Blackness’ in Trans(Re)lation

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | This talk reflects on the specific stakes of translating works by “Black" francophone authors into the Anglosphere. Dr. Kaiama Glover considers their own practice in conversation with a constellation of francophone and anglophone intellectuals and creative actors – from Haitian writers Frankétienne and René Depestre, to “Black” French thinkers Maboula Soumahoro and Edouard Glissant, and Black American theorists Brent Hayes Edwards and John Keene – offering the notion of trans(Re)lation as a usefully provocative point of departure for sharing language and culture across the various borders of our persistently racialized world.

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 and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, 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.
 
Supported by Black Studies, Literature, and CSL/French.