The Blue Savannas of Memory: Edouard Glissant and Caribbean space

Public Lecture
by Michael Dash
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
2:00 pm
Diffenbaugh 009
Florida State University

Arranged by the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 

 

 

Michael Dash
 

Place in the Caribbean imagination has been treated in terms of the idea of either a grounded identity typical of Cesairean poetics or Edouard Glissant’s vision of Caribbean space as indeterminate, enabling a network of global relations. In his lecture, Professor Dash looks at Glissant’s problematizing of origins and belonging in terms of a salutary dislocation, of the shaping force of the Caribbean Sea’s disruptive fluidity. In rejecting atavistic models of grounded identity he launches an innovative relational model of horizontal incomplete beginnings.

J. Michael Dash, born in Trinidad, has worked extensively on French Caribbean writers, especially Edouard Glissant, whose works, The Ripening (1985), Caribbean Discourse (1989) and Monsieur Toussaint (2005) he has translated into English. He is now Professor of French at New York University and his publications include Literature and Ideology in Haiti(1981), Haiti and the United States (1988), Edouard Glissant (1995), The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998). His most recent books are, Libeté: A Haiti Anthology (1999) with Charles Arthur and Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001).

 

 

For more information contact: 

Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics

Florida State University

Tallahassee, Florida 32306-1540

Telephone 850.644.7636

Fax 850.644.9917

E-mail icffs@mailer.fsu.edu

Website www.winthropking.fsu.edu