Wesleyan Home → Center for the Americas → Americas Forum

Americas Forum

Organized by Center for the Americas regular faculty and by the two Mellon postdoctoral fellows in alternate years, the Americas Forum is an annual international symposium that brings into dialogue scholars and artists from "north" and "south" around a common theme.  Topics featured in past years have included disability studies, public art, culture and ownership, and the days of the dead.  The most recent forum, "Sports Documentary Filmmakers in the Americas: The Politics of Access," showcased baseball star Luis Tiant, filmmakers Jonathan Hock and Michael Zimbalist '02 (with screenings of their respective films, "The Lost Son of Havana" and "The Two Escobars"), and scholar and sports essayist Dana Brand.  

The Americas Forum 2013 commemorates the centenary of Aimé Césaire (June 26, 1913-April 17, 2008), éminence grise of the Francophone Caribbean. More than a merely regional figure, he is also a global presence in the second half of the twentieth century as intellectual, artist, politician, and moral center.  His influence is felt in many disciplines:  poetry, the stage, the development of a racial consciousness and a politics both moral and pragmatic.  His life spans the 20th century, and in many ways exemplifies it:  from the artistic and psychological Modernist movement known as Surrealism, to the movement called Negritude, from mastery of French culture and language to decolonization and a spiritual/cultural pan-africanism.  The 2013 Forum, held on the 100th anniversary of the year of his birth, is both a celebration of Césaire’s life and his continuing influence on the arts, and an intellectual consideration of his profound contributions to our understanding of the Americas, of Marxism, of imperialism and independence, of race and racism, of the role of art as political and ethical agent.

The Forum brings together prominent scholars in the fields of Caribbean Studies, French literature and poetics, Césaire studies, American Studies, and African diaspora studies.  In addition, musicians, poets, and performers will present their own and Césaire’s work.  The 2013 Americas Forum organizers are Wesleyan's Indira Karamcheti, Director, Center for the Americas and Associate Professor of American Studies; Typhaine Leservot, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and the College of Letters; and Suzanna Tamminen, Director and Editor in Chief, Wesleyan University Press.

For a visitors guide to Wesleyan University, please visit: http://www.wesleyan.edu/about/index.html

 

T H E CENTER FOR THE AMERICAS

A M E R I C A S  F O R U M  2 0 1 3

CÉSAIRE AT 100!

THE CENTENARY OF AIMÉ CÉSAIRE 1913–2008 

POET, PRAGMATIST, A VOICE FOR THE VOICELESS 

April 5^th& 6^th, 2013

 

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY

RUSSELL HOUSE, 350 HIGH STREET, MIDDLETOWN, CT

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

 

 FRIDAY, APRIL 5^th

4 P.M.

WELCOME!

 

 4:15–5:30 P.M.

CLAYTON ESHLEMAN, A. JAMES ARNOLD,

EVIE SHOCKLEY, YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

The Poetic Legacy

 

 6:15–6:30 P.M.

NEELY BRUCE AND ELIZABETH SAUNDERS

Césaire’s Music

 

 6:30–7:30 P.M.

KEYNOTE: A. JAMES ARNOLD

Editing Césaire for the 21st Century

 

 9–10 P.M.

WESLEYAN STUDENT POETS

Caribbean Students Association

 

 SATURDAY, APRIL 6^th

9–10:30 A.M.

ALEX DUPUY, DEMETRIUS EUDELL

Politics and Césaire

 

10:40 A.M.–12:10 P.M.

RICHARD WATTS, EMILY SAHAKIAN

Producing Césaire

 

 1:30–3 P.M.

NORMAN SHAPIRO, chair

J. MICHAEL DASH, CLAYTON ESHLEMAN, HOLLY COLLINS

Césaire and Literature

 

3:10–4:30 P.M.

LAURA WEXLER, HAZEL CARBY

Round Table: The Caribbean and American Studies—Future Directions

 

7:30–9 P.M.

World Music Hall at WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY

AIMÉ CÉSAIRE—READINGS FROM HIS POETRY

 

 For more information: e-mail Laura Borhman, The Center for the Americas, lborhman@wesleyan.edu

 Sponsored by: The Center for the Americas, Wesleyan University Press, the African American Studies Program, the Romance Languages and Literatures Department’s Thomas and Catharine McMahon Memorial Fund, Academic Division I, Academic Division II, the Albritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the English Department, the Center for the Arts, the Caribbean Students Association, the College of Letters.

 

 

To view posters from our past programs, please click the slideshow below.