Phantom Africa: A Discussion with Brent Hayes Edwards
Department: Intl. Center for Writing and Trans.
Date and Time: May 20, 2021 | 5:30 PM-6:30 PMEvent Location: Zoom
Event Details
Brent Hayes Edwards will present his recent translation of Michel Leiris’s ground-breaking account of the 1931-33 anthropological expedition across Africa, from the South Atlantic to the Indian Ocean: Phantom Africa (L’Afrique fantôme, 1934).
DATE: Thurday, May 20, 2021
TIME: 5:30-6:30 PM PST
Sponsored by the International Center for Writing and Translation
TIME: 5:30-6:30 PM PST
Sponsored by the International Center for Writing and Translation
Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He is also the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. His publications include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), the co-edited collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004), and scholarly editions of classic works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Joseph Conrad, and Claude McKay.
Edwards’s most recent books are his translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (2017), which was supported by a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and Edwards’s own Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017), which was awarded the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Music Criticism and the 2019 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His current projects include “Black Radicalism and the Archive” (a book based on the Du Bois Lectures he presented at Harvard in 2015) and a bilingual edition of the collected interwar articles of the Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal. Edwards was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.