Withfriends presents “Sophie Maríñez’s SPIRALS IN THE CARIBBEAN with Lauren Derby”—a conversation to be held on Sunday, October 13 at 4:00pm, at Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th Street) in Washington Heights, New York City.
Description: Professor Sophie Maríñez shares her new book Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, an in-depth analysis of literary and cultural productions from Haiti and the Dominican Republic and their diasporas. In conversation with Maríñez will be Lauren Derby, Professor of History and the E. Bradford Burns Chair in Latin American Studies at UCLA. The conversation will be moderated by visual artist, graphic designer, and producer Reynaldo García Pantaleón.
This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance. [In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.]
ABOUT THE BOOK: “Spirals in the Caribbean” responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Spirals details how a paradigm of permanent conflict between the two nations has its roots in reactions to the Haitian Revolution–a conflict between slavers and freedom-seekers–contests over which have been transmitted over generations, repeating with a difference. Anti-Haitian nationalist rhetoric hides this long trajectory. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called Spiralism, Sophie Mariñez explores representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.
With its emphases on folk tales, responses to the 1937 genocide, the Constitution of the Dominican Republic, Afro-indigenous collective memories, and lesser-known literary works on the genocide of indigenous populations in the Caribbean, “Spirals in the Caribbean” will attract students, scholars, and general readers alike.
Sophie Maríñez is a Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY and an affiliated Professor in the Ph.D. Program in French and the Africana Studies Certificate Program at The Graduate Center. Professor Maríñez is also a poet, a writer, and a literary translator. Her essays and poetry have appeared in The Boston Review, Small Axe Salon, Caribbean Quarterly, The Caribbean Writer, and The Cincinnati Romance Review. She has published several children’s books with McGraw-Hill and translated into French the poetry of Julia Alvarez, Jacques Viau Renaud, and Frank Báez, among others.
Lauren (Robin) Derby is a Professor of History and the E. Bradford Burns Chair in Latin American Studies at UCLA. Her research has focused on everyday life under regimes of state terror, the long durée social history of the Haitian and Dominican borderlands, and how notions of race, national identity, and witchcraft have been articulated in popular media such as rumor, food and animals. She is Senior Editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review (now housed at UCLA), and the author of, among other titles, The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (Duke UP, 2009) and Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, forthcoming with Duke University Press.
For more information, see https://withfriends.co/event/20823094/sophie_marezs_spirals_in_the_caribbean_with_lauren_derby