Book Presentation | "Because When God Is Too Busy" by Gina Athena Ulysse

Book Event | "Because When God Is Too Busy" with Gina Athena Ulysse

Thursday, February 23
6-8 pm

A poetic journey through silence, rebellious rage, love and the sacred, Because When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me, THE WORLD is a lyrically vivid meditative journey that is unapologetic in its determination to name, embrace, and reclaim a revolutionary Blackness that has been historically stigmatized and denied. Crafting experiments with “ethnographic collectibles” of word, performative sounds, and imagery to blur genres and the lines between the geopolitical and the personal, this collection is a testament to postcolonial inheritances. These poems, performance texts, and photographs gather fractured memories—longings laced with Vodou chants confronting a past that looms too largely in the present. Because When God Is Too Busy searches for humility while honoring sacred and ancestral imperatives to recognize and salute power beyond Western attachments to reason.

Gina Athena Ulysse is a feminist artist-academic- activist and self-described Post-Zora Interventionist. She is an interdisciplinary methodologist whose research interests focus on Black diasporic conditions. She integrates performance, representation and public anthropology to create her works. She is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, A Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica (2008), as well as Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (2015). Her edited projects include “Pawol Fanm Sou Douz Janvye,” in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism Journal (2011), and “Caribbean Rasanblaj,” (2015), a double issue of emisférica. In addition to several anthologies, her writing has appeared in AnthroNow, Feminist Studies, Gastronomica, Journal of Haitian Studies, Liminalities, PoemMemoirStory, Souls, AfricaIsACountry, Huffington Post, Tikkun Daily and Transition. Her projects include: Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD; I Am Storm: Songs & Poems for Haiti and VooDooDoll What if Haiti Were A Woman: On Ti Travay Sou 21 Pwen Or An Alter(ed)native in Something Other Than Fiction. She is Professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University.

Joy James is F.C. Oakley 3rd C. Professor @ Williams College where she teaches courses in the humanities and political science. Her most recent book is Seeking the Beloved Community.  Her other books include Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals, and Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in U.S. Culture. Her edited books include: Warfare in the American Homeland; The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings; Imprisoned Intellectuals; States of Confinement; The Black Feminist Reader (co-edited with TD Sharpley-Whiting); and The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Her public intellectual work on race, gender and policing/incarceration has appeared in the Boston Review, NY Times, Viewpoint. She is a member of the Abolition Collective and co-curator/editor of its 2016 Elections Blog. James is co-curator of digital repositories for the Warfield Center and the Harriet Tubman Literary Circle, an educational nonprofit organization, at the University of Texas-Austin.

Jeremy Matthew Glick is an Associate Professor of African Diaspