New Books in the Arts & Sciences:
Celebrating Recent Work by Kaiama L. Glover

A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being
By: Kaiama L. Glover

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.

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About the Author:

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Barnard Digital Humanities Center. She has written Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP 2010) and has published articles in The French Review, Small Axe, Research in African Literatures, The Journal of Postcolonial Writings, and The Journal of Haitian Studies, among others.

About the Speakers:

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is Associate Professor of French and Graduate Program Director at Boston College. Her book Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary was released in 2014.

Yvette Christiansë is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English and Africana Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics (Fordham University Press 2013).

Saidiya Hartman, University Professor at Columbia University, is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.

Madeleine Dobie is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of After Violence: Cultural Renewal in Contemporary and has edited The Comparative Literary History of Slavery, Vol. 1: Slavery, Literature & the Emotions.