Kaiama L. Glover

René Depestre and the Poetics of the Cold War/In the Same Boats: Toward an Intellectual Cartography of the Afro-Atlantic

My proposed project consists of a manuscript, "René Depestre and the Poetics of the Cold War," and an integrally related digital platform, "In the Same Boats: Toward an Intellectual Cartography of the Afro-Atlantic." In their combination, this monograph and linked multimedia humanities platform propose innovative ways of understanding and, ultimately, teaching the impact of the American Hemisphere on the politics and poetics of the twentieth century in general and of the global Cold War in particular. Both projects aim to think about key political, intellectual, and artistic movements of this period in world history and beyond from a decisively Afro-Atlantic perspective.

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Barnard Digital Humanities Center. Her first book, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP), addresses the general issue of canon formation in the francophone Caribbean and the particular fate of the Haitian Spiralist authors vis-à-vis this canon. Her most recent monograph, "A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being," is forthcoming with Duke UP in 2020. In 2018-2019 she was a resident Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, where she began work on her current book project, “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life.” Kaiama has published articles in The French Review, French Forum, Public Culture, Small Axe, Research in African Literatures, The Journal of Postcolonial Writings, and The Journal of Haitian Studies, among others, and has co-edited several works, including New Narratives of Haiti for Transition magazine (2013), Translating the Caribbean for Small Axe (2015), Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Femininefor Yale French Studies (2016); The Haiti Exception (Liverpool UP 2016) and, most recently, The Haiti Reader (Duke UP 2020).

Kaiama has also translated several works of fiction and non-fiction from French to English, notably 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 (2020). She 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 archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and founding co-director of the digital humanities project "In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography."