Homage to Maryse Condé. Part I

Maryse Condé was one of the most distinguished voices in contemporary world literature. She was born in Guadeloupe on February 11, 1937, and died in Apt, France, on April 2, 2024. Condé studied at Université de Paris III and received a doctorate in Comparative Literature. She is the author of 16 novels as well as two memoirs and an important body of literary criticism. Her fiction foregrounds questions of diasporic Caribbean identity and migration, deracination and dislocation, and the ways in which gender intersects with these questions.  In recognition of her writing and service to Francophone culture, she was made a Chevalier in the Legion of Honor in 2014 and received a Grand Croix in the National Order of Merit in 2019. She was awarded the New Academy or “Alternative Nobel” Prize in Literature  in 2018. Her fiction and criticism alike resonated with both the French-speaking world and international audiences, and helped to reimagine French studies—once focused on metropolitan French literature—as a field of Francophone studies that explores writing about and by French-speaking authors from countries and regions around the world. 

In 1995, Condé joined the French Department at Columbia, where she chaired the Center for French and Francophone Studies from its foundation in 1997 to 2002. During her time at Columbia, she trained many students in Francophone literature, and is remembered by her colleagues for her remarkable ability to generate a mix of humor, intellectual rigor, and joy in any room as well as for her hospitality.

Wednesday, December 4, 5:30-8:30 PM

Homage to Maryse Condé I

Richard Philcox and Kaiama L. Glover 

The first evening will feature a talk by Richard Philcox, Condé’s husband and translator, on translating Maryse Condé’s work into English, and a reading of an excerpt from Crossing the Mangrove in French and English. Kaiama Glover will respond and explore questions of  “Blackness,” Frenchness, and translation. The evening will conclude with a screening of Maryse Condé: une voix singulière (written by Françoise Vergès and directed by Jérôme Sesquin, 2011, 52 min.).

Richard Philcox is Maryse Condé’s husband and translator. His translation of Condé’s Waiting for the Waters to Rise, published by World Editions, was long listed for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature in the U.S., and his translation of her Crossing the Mangrove is now a Penguin Classic. Philcox has also translated Condé’s other World Editions title, The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana. He has also published new translations of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. He has taught translation on various American college campuses and won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts for the translation of Condé’s works. 

Kaiama L. Glover is Professor of African American Studies with a secondary appointment in French at Yale University. She has written about Caribbean literature in A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon; and “New Narratives of Haiti” and “Translating the Caribbean” for Small Axe magazine. Her current project is entitled For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life.

Thursday, December 5, 5:30-8:30 PM

Homage to Maryse Condé II

Edwidge Danticat, Madeleine Dobie, Brent Edwards, Mame-Fatou Niang, Pierre Force, Ronnie Scharfman, and Gayatri Spivak

Information and registration here.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Maison Française, 515 West 116th Street, New York, United States