East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall
515 W. 116 St., New York, NY 10027
Edwidge Danticat talks with Brent Hayes Edwards about We’re Alone, her recent book of essays that trace a loose arc from her childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, and include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin. The essays explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience, moving from the personal to the global and back again. Literature and art remain her reliable companions and guides through both tragedies and triumphs. We’re Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.
Speakers:
Edwidge Danticat is the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. She is the award-winning author of 18 books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist.
Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He is the editor of the journal PMLA. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003) and the English translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (Seagull, 2017).
This event is co-sponsored by the Maison Française, African American and African Diaspora Studies Department, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER).
