Book Panel: The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories
Short Bio from book panel
Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken is Research Coordinator and Senior Researcher at the Research Center for Material Culture at the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen in the Netherlands, proudly working under the aegis of Henrietta Lidchi and Wayne Modest. In this capacity, she contributes to critically interrogating the historical legacies of ‘the ethnographic museum.’ She has a series of articles that interrogate what Sarah Phillips Casteel names “the rhetorical oppositionality of ‘Black’ and ‘Jew’” as well as a series that think through Africana feminism and the notion of nomadism through the work of novelist Igiaba Scego and Abdourahman Waberi. Her full-volume publications are: Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (2015); the co-edited “Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet,” a special issue of Yale French Studies (2016), and also the co-edited The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative (2016). Alessandra currently holds an affiliation with Gender Studies at Utrecht University, and was formerly Associate Professor of Caribbean and Postcolonial Studies and French at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center (City University of New York). She is Series Editor for Brill’s Caribbean Series, Co-Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Haitian Studies, and member of the FACE Foundation’s French Voices selection committee. She has engaged two career tracks in academe and in culture diplomacy, at the French Embassy as well as at the Québec Government House in Washington, D.C. and NYC. She is also a graduate of: Critical Muslim Studies: Decolonial Struggles and Liberation Theologies and Black European Summer School.
Born and raised in Martinique, Malcom Ferdinand is a civil and environmental engineer from University College London and a doctor in political philosophy from Université Paris Diderot. He is currently a researcher in the fields of political ecology and environmental humanities at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and based at the University Paris Dauphine-PSL. He is the author of Une écologie décoloniale (2019), of which an English translation is available under the title A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (Polity Books, 2021).
Vincent Joos (PhD, UNC Chapel Hill) is a cultural anthropologist who researches post-disaster reconstruction and the relations between states, citizens, and international organizations in the Caribbean. His new book, Urban Dwelling, Haitian Citizenships tracks the vernacular transformation of urban space by people excluded from the aid economy in post-earthquake Haiti.
H. Adlai Murdoch is Professor of French and Francophone Literature and Director of Africana Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel, and of Creolizing the Metropole: Migratory Metropolitan Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film. He is the editor of the volume The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories: Neoliberalism Since the French Antillean Uprisings of 2009, and the co-editor of the essay collections Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies, Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity, and Metropolitan Mosaics and Melting-Pots: Paris and Montreal in Francophone Literatures, and of various special issues of reputable academic journals. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Seizing Black Diasporic Subjectivity in the French Caribbean: From the Haitian Revolution to the French Antilles in 2009, focusing on issues of revolution, diaspora, and agency in the French Caribbean and the New World.
Hanétha Vété-Congolo is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College, Maine, Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. She is a member of the Africa Academic Hub Initiative and affiliated to the Africana, the Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Programs of her institution. She is also Membre d’Honneur of the Research Group on Black Latin America at the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, France (CRESEM/GRENAL, Languages and identities).
Her scholarship focuses principally on Caribbean and (West/Central) African critical thought, philosophy, literature, culture and orality and, on discourses by women and about women of the Caribbean and, West and Central Africa. She is author of, Nous sommes Martiniquaises. Pawòl en bouches de femmes châtaignes : Une pensée existentialise noire sur la question des femmes [2020], L’interoralité caribéenne: le mot conté de l’identité (Vers un traité d’esthétique caribéenne) [2011.2016], and editor of The Caribbean Oral Tradition [2016], Léon-Gontran Damas : Une Négritude entière [2015] and Le conte d’hier, aujourd’hui : Oralité et modernité [2014].
She has two 2022 forthcoming books on French Caribbean women thought and theory, Discours AntillaisE (Editions Complicité), and Le Femmisme as well as two co-edited volumes one of which is on African thought, Pensées africaines (with Hadi Ba and Oumar Dia) and one on francophone Black women Feminism, Pensées féministes noires francophones: Afrique, Amérique, Europe. Recherches Féministes, Vol. 34.2, 2021 (with Agnès Berthelot-Raffard).
Her poetry collections, Avoir et Être : Ce que j’Ai, ce que je Suis was published with Le chasseur Abstrait in 2009 and, Mon parler de Guinée in 2015 with L’Harmattan, coll. Poètes des cinq continents. Her unpublished collection of poetry Womb of a Woman was Shortlisted for the 2015 Small Axe Literary Competition.