Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction, by Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, was published by University of Virginia Press in November 2022. The author will deliver a talk based on her research at the Black Studies Colloquium hosted by Columbia University’s English Department on April 11, at 4:00pm. The event takes place at 758 Schermerhorn Extension (located at 200 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, New York). [Space is limited; reserve at https://forms.gle/LbQYrqCbnV9Acgq76.]

Book Description: What would it mean to reorient the study of Haitian literature toward ethics rather than the themes of politics, engagement, disaster, or catastrophe? Looking for Other Worlds engages with this question from a distinct feminist perspective and, in the process, discovers a revelatory lens through which we can productively read the work of contemporary Haitian writers.

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles explores the “ethical imagination” of three contemporary Haitian authors—Yanick Lahens, Kettly Mars, and Evelyne Trouillot—contending that ethics and aesthetics operate in relation to each other through the writers’ respective novels and that the turn to ethics has proven essential in the twenty-first century. Jean-Charles presents a useful framework for analyzing contemporary literature that brings together Black feminism, literary ethics, and Haitian studies in a groundbreaking way.

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is Dean’s Professor of Culture and Social Justice and Professor of Africana Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University and the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary.

For more information, see https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5637/ and https://www.amazon.com/Looking-Other-Worlds-Feminism-Haitian/dp/0813948452/