1804 & Its Afterlives: Session Three
1804 & Its Afterlives is a programme departing from the inaugural moment of Haiti’s history as an independent nation – the Revolution of 1791 to 1804. The programme was devised as part of the exhibition KAFOU: HAITI, ART AND VODOU.
Session three comprises a panel discussion with Barbara Browning, Michael Largey, and Dr Martin Munro around the influence of Haiti's Revolution on the production of arts and culture across the Caribbean.
Barbara Browning is Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Browning’s major interests lie in Brazil and the African diaspora; dance ethnography; race, gender and postcoloniality; fiction and performance. In “Infectious Rhythm” (1998) Browning analyses how the African cultural diaspora has continued to be represented in terms of metaphors of disease and contagion. While no longer performing professionally, she continues to merge practical engagement of body practices with her scholarly work, which broadly addresses performance and politics in the African diaspora.
Michael Largey is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Area Chair of Musicology at Michigan State University College of Music. Largey is a specialist in Caribbean music, specifically Haitian classical and religious music. He lectures in Caribbean music, South Asian music, East Asian music, ethnographic fieldwork, world music, and historical musicology. He is a core faculty member in the American Studies program, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Asian Studies Center at Michigan State University. He is author of Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism (University of Chicago Press, 2006) in which he examined how elements of Vodou music were used by elite composers to express understandings of nasyon from the 1890s through to the US military occupation of 1915-1934.
Dr Martin Munro is Professor of French and Franophone Studies at Florida State University, specialising in Francophone Caribbean literature and culture. He is the author of Shaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre (2000) and Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat (2007). He has co-edited two books on Haiti: Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks(2006), and Echoes of the Haitian Revolution (2008). He has edited and co-edited four special issues of the journal Small Axe and is a member of the same journal’s editorial collective. He is the editor of Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide (2010) and Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010(2010). He is currently working on an auditory history of the Caribbean.