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Trans-American Crossroads: Haiti and the Making of the Americas

Trans-American Crossroads: Haiti and the Making of the Americas







The Five College Center for Crossroads in the Study of the Americas (CISA) presents its 2002-2003 interdisciplinary colloquium:




 


TRANS-AMERICAN CROSSROADS:


HAITI AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAS



Trans-American Crossroads: Haiti and the Making of the Americas will explore the historical, cultural, literary, and political import of Haiti within the Americas over the last two centuries since the General Slave Revolt of 1791 in colonial Saint Domingue and the establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1804. 


 





COLLOQUIUM PROGRAM


MARCH 6-7, 2003. Amherst College


 

 

 

Thursday, March 6


 

 

1:00 pm - 1:15 pm                

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Robert Schwartzwald, Director, CISA; Jana Evans Braziel, Fellow, CISA

 

 

1:15 pm 3:15 pm               

Session I - Long-Distance Nationalism:

Haitis 10th Département and Transborder Citizenship

Introductions by H. Enoch Page, University of Massachusetts Amherst

 

Georges Eugene Fouron, Associate Professor in the School of Education at SUNY-Stony Brook, was born in Aux Cayes, Haiti and migrated to New York in 1969.  Author of important articles on the Haitian diaspora and Haitian immigration patterns in North American, Fouron recently published Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home (Duke, 2001), co-authored with Nina Glick Schiller.

 

Nina Glick Schiller, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Hampshire, has published widely on immigration and transnationalism.  With Cristina Blanc-Szanton and Linda Basch, she co-authored Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Routledge, 1994) and edited Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).  Most recently, Glick Schiller published Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home (Duke, 2001), co-authored with Georges Eugene Fouron.  

 

 

3:15 pm - 3:45 pm                 Coffee and Tea

 

 

4:00 pm 6:00 pm               

Session II - Haitian American Children in U.S. Public Schools:  Cultural Translations, Second Languages

Introductions by Jana Evans Braziel, Amherst College

 

"Unthinking a Chimera": Combining Fieldwork and Literature in U.S. "Haitian Valleys"

Sophia Cantave, Tufts

Sophia Cantave is a part-time lecturer in the Department of English at Tufts University, where she is teaching a course entitled Literature and Film of the Haitian Dyaspora.

 

 

Angle se yon lang, Kreyol se lang mwen , A Look at the Politics of Language and Intimacy among Haitian American Youth

Valerie Chanlot, University of Paris-Sorbonne Nouvelle; Harvard

Valerie Chanlot is a doctoral student in American Studies at the Institut du Monde Anglophone (Institute for the Study of the English-Speaking World) at the University of Paris-Sorbonne Nouvelle and a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Romance languages and Literatures at Harvard University.  Chanlots doctoral research is on forms of protest among Haitians in the United States.

 

 

Rethinking Success in the American Paradigm: Haitian Parents Transnational Adaptation in U.S. Academic Settings

Alexandra Célestin, Independent Scholar

 

Temwen: Haitian Students Recount their School Reality from 1990-1996

Charlene Désir, Harvard

Charlene Désir is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Her research work addresses the school adjustment of Haitian immigrant children in US schools.  She also holds a Masters in School Psychology and works as a School Counselor in the Cambridge, Massachusetts Public School system.

 

 

6:15 pm 8:15 pm                Dinner Recess (For a list of restaurants, please see the Amherst Restaurant Guide)

 

 

8:30 pm 10:00 pm             

Session III -  Cette grenade dans la main du jeune nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit?: A Reading by Dany Laferrière

Introduction by Dawn Fulton, Smith College

Nota Bene: Reading in French; photocopy of text translated into English available upon request.

 

Dany Laferrière is the author of Une Autobiographie américaine (An American Autobiography), a series of ten autobiographical novels: Comment faire lamour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985); Éroshima (1987); LOdeur du café: roman (1991); Le Goût des jeunes filles: roman (1992); Cette grenade dans la main du jeune nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit?: roman (1993); Chronique de la dérive douce: roman (1994); Pays sans chapeau: roman (1996); Le Chair du maître: roman (1997); Le Charme des après-midi sans fin: roman (1997); and Le Cri des oiseaux fous: roman (2000).  Since the completion of the American Autobiography, Laferrière has published Jécris comme je vis (2000), a series of interviews with Bernard Magnier, and Je suis fatigué: essai (2001).

