AFRICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES PROGRAM
2026-2027 NEW DIRECTIONS LECTURE SERIES:

Dr. Faith Smith

Marta F. Kauffman '78 Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor of English
Brandeis University

At the center of Dr. Faith Smith's presentation is a bleak novelistic portrait of the 1980s – two decades after political independence, in the English-speaking Caribbean landscape that she is charting. The refusal of kinship implied by “beyond” in her title suggests an impatience with political and scholarly platitudes -- about ideological kinship, about the tragedy of failed radical movements, and so on, that marks the fiction she will examine (and that also questions her own attachment to such platitudes). Dr. Smith invites us to consider what fiction from the past decade might tell us about our current moment’s investments in and narration of various pasts, as well as the present.