Events

Jenna Grace Sciuto

“[A] border that exists beyond maps”: Contextualizing State-Sponsored Violence in Contemporary Haitian American and Dominican American Literatures

Dominican American authors Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario—as well as Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat—all wrote historically-grounded works of fiction predominately in English in the 1990s and 2000s, engaging with the legacy of Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, who was in power from 1930 to 1961. In this lecture, Dr. Sciuto will use representations of the Haitian Massacre of 1937 as a test case essential for distinguishing the approaches and positionings of each novelist, in addition to exploring the relationship between these Caribbean diasporic novels, national belonging, and the tension between History with a capital h (or official written accounts of the past) vs. personal individualized histories.

Jenna Grace Sciuto is Associate Professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the United States of America. Her first book, Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2021.

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Culture of the North: Russia, Faroe Islands, Iceland: Geography, History, Literature, Culture.

Seminar and film screening in Veröld – House of Vigdís, 2nd floor, 27 October  at 2-6 pm.

Program:

Talks will be given on Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nordic culture and Russian, Icelandic and Faroese translations.

Two documentaries will be screened:
Dostoevsky: The Siberian Diary, 2006 (26 min.)
The Boys of Tikhaya, 2015. (39 min).

Note: Talks will be in Russian and Icelandic and interpreted to Icelandic and Russian. The documentaries have English subtitles.

The Program is part of Russian Days in Iceland 25-30 October and held through the collaboration of Vigdís Centre, ODRI – Friendship Society of Russia and Iceland, The Embassy of Russia in Iceland and The Embassy of Iceland in Russia.

Free admission and all are welcome.

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