What's the epistemic force of literature? How can fiction articulate a feminist decolonial perspective?

In this talk Valeria Grinberg Pla will argue that Zee Edgell and Astrid Roemer use literature as a site of felt knowledge, that is, a site for the production, discussion and transformation of received ideas about the place of women in Belize and Suriname—and the place of Belize and Suriname in the postcolonial world.

Through a fictional exploration, both authors look at two pressing issues for women in the Caribbean: abortion and single motherhood, conveying a concern about the lingering effect of patriarchal values in the private and public sphere. Specifically, Valeria will discuss how Off-White (Gebroken Wit [2019]) and In Times Like These (1991) imagine the practice of love as a way to bypass the coloniality of power and gender. 

Speaker

Valeria Grinberg Pla is a cultural critic and literary scholar. She is a professor of Latin American literature and cultural studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA. Her research interest revolves around the interventions of film and literature in the public sphere and the epistemological force of cultural productions. Currently she is a visiting fellow at KITLV which allows her to further expand multidisciplinary collaborations with scholar-activist communities working on the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Netherlands, in connection to her current research project on the role of feminist Caribbean writers in reshaping transnational and transregional identities that resist Eurocentric and patriarchal frameworks of belonging.

Moderator

Rosemarijn Hoefte is a historian specialized in the Caribbean. She is Professor in the history of Suriname after 1873 in comparative perspective at the University of Amsterdam. Her main research interests are the history of postabolition Suriname, migration and unfree labor, contemporary Caribbean history, and nation building and nation branding in postcolonial states.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in conference room HMO 0.28 in the Herta Mohr building, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Tuesday 9 June from 15.00–16.30 PM (CET). 

Image

Photo by Valeria Grinberg Pla.

Flyer

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