Spring 2021 Events

Monday, February 22, 5:30-7:00pm,
Afro-Latin Activist Intellectuals:  New York, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil
With Ayanna Legros, Sandy Placido and Christen A. Smith
Moderated by Rachel Cantave (International Affairs)

Thursday, March 4, 12-1:30 pm
Cultural Ecologies of the Francophone Caribbean
With Mamyrah Dougé-Propser and Malcolm Ferdinand 
Moderated by Aurélie Matheron (World Languages and LIteratures)

Monday, April 5, 8-9:30 pm
Inspired by the Haitian Revolution
With Cecilia Lisa Eliceche and Kyrah Malika Daniels
Moderated by Rachel Cantave (International Affairs) and Lisa Jackson-Schebetta (Theater)
Join the event

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Inspired by the Haitian Revolution
With Cecilia Lisa Eliceche and Kyrah Daniels
Moderated by Rachel Cantave (International Affairs) and Lisa Jackson-Schebetta (Theater)
Join the event
Flyer

Presentation : "Mystic Battles of the Spirits: Vodou Art of the Haitian Revolution, the 2010 Earthquake, and the Coronavirus Pandemic"

Dr. Kyrah Malika Daniels is Assistant Professor of Art History, Africana Studies, and Theology at Boston College. Her first book (Art of the Healing Gods, in progress) is a comparative religion project that examines sacred art objects used in healing ceremonies in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2019-2020, she was awarded a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art to complete this book project. Following the Haitian earthquake of 2010, Daniels worked in St. Raphael, Haiti, with Lakou Solèy Academic and Cultural Arts Center, a grassroots organization that develops arts-based pedagogy. Her work has been published in the Journal of Haitian Studies and the Journal for the American Academy of Religion. Daniels currently serves as Vice-President for KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou. She completed her B.A. in Africana Studies at Stanford University, and received her M.A. in Religion and her Ph.D. in African & African American Studies at Harvard University. (Scholarship here.)

Presentation: "Haiti or Ayti"

Cecilia Lisa Eliceche (Wallmapu, 1986) is a dancer choreographer and dance advocate based between Salvador de Bahia and Brussels. They are traversed by more than 500 years of colonialism in Abya Yala. The territories she walks inhabit her. They conceive dance as a space to practice otherwise and otherworlds. She has been dancing for more than 10 years with Heather Kravas. Since 2016, they have been sharing life and work with Brazilian artist Leandro Nerefuh and diving in the deep waters of Ayiti (Haiti o Ayiti). In 2020, with the guidance of Ruro Caituiro, Cecilia with the company of Leandro gave birth to the divine Toya. She is thankful to Houngan Jean-Daniel Lafontant and Egbomi Nancy de Souza for their teachings and friendship.

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Cultural Ecologies of the Francophone Caribbean
With Mamyrah Dougé-Propser and Malcolm Ferdinand 
Moderated by Aurélie Matheron (World Languages and LIteratures)

Title: Decolonial Ecologies to Move Beyond the Double Colonial and Environmental Fracture of Modernity. 

 

Dr. Malcom Ferdinand is an environmental engineer from University College London and doctor in political philosophy from Université Paris Diderot. A researcher at the CNRS (IRISSO/University Paris Dauphine), Ferdinand works at the crossroad of political philosophy, postcolonial theory and political ecology. His research on the Black Atlantic and particularly the Caribbean explores the relations between current ecological crises and the colonial history of modernity. He recently published a book based on his PhD dissertation entitled Une écologie décoloniale: penser l'écologie depuis le monde caribéensoon to be translated in English.

Title: Development in Occupied Haiti

Dr. Mamyrah Dougé Prosper is Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Her doctoral work centered on a coalition of social movement organizations calling for an end to the ongoing “non-governmental” occupation of Haiti .She studies the construction of neocolonial nationalist ideologies and collective identities in relation to race and class, gender and sexuality, education and language and religion. She has amonograph in process,  Development Contested in Occupied Haiti: Social Movements, NGOs, and the Evangelical State, and has publications in academic and political journals including Women’s Studies Quarterly and Commune Magazine, and Anthropolitics. Outside academia, she has served as an organizer with land and housing rights organization Take Back the Land-Miami and is presently the International Coordinator for Community Movement Builders. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Spring 2021 issue of NACLA Magazine, and author of "An Island in the Chain: Haiti and the Geopolitics of PetroCaribe."

Afro-Latin Activist Intellectuals:
New York, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil

With Ayanna Legros, Sandy Plácido and Christen A. Smith

Moderator:  Rachel Cantave (International Affairs)

Caribbean Women as Activist-Intellectuals: Scenes from the 1800s to the Present

Sandy Plácido is an Assistant Professor in the History department at Queens College, and the Dominican Studies Scholar at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. Her research and teaching focus on social movements in the Americas, with an emphasis on the participation of marginalized genders and people from the Caribbean. Sandy is working on two books: a co-authored volume that focuses on women who fundamentally shaped Dominican society from the early 1800s to the present; and a sole-authored manuscript that centers the life of Dr. Ana Livia Cordero, a Puerto Rican physician who forged connections between anti-imperialist movements across the Third World. Plácido received her PhD in American Studies from Harvard University, and she has published writing in venues such as Feminist Formations, The Washington Post, Latinx Talk, Black Perspectives, and Global African Worker.

“Beatriz Nascimento’s Black Atlantic.”  

Christen A. Smith, Ph.D. is a Black feminist anthropologist whose work focuses on the transnational, gendered dimensions of anti-Black state violence and Black women’s intellectual contributions to the Americas. She is the author of Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (2016) and is currently working on a project chronicling the life and work of radical Black Brazilian intellectual Beatriz Nascimento. Smith is an associate professor of anthropology and African and African diaspora studies and director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.-

From the Other Side of the Sea: Rasanblaj/Reassembling Haitian Radio Archives of Exile

Ayanna Legros is an interdisciplinary historian of 20th century Caribbean and Latin America. She is completing at Ph.D. in the Department of History at Duke University. Her dissertation project spans the fields of sound studies, immigration, Black diaspora studies, and histories of technology. Her work uses oral histories, radio show transcripts, cassette tapes, and songs to craft a nuanced history of Haitians peoples’ usage of radio to inform and empower new political visions for the nation. She is the recipient of fellowships from Davis Foundation 100 Projects for Peace (Batey Lechería, Dominican Republic), National Alliance for the Advancement of Haitian Professionals, Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship through Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (Harlem, New York) and teaching residences at Dominican Academy, Loyola School, Success Academy, and City University of New York. Her most recent work is a collaborative book with Radio Haiti archivist, Laura Wagner, Ph.D., From the Other Side of the Sea: Rasanblaj/Reassembling Haitian Radio Archives of Exile (University of Virginia Press, 2021).