The Infamous Rosalie

A virtual book club by Opera Lafayette
With Scholars Kaiama L. Glover & Laurent Dubois

Sessions: March 2, 9, 16, 2022

Join us for conversations about The Infamous Rosalie, a novel set in colonial Saint-Domingue written by Évelyn Trouillot, one of Haiti’s great contemporary writers. In our meetings, we’ll explore the themes of slavery, resistance, and motherhood taken up in the novel, talk about the historical events and contexts depicted in it, and think through the style and structure of the work as an example of Caribbean literature. Together, we’ll gain a better sense of the worlds that shaped the music that will be performed in Opera Lafayette’s presentation of Concert Spirituel aux Caraïbes coming to DC and NY June 2022 (Get tickets).

Each week, we’ll read two chapters of the novel. As you read, we hope you’ll pick out particular passages you find striking or moving and would like to discuss, take note of any questions you’d like to ask us, and think through the questions under each week’s session.  

Sessions & Readings | Meet Your Hosts | Get Your Copy | Resources

$25/complete series or $10/session
*There is a small fee associated with each ticket purchase.

Sessions & Readings

We suggest registering for all sessions ($25/all), but you can also register for individual sessions ($10/session).

 

March 2, 6pm est, virtual

Lisette’s Story (Chapters 1 & 2, pp. 1-44)

  • Concepts to consider while reading:

    • Consider how this novel blends the personal and the historical. Why might Trouillot have decided to present the colonial world through Lisette's eyes?

    • Consider the various enslaved characters in Lisette’s life. What do their individual stories tell us about the workings of 18th century plantation society?

    • Describe Trouillot's representation of the white planters. How do they perceive the enslaved? What anxieties do they express and why? What differences do we see between the role and attitude of the women and those of the men?

March 9, 6pm est, virtual

“Fly up into the sky” (Chapters 3 & 4, pp. 45-82)

  • Concepts to consider while reading:

    • What is the significance of the fact that Lisette is Creole?

    • What is the significance of the "time of the barracoons?"

    • What do Gracieuse and Louise's choices tell us about enslaved women's particular suffering?

March 16, 6pm est, virtual

Creole to African (Chapters 5 & 6, pp. 83-129)

  • Concepts to consider while reading:

    • Why is the real historical character Makandal so important to Trouillot's historical fiction?

    • What conclusions can we draw about the distinctions between male and female forms of marronage? 

    • How has Lisette transformed over the course of the novel? What does it mean that she ultimately calls herself an Arada woman?

Meet Your Hosts

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has written extensively about Caribbean literature in such works as A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (2021) and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (2010), and she is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction. Her current project, an intellectual biography titled “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life," has been supported by fellowships at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and the New York Public Library Cullman Center. She has also been awarded grants from the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and is the co-host of WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean.

Laurent Dubois is the John L. Nau III Bicentennial Professor in the History & Principles of Democracy in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, and Director for Academic Affairs of the Democracy Initiative. He has written about the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean, with Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (2004), which won four book prizes including the Frederick Douglass Prize. His 2012 Haiti: The Aftershocks of History was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His work on the cultural history of music, The Banjo: America's African Instrument (2016), was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Fellowship, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. His most recent book is Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean (2019), co-authored with Richard Turits. He is currently beginning work on a history of the French Atlantic.

Get Your Copy of "The Infamous Rosalie" Today

You can purchase a copy of The Infamous Rosalie from The University of Nebraska Press or use Indie Bound to locate a copy in an independent bookstore near you. 

Want to shop local? Politics and Prose has agreed to stock copies for us. Find out where here.

Additional Resources

For an introduction to Trouillot and the novel, watch this interview with her done by Laurent Dubois below and read this portrait from PBS Newshour in 2011.