 

 




Friday, March 7


 

8:45 am - 9:15 am                              Morning Reception: Coffee

 

9:30 am 11:30 am                          

Session IV - Gender, Violence, Desire: Revolutionary Beginnings, Imperialist Interventions, and the Violent Making of the Americas

Introductions by Joseph T. Skerrett, University of Massachusetts Amherst

 

Haiti and the Making of American Empire

Mary Renda, Mount Holyoke College

Mary Renda, Associate Professor of History, Womens Studies, and American Studies at Mount Holyoke College, is the author of Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), which has won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations; the John Hope Franklin Prize, awarded by the American Studies Association; and the Albert J. Beveridge Prize, awarded by the American Historical Association.

 

 

Gender and Sexuality in Literary Representations of the Haitian Revolution

Curtis Small, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Curtis Small, Lecturer of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, completed the Ph.D. in French at New York University in 2001.  Smalls dissertation, Cet homme est une nation: The leader and the collectivity in literary representations of the Haitian Revolution, explored gendered myths about paternity and patria in literature about the Haitian Revolution.  

 

 

11:45 am 1: 15 pm Lunch Recess (For a list of restaurants, please see the Amherst Restaurant Guide)

 

 

1:30 pm 3:30 pm               

Session V - The gods do not die: Vodou in New New Worlds (Haiti, Diaspora, and Religion)

Introductions by Deborah Gewertz, Amherst College

 

Continuity and Change: Vodou in the Haiti and in the Diaspora

Leslie G. Desmangles, Trinity College

Leslie G. Desmangles is Professor of Religion and International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and served as the first president of the Haitian Studies Association from 1994-1998. A native of Haiti, he was educated in Haiti, Canada and the United States and holds a Ph.D. degree in Anthropology of Religion (Religion and Culture) from Temple University in Philadelphia. As an expert in cults and cultic studies, he has published many articles on Haitian Vodou and is also the author of a book on religion in Haiti. Entitled, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti, this award-winning book was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1993. In 1995, he edited a volume for the Haitian Studies Association entitled Haiti in the Global Context. More recently, he served as an associate editor for the Encyclopedia of African and African American Religions, published in 2001 by Routledge Press.

 

 

The Promise of Applied Ethnomusicology in Third World Development: The Case of Haiti

Gerdès Fleurant, Wellesley College

Gerdès Fleurant, Associate Professor of Music at Wellesley College, is a well-known ethnomusicologist whose research and publications explore the Rada and Kongo rites of Vodou; he is also a founding member of the academic organization KOSANBA: Congress of Santa Barbara/Congres de Santa Barbara/Kongre Santa Barbara, which is devoted to the academic study of Vodou.  Fleurant is author of Dancing Spirits: Rhythms and Rituals of Haitian Vodun, the Rada Rite (Greenwood Press, 1996).  

 

 

3:30 pm 3:45 pm                Coffee and Tea

 

4:00 pm 6:00 pm               

Session VI - Trans-American Literatures: Haiti and the Americas

Introductions by Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Amherst College

 

Hybrid Realities: Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba

Myriam J.A. Chancy, Arizona State University; Smith

Myriam J.A. Chancy, Senior Editor of Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism and Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, is a Haitian writer and scholar born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and raised in Quebec City and Winnipeg.  Chancy is also the author of two groundbreaking books about Caribbean authors, Framing Silence: Haitian Womens Literature of Revolution (Rutgers University Press, 1997) and Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (Temple University Press, 1997).  Chancys novel In the Hills of Haiti will appear in April 2003 with Londons Mango Press.

 

 

Dany rewrites Laferrière:  Cette grenade

Carrol F. Coates, SUNY-Binghamton

Carrol F. Coates, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University (SUNY), has written and published extensively on Haitian and Haitian diasporic literatures. Coates has also translated works by Haitian writers into English, including Jacques-Stéphen Alexiss In the Flicker of an Eyelid (2002). Alexiss General Sun, My Brother (1999), and René Depestres Festival of the Greasy Pole  (1990), which were published in the CARAF series (Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French) by the University Press of Virginia.

 

 

6:15 pm 8:15 pm                Dinner Recess (For a list of restaurants, please see the Amherst Restaurant Guide)

 

8:30 pm 10:00 pm             

Session IV - Viewing and Discussion: Raoul Pecks Profit and nothing but! (2001)

Introduction by Géraldine Vatan, University of Massachusetts-Amherst





Important note:


 Johnson Chapel (All Sessions before 4:00 pm)

Cole Assembly Room (All Sessions after 4:00 pm)