archipelagos editor Kaiama L. Glover's latest book, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Women and the Ethics of Disorderly Being, will be available next month. Glover is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies and the Faculty Director of the Barnard Digital Humanities Center, where she teaches and researches about Black francophone literature, colonialism, and postcolonialism.

Read the blurb below and get a sneak peek of the introduction here. 

In A Regarded Self Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege the self in ways unmediated and unrestricted by group affiliation. The women of these texts offend, disturb, and reorder the world around them. They challenge the primacy of the community over the individual and propose provocative forms of subjecthood. Highlighting the style and the stakes of these women's radical ethics of self-regard, Glover reframes Caribbean literary studies in ways that critique the moral principles, politicized perspectives, and established critical frameworks that so often govern contemporary reading practices. She asks readers and critics of postcolonial literature to question their own gendered expectations and to embrace less constrictive modes of theorization.

Build: October – December 2020
Launch: 4 December 2020 at 1:00-2:00pm (EST) - Register here

This year, the seventh annual Caribbean Digital event will be held virtually, with a synchronous virtual gathering on 4 December, from 1pm-2pm, and three asynchronous digital community projects:

The Directory of Caribbean Digital Scholarship is a collaborative curation of digital resources concerning the Caribbean and its diasporas. The project engages the community in compiling entries in an open, shared online dataset. To suggest projects for inclusion in the Directory, you are invited to add links and annotations to the master spreadsheet until November 20. 

The Collective Annotation of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, will run November 16 to 20. This event offers participants the opportunity to engage Césaire’s work in ways that will generate an original textual artifact. Please sign up here to receive timely information regarding participation in this venture.

The Keyword Collection for Caribbean Studies, initiates a collaborative exploration of words that serve as rich sites for research and pedagogy in Caribbean Studies. This collection is intended to be the beginning of a project that will grow with future Caribbean Digital events.

Please contact the organizers – Kaiama L. Glover, Alex Gil, and Kelly Baker Josephs – at thecaribbeandigital@gmail.com if you have questions and/or wish to participate.

All three ventures will be launched synchronously at the Caribbean Digital event on 4 December 2020, 1pm-2pm, which you can register for here.

Date: Monday 16th November, 2020

Time: 6pm - 7:30pm

From centreforthehumanities.org

Please join Small Axe editorial committee member Régine Michelle Jean-Charles for Île en île, a digital humanities archive documenting the cultures with especial focus on the literature of the world's Francophone islands. A pioneering addition to the French-speaking Internet, Île en île has served to present to a global audience works by authors far removed from a Parisian "center." Online since 1998, it is an extensive archive with biographies, bibliographies, excerpts of prose and poetry, and an audio and video archive.

Join scholars Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Françoise Lionnet, Thomas C. Spear, and Alex Gil who will address the transformations that have taken place in the last decades in the field of Francophone Studies as well as with the digital resources available to scholars, students, readers, and teachers.

Free and open to the public. Register here.

More on  Régine Michelle Jean-Charles:

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is a Black feminist literary scholar and cultural critic specializing in francophone studies. She is an associate professor of French and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. Her scholarship and teaching on world literatures in French includes Black France, Sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an AM and PhD from Harvard University. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Mays Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014) as well as numerous essays that have appeared in edited volumes and journals such as American Quarterly, French Forum, The Journal of Haitian Studies, Research in African Literatures, Palimpsest, and Small Axe. She is currently working on two book projects: one on literary ethics in contemporary Haitian fiction and another on Haitian girlhood in literary and visual texts.

Date: Thursday, 5th November 
Time: 3:00pm EST

From LACS Stony Brook:

The Greater Left/Greater Caribbean: Undertheorized Radical Movements in the Archipelago series presents 'Following the Revolution: The Transnational Activism of Blanca and Juan Moncaleano, 1911-1916,' a lecture by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, History, Dartmouth College. The event will be presented by Régulo Silva (PhD Candidate, Hispanic Languages and Literature).

Jorell Meléndez Badillo is the author of the forthcoming The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press) and Voces libertarias: Orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico (Ediciones CCC: Santurce, 2013; 2nd ed., Madrid: Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, 2014; 3rd ed., Lajas, P. R.: Editorial Akelarre, 2015). 

See below for the Zoom details:

Zoom Meeting ID: 966 6689 1148

Passcode: 638249

Date: Friday, 30th October

Time: 10am EST

From the Institute of Jamaica:

The Institute of Jamaica hosts Heritage Fest in October of each month in celebration of “Heritage Month”. The event, celebrated under a theme of cultural significance highlights Jamaica’s treasures and brings together the community creating national pride and inspiring generations.

Join on the Institute of Jamaica's YouTube page

From the Dark Laboratory website:

In this virtual showcase, students from Tao Leigh Goffe’s Cornell seminar “Archipelagoes: A Digital Decolonial Lab” will present their final collaborative project a glossary of terms for decolonization. The glossary will center mother tongues of Indigenous language, creoles, pidgin, and patwas. Tao Leigh Goffe has contributed to Small Axe and sx salon, and will appear in the upcoming issue 63 of the journal. 

Register for the event here.

Dark Laboratory describes itself as "an engine for collaboration, design, and study of Black and Indigenous ecologies through creative technology. Co-founded by Tao Leigh Goffe and Jeffrey Palmer, assistant professors at Cornell University, the Dark Laboratory is a collective funded by generous sponsors including the Rural Humanities, a Mellon initiative at Cornell University. We are situated at the intersection of scholarship, artistic praxis to examine Indigenous forms of storytelling by centering local and global non-profit community institutions as educators." 

Date: Thursday, 22nd October

Time: 4:30pm EST

From Stony Brook Latin American and Caribbean Studies:

A conversation with contemporary queer Caribbean writers Yaissa Jiménez (República Dominicana), Johan Mijail (República Dominicana), Ángel Antonio Ruiz (Puerto Rico) y Juan de Dios Sánchez (Colombia)

Moderated by Mario Henao  (PhD candidate, Hispanic Languages and Literature)

Live stream: https://www.facebook.com/StonyBrookLACS

Stony Brook LACS has multiple events planned for the rest of the semester, which you can see here.

Columbia University's news page recently interviewed the hosts of Zora's Daughters, PhD anthropology students Brendane Tynes and Alyssa James, who also works as an editorial assistant for Small Axe. Read the Q&A here.

Date: Thursday, 22nd October

Time: 4pm EST

Amongst a line-up of other esteemed poets, sx salon creative editor Rosamond S. King will lead a close reading of Natalie Diaz’s “My Brother at 3 A.M.” for the Flow Chat's Foundation's fall/winter 2020 CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE season. Read more on the Flow Chart's Foundation's website.

Date: Thursday 24rd September
Time: 3:30PM on Zoom

Zoom meeting details:
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/96003849213?pwd=YUdEc0JkcEtTKzZzclNHUHVheXM4UT09

Meeting ID: 960 0384 9213
Passcode: 605356
 

Screening: https://www.facebook.com/StonyBrookLACS/