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"'Flesh Like Our Own': On Poverty and 'Other' Contagions"
  • Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm

Williams Hall, Cherpack Lounge (room 543)


Latitudes and Theorizing present Kaiama Glover

Kaiama Glover is Associate Professor of French at Barnard College. She works on Francophone literatures, especially those of Haiti and the French Antilles; colonialism and postcolonialism; and sub-Saharan African cinema.

 

Talk Abstract from Professor Glover:

In this discussion, I consider the narratives of difference and the language and imagery of disaster that more and less subtly evoke Haiti’s fundamental "Africanness," and thereby insist on what Achille Mbembe has dubbed the "presupposed ontological difference" of the African and, I would add, the "Afro" more broadly. Putting in dialogue concepts taken from the fields of critical media science and communication studies, on the one hand, and questions raised by trauma studies and psychoanalysis, on the other. I reflect here on the uncanny commonalities between constructions of Haiti and of sub-Saharan Africa in the Euro-North American media, and offer some thoughts on the ways in which deep seated industrial-world perceptions of the poor, black body and its material realities effectively disallow empathy, insisting on the deficient unrecognizability of the other.

The other sponsors of this event are French and Francophone Studies and Africana Studies.

​Brooke, Aaron, and I hope to see many of you there!