JOINT CONFERENCE: HAITI: BEYOND COMMEMORATIONS & BOUNDARIES
GRADUATE STUDENT & FACULTY JOINT CONFERENCE: HAITI: BEYOND COMMEMORATIONS &
BOUNDARIES (UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, MAY 12-14, 2016; DEADLINE: AUGUST 14, 2015)
• Call for Papers: Haiti Beyond Commemorations and Boundaries.
This joint conference explores the field of Haitian Studies through multiple approaches that go beyond
geographical and linguistic boundaries as well as the chronological limitations of a century. The aim is to
transcend the curiosity towards the Haitian Revolution, and the extended series of sociopolitical crises
made more acute in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. Vast fields of potential inquiry in Haitian Studies
(notably literature, history, anthropology, culture, and language) are too often under-examined, whereas
the most popular of these fields seem bound by deeply entrenched traditional academic discourses. This
event will attempt to generate a pertinent, innovative, and theoretically informed approach to
understanding Haiti. It proposes a brainstorming on current work in a number of disciplines, thereby
attempting to move scholarly work and theoretical reflection on Haiti “beyond commemorations,” as the
conference’s title so aptly puts it. The contributors will represent a diverse group of scholars (both
established and young researchers) in terms of discipline, methodological and theoretical perspectives.
Graduate symposium (Thursday): speakers will be asked to prepare short (15-20 min.) presentations.
Faculty conference (Friday & Saturday): speakers will be asked to prepare a 30-minute talk and allow
15 minutes for discussion.
Papers can be presented in French and/or English.
INDIVIDUAL SUBMISSIONS should consist of a titled abstract of no more than 250 words.
Important Dates
Deadline for proposal submission: August 14, 2015
Notification of acceptance: September 14, 2015
Graduate Students Conference: May 12, 2016
Faculty Conference: May 13-14, 2016
• The focus of the conference
Presentations will be organized in a way to stimulate a dialogue between graduate students and faculty.
They will showcase ongoing debates among philosophers, historians, musicologists, and literary scholars,
and facilitate a face-to-face conversation between literary specialists who have considered the French &
Francophone studies as two indissociable entities and those who have vowed to maintain a restricted
field of postcolonial Francophone studies. The organizers envision different panels to reflect these
ideological divides as well as themes, questions, and unsettled issues vis-à-vis minor and major
literatures.
Among other things, the one-day graduate conference will be an occasion to assess the landscape of
Caribbean studies with an emphasis on the unique issues faced by graduate students and postdoctoral
scholars who identify their field of interests in French Caribbean, Francophone, or French/Francophone
literatures.
The conference will discuss the issues introduced above, with a special emphasis on all sorts of new
ground-breaking projects related to the context of a New World intellectual history of Haiti and the Black
American Diaspora since the French Revolution. The list of topics we hope to consider includes, but is not
limited to the following:
• The uncharted connection between late nineteenth-century Haitian thinkers (such as Anténor Firmin,
Louis-Joseph Janvier) and Booker T. Washington on the one hand, and W.E.B. Dubois and Jean Price-
JOINT CONFERENCE: HAITI: BEYOND COMMEMORATIONS & BOUNDARIES
Mars (the Father of Negritude according to Senghor) on the other. Rethinking Haitian intellectual history
and the Black Atlantic.
• A comparative analysis of racial issues, and the political visions of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B.
Dubois, and Anténor Firmin in the context of a New World intellectual history of Haiti and the Black
American Diaspora at the end of the nineteenth century.
• How and why does the French/Francophone tradition examine Haitian culture differently?
• How can we possibly re-think the postcolonial in the context of Haiti which has been independent since
1804?
• What is the relationship between Haitian history in fiction and fiction in Haitian reality?
• What is the role of history as a discipline in contemporary Haiti? How does the history of literature or the
philosophy of history engage with issues of slavery, colonialism, and the colonial legacy of racial conflicts
within Haiti?
• Fin-de-siècle Haïti and French Fin-de-siècle France.
• Caribbean Archipelago: Hispanophone, Anglophone, and Francophone experiences.
• Haiti-Louisiana-Québec: North-American Francophone exchanges.
• Re-thinking Haitian music, culture, art, and tradition beyond colonialism and voodoo.
• What are the evolving definitions of the term Francophone studies? How can we connect French studies
with Haitian studies?
• Can we reverse the literary histories between Haiti and France instead of carving to the continuing
tradition to read nineteenth-century Haitian poetry as an offspring of French Romantic poetry?
• A reflection on the cultural and literary aspects of monarchy in post-revolutionary Haiti, focusing
especially on the kingdom of Henry Christophe in the North (1811-1820).
• Is it possible to overcome the stereotype of “Haiti as perpetual catastrophe”?
• What is commemoration? Commemorative approaches as historical distortion: the case of Haitian
Independence.
• Hegel and Haiti.
• Clausewitz on War and Toussaint Louverture on indigenous Warfare.
QUESTIONS regarding abstracts or presentations may be directed to
Faculty conference: Daniel Desormeaux (Organizer)
Email: [email protected]
Graduate conference: Bastien Craipain, Michele Kenfack, Linsey Sainte-Claire (graduate committee
organizers)
Email: [email protected]