Bard College Hosts Conference on Haiti's Past and Present

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—On Friday, March 12, Bard College will host “Beyond Silence: Meaning and Memory in the Noise of Haiti’s Present,” an all-day conference exploring the undocumented and unspoken histories of Haiti’s people and arts from before the earthquake and now in light of Haiti’s current challenges. “This conference will spotlight groundbreaking work being done by scholars, activists, and artists to push discourse in a new direction, to move beyond past and present mis-representations and silences that surround Haiti in the historical record,” says Winter Schneider ’10, Bard senior and conference organizer, who was in Port-au-Prince for research on her Senior Project in history and human rights when the earthquake struck Haiti on January 12. “In a time of crisis when the space of several seconds witnessed the leveling of almost an entire city, the question of where history is located in the absence of artifact, monument, and archive becomes even more important.” The conference is free and open to the public, no registration necessary. Panel discussions run from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The keynote address starts at 5:30 p.m. All events take place in the Sosnoff Theater of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

The recent earthquake has raised the stakes for historical preservation and documenting memory in Haiti. The multidisciplinary conference will also serve to focus discussion on an upcoming community-based archiving and oral histories project within Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora. As scholarship on Haiti focuses on questions surrounding recovery and rebuilding, it is essential that Haitian voices and opinions shape that scholarship.

Conference participants include keynote speaker V. Y. Mudimbe, author of The Invention of Africa (1988), Parables and Fables (1991), The Idea of Africa (1994), and Tales of Faith (1997) among other books and articles, and professor of literature at Duke University; Ada Ferrer; Alex Dupuy; Myriam Chancy; Ninaj Raoul; Diana Lachatanere; Edna Bonhomme; and Andràs Riedlmayer.

This conference is being sponsored by the history department, Human Rights Project, President’s Office, and Chinua Achebe Center, with contributions from the Dean of Students Office, French studies department, Bard Urban Studies in New Orleans Program, Trustee Leader Scholar Program, and others. The Black Students Organization and Caribbean Students Association are sponsoring a fundraising dinner, followed by a performance by the Haitian band Bwa Kayiman, and a D.J. dance party on Friday, March 12, at 7:00 p.m. in Manor House Café. All of the proceeds will be donated to a small community organization in Haiti.

This event was last updated on 02-25-2010

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