This presentation discusses the conceptualization and development of interactive cartographic platform In the Same Boats: Toward an Intellectual Cartography of the Afro-AtlanticIn the Same Boats is a work of multimodal scholarship designed to encourage the collaborative production of humanistic knowledge within scholarly communities. Comprising two interactive visualizations that trace the movements of seminal cultural actors from the Caribbean and wider Americas, Africa, and Europe within the twentieth century Afro-Atlantic world, the platform seeks to push back against the ways in which “Global South” intellectual production has been stubbornly balkanized in the academy, its limits and contours largely determined by imperial metropoles. The project charts the extent to which Caribbean, African, Latin American, European, and Afro-American intellectuals have had opportunities to be in both punctual and sustained conversation with one another: attending the same conferences, publishing in the same journals and presses, active in the same political groups, perhaps even elbow-to-elbow in the same Parisian cafés and on the same transatlantic crossings – literally and metaphorically in the same boats – as they circulate throughout the Americas, Africa, Europe, and beyond. Leveraging the affordances of digital technology to facilitate a literal retracing of hemispheric black studies, the project draws attention to multiple sites of potentially interconnected Afro-Atlantic theoretical and creative production. Easily accessible, visually impactful, and content-rich, the combination of these two visualizations proposes a generative resource for twenty-first century scholarship concerning the long-historical impact of Afro-Atlantic figures across a vast networked geo-cultural space.

See below for a Sutori recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Glover during her talk.

Kaiama L. Glover is Associate Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Having received a B.A. in French History and Literature and Afro-American Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University, Professor Glover joined the Barnard College faculty in 2002. Her teaching and research interests include francophone literature, particularly that of Haiti and the French Antilles; colonialism and postcolonialism; and sub-Saharan francophone African cinema. She advises students in French, Africana Studies, Comparative Literature, and Human Rights. Her book, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP 2010), addresses the general issue of canon formation in the francophone Caribbean and the particular fate of the Haitian Spiralist authors vis-à-vis this canon. She has published articles in Public CultureThe French ReviewFrench Forum, Small AxeResearch in African LiteraturesThe Journal of Postcolonial Writings, and The Journal of Haitian Studies, among others. 

She is the co-editor of “New Narratives of Haiti,” a special issue of Transition magazine; co-editor of “Translating the Caribbean,” a volume of critical essays on translation in the Americas published as a two-part special section of Small Axe; first editor of Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine, a volume of critical essays published as a special issue of Yale French Studies; and co-editor of the forthcoming Duke University Press Haiti Reader. She has translated Frankétienne’s Mûr à crever (Ready to Burst), René Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (Hadriana in All My Dreams), and Chauvet’s Danse sur le volcan (Dance on the Volcano). She has been on the editorial board of the Romanic Review since 2002, on the editorial board of Small Axe since 2012, and since 2016 is the founding co-Editor of sx archipelagos : a small axe platform for digital practice and co-Director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. She is currently completing a monograph concerning individualism, self-regard, and representations of womanhood in Caribbean prose fiction. Professor Glover has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, The New York Public Library, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and she is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review. She has recently completed a monograph titled “Disorderly Women: On Caribbean Community and the Ethics of Self-Regard.”

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues webpage.

Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions. Viewers can watch the live stream as well.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: MITH (mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301.405.8927).