In this Book Talk organized by the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures, and co-sponsored by the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of French at Barnard College, Sophie Maríñez (CUNY)—author of Mademoiselle de Montpensier: Writings, Chateaux, and Female Self-Construction in Early Modern France—will be in conversation with Kaiama L. Glover (Yale University) on Tuesday, September 24, 2024, from 12:00 until 2:00pm, at the Sulzberger Parlor, Barnard Hall, 3rd floor. Lunch and light refreshments will be served. [Non-CU/BC ID holders, please rsvp to mhorn@barnard.edu. You may join the event remotely via Zoom.]
The discussion will explore Dr. Maríñez’s new book Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Description: An in-depth analysis of literary and cultural productions from Haiti and the Dominican Republic and their diasporas.
Spirals in the Caribbean responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Spirals details how a paradigm of permanent conflict between the two nations has its roots in reactions to the Haitian Revolution—a conflict between slavers and freedom-seekers—contests over which have been transmitted over generations, repeating with a difference. Anti-Haitian nationalist rhetoric hides this long trajectory. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called Spiralism, Sophie Maríñez explores representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.
With its emphases on folk tales, responses to the 1937 genocide, the Constitution of the Dominican Republic, Afro-indigenous collective memories, and lesser-known literary works on the genocide of indigenous populations in the Caribbean, Spirals in the Caribbean will attract students, scholars, and general readers alike.
For more information, see https://www.pennpress.org/9781512826401/spirals-in-the-caribbean/
Also see our previous post, https://repeatingislands.com/2024/06/16/new-book-spirals-in-the-caribbean-representing-violence-and-connection/
In this Book Talk organized by the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures, and co-sponsored by the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of French at Barnard College, Sophie Maríñez (CUNY)—author of Mademoiselle de Montpensier: Writings, Chateaux, and Female Self-Construction in Early Modern France—will be in conversation with Kaiama L. Glover (Yale University)