For more information, visit the CUNY Grad Center event page.

Event Co-Sponsors: Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, the Center for the Study of Women and Society, CUNY Graduate Center, the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, and Women Writing Women’s Lives

About the Speakers Continue reading Roxane Gay in Conversation with Katia D. Ulysse

Reimagining Money Workshop and Caribbean Syllabus Launch

4:00pm – 6:00pm
10 October 2018
754 Schermerhorn Ext
Columbia University

The Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) working group Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy presents: Caribbean Syllabus: Second Edition and Max Haiven’s Art After Money, Money After Art Book Launch with: Tao Goffe, Monica Jiménez, Sarah Muir, Frances Negron-Muntaner, and Jason Wozniak.

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Panel Discussions and the “Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking” Exhibition

4:00pm
9 October 2018
Room 1527, North Building
Hunter College, CUNY
Free Admission

Opening Panel:
To mark the opening of Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking, cocurators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Asad Raza, along with artist Julie Mehretu, will discuss Americas Society’s new exhibition in a panel moderated by Gabriela Rangel.


Image: Lydia Cabrera (second from right) with a group of informants, Central Cuba, undated. Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.

6:00pm – 8:30pm
9 October 2018
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue,
New York, NY
Free Admission

Exhibition Opening
Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking focuses on the ideas developed by the prominent Caribbean thinkers Lydia Cabrera (Havana, 1899–Miami, 1991) and Édouard Glissant (Sainte-Marie, Martinique, 1928–Paris, 2011) and an archipelago of modern and contemporary artists whose works respond to their notions of identity. Artists include: Etel Adnan, Kader Attia, Tania Bruguera, Manthia Diawara, Mestre Didi, Melvin Edwards, Simone Fattal, Sylvie Glissant, Koo Jeong A, Wifredo Lam, Marc Latamie, Roberto Matta, Julie Mehretu, Philippe Parreno, Amelia Peláez, Asad Raza, Anri Sala, Antonio Seguí, Diamond Stingily, Elena Tejada-Herrera, Jack Whitten, and Pedro Zylbersztajn. The exhibition will run from October 9, 2018 to January 12, 2019. 

6:30pm
16 October 2018
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue,
New York, NY
Free Admission. Please register in advance.

Panel Discussion: Lydia Cabrera in the Archipelago
Join Visual Arts at Americas Society for a panel including scholars Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (assistant professor, Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College), Martin Tsang (librarian for the Cuban Heritage Collection and curator for Latin American Collections at the University of Miami), and Christopher Winks (Comparative Literature, Faculty member at Queens College), moderated by Gabriela Rangel. They will discuss the Cuban writer-ethnographer Lydia Cabrera (Havana, 1899–Miami, 1991) in relation to the exhibition Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking. The publications by Cabrera including Cuentos Negros de Cuba and El Monteinform current scholarship surrounding literature, ethnography, and art.

Continue reading Panel Discussions and the “Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking” Exhibition

History of Women & Gender: Tracing and Gendering Diaspora

12:30pm – 2:00pm
1 October 2018
King Juan Carlos Center, Room 701
New York University

Please join the History of Women and Gender program for the first event of the semester. This event is cosponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Joan Flores-Villalobos, Assistant Professor of History at The Ohio State University, will discuss her paper ” ‘Freak Letters:’ Tracing and Gendering Diaspora in the Archive of the Panama Canal”.

Abstract:
“This article explores how West Indian women are recorded using the papers and correspondence of the Isthmian Canal Commission, the biggest repository of original documents regarding the construction of the Panama Canal, housed in the National Archives of the United States. Using a 1909 photograph of a nude black West Indian woman found in a file labeled “Freak Letters,” I consider the difficulties of recovering historical subjects structured by imperial frameworks of productivity and perversity, and trace instead the counter-narratives of mobility, affect, and self-determination that might have shaped this woman’s life. I argue that a diasporic and imaginative methodology of recovery can illuminate experiences and limitations beyond the lens of empire. Using this approach, I uncover the archival logic behind “Freak Letters” and recreate the woman’s milieu, highlighting her mobility and diasporic connections. Ultimately, the article seeks to build an empathetic, horizontal, archipelagic counter-discourse as the basis for our explorations of subjects historically silenced or denigrated.”

A light lunch will be served.

RSVP to Clare Richfield at cjr431@nyu.edu for a copy of the text. All are welcome to attend, whether or not you read the paper in advance.

Above text adapted from webpage.

New Puerto Rican Cinema: Emerging Filmmakers

6:00pm – 9:00pm
28 September 2018
King Juan Carlos Center, Auditorium
New York University

NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, present a conversation with the creators of groundbreaking Puerto Rican films, El silencio del viento (The Silence of the Wind; 2017), El Chata (The Sparrow; 2017), and Antes que cante el gallo (Before the Rooster Crows; 201). Introduced by Licia Fiol-Matta (NYU Department of Spanish and Portuguese) and moderated by Jennifer Duprey (Rutgers University Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies), students and the academic community at NYU will have the opportunity to dialogue with the directors, some of the actors, screenwriters, sound designers, and producers of these films.

About the filmmakers and films: Continue reading New Puerto Rican Cinema: Emerging Filmmakers

A Conversation about Literature and the Arts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria

2:50pm – 4:10pm
27 September 2018
Rutgers University
Center for Cultural Analysis, Room 6051
Academic Building, 15 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ, 08901

The Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies (RAICCS) is pleased to announce the visit of renowned Puerto Rican novelist and visual artist Eduardo Lalo (University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras) to Rutgers U., New Brunswick as part of our “What is Decoloniality?” Speaker Series. Lalo will speak about literature and the arts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

Continue reading A Conversation about Literature and the Arts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria