Homage to Maryse Condé II

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.

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

Scholars and colleagues who worked with, and were deeply marked by,  Maryse Condé’s work will discuss some of her contributions to French and Francophone studies, Comparative Literature, and post-colonial thought; her role as an author and literary critic; her engagement with the intersection of history and literature; her contributions to the public memory of slavery; and her impact as a colleague, teacher, and  mentor.

Panelists

Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker; Claire of the Sea Light; The Art of Death; and Everything Inside, a National Book Critics Circle Awards winner. She has also edited several books and written seven books for children and young adults. Her memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.  Among her numerous other honors and awards, she is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation  “Art of Change” Fellow, the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize, a 2020 United States Artists Fellow, a two-time winner of The Story Prize, and the 2023 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.  Her essay collection, We’re Alone, will be published in September 2024. She teaches at Columbia University.

Madeleine Dobie is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  She is the author of Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language and Culture in French Orientalism; Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture; and Relire Mayotte Capécia: Une femme des Antilles dans l’espace colonial français (with Miriam Cottias). She is the co-editor, with Kaiama Glover, of the Yale French Studies volume, Maryse Condé: A Writer for our Times and editor of A Comparative Literary History of Slavery, Vol. 1: Slavery, Literature & the Emotions. She is currently writing a book about testimonies of the Algerian Revolution written late in life.

Brent Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, which won the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism as well as the 2019 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies.

Mame-Fatou Niang is Associate Professor of French Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, the Founder-Director of the Center for Black European Studies and the Atlantic, an artist-in-residence at Ateliers Médicis, and Visiting Professor of French at Columbia University in fall 2024. She is the author of Identités Françaises;  co-author of Universalisme; co-director of the film Mariannes Noires; and she is currently completing Échoïques, a sonic art installation that debuted in June 2023 at Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her current project is Mosaica Nigra: Blackness in 21st-Century France.

Pierre Force is Professor of French and History at Columbia University. He is the author of Le Problème herméneutique chez Pascal); Molière ou Le Prix des choses; Self-Interest before Adam Smith; and Wealth and Disaster. He received the Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award in 2005 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. 

Ronnie Scharfman is Professor Emerita of French and Francophone Literature at Purchase College, SUNY. She has published widely on francophone writers, and her 1987 book on Césaire, Engagement and the Language of the Subject in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire, won a Gilbert Chinard Literary Prize. 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Among her many publications are Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida's De la grammmatologie); Imaginary Maps (translations with critical material of the fiction Mahasweta Devi); In Other Worlds; The Post-Colonial Critic; Outside in the Teaching Machine; An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization; and Readings. 

Wednesday, December 4, 5:30-8:30 PM
Homage to Maryse Condé I
Richard Philcox and Kaiama L. Glover

Information and registration here.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

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