For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of the Cold War

FAIN: FEL-282005-22

Kaiama L. Glover
Barnard College (New York, NY 10027-6909)

Research and writing leading to publication of an intellectual biography of Haitian poet René Depestre (1926- ) and his uniquely Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic perspectives on the Cold War.

For the Love of Revolution tells the story of influential Haitian writer René Depestre (b. 1926) in order to offer a new perspective on global politics and poetics in the decades following the second World War. By mapping Depestre’s journeys among an extraordinary network of cultural actors invested in re-envisioning the global geo-political order, I re-interpret key political, intellectual, and artistic movements of this period in world history from a specifically Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic perspective. I place Depestre within the frame of both postcolonial Caribbean and postwar European literary and political movements, combining an exhaustive account of his intellectual production with close readings of his rich body of work, much of it still too little known. In relating the contours of a fascinating individual life, I aim to illuminate the colonial and postcolonial spaces and networks, political principles, and artistic perspectives that shaped 20th century Atlantic modernity.