Archival Fictions: Telling the Time of Futures Past

FRANCE AND THE WORLD

SPEAKER: Kaiama L. Glover, Yale University

Professor Kaiama L. Glover will discuss René Depestre’s late novel Popa Singer (2016), a daring work that revisits Haiti’s Duvalier dictatorship, Caribbean revolutionary dreams, and the afterlives of political hope. Drawing on newly examined archival materials, Glover traces the forty-year journey of the novel’s key chapter, “Homo Papadocus,” from its origins in 1970s Cuba to its final form in Depestre’s last major work of fiction. The talk explores how, through Haitian storytelling traditions, irrepressible humor, and investment in a boundless maternal imagination, Depestre succeeds in transforming historical trauma into a future-oriented vision of justice and possibility.

About the speaker

Kaiama L. Glover is a professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP) and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP), as well as of numerous essays, articles, and chapters concerning race, gender, and representation in the francophone world. She is currently at work on a biography titled “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life" (forthcoming with Liveright/Norton) and a series of essays, “Blackness in French: Race Matters in Translation.” has published articles in The French Review, 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, Translating the Caribbean for Small Axe, Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine and Maryse Condé: A Writer for Our Times for Yale French Studies; The Haiti Exception (Liverpool UP) and, most recently, The History of Haitian Literature  (Cambridge UP).

Professor Glover is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction and francophone non-fiction, notably, Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst, Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano, René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams and Popa Singer, Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Quiet Dawn, Yanick Lahens’s Sweet Undoings, Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, and Feminism, and Maboula Soumahoro’s Black is the Journey, Africana the Name. She is the founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. She is also a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the co-host of the podcast WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean. 

Professor Glover's scholarly, translation, and digital humanities work has been generously supported by fellowships at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.