René Depestre, From Haiti to Moscow with Love

In this lecture, Professor Kaiama L. Glover considers the ways in which the phenomena of refugeeism, exile, and other coerced displacements are constitutive of the “Afro” on a global scale. Taking as point of departure the extraordinary multi-continental peregrinations of Haitian essayist, novelist, militant Socialist activist, and erotic poet René Depestre, Glover examines a story of generative movement that pushes against the more typical narratives of abjection that tend to attach to black bodies in motion. What forms of storytelling most responsibly and compellingly translate – carry across borders and render legible – these narratives? What possibilities exist for representing and perceiving black movement otherwise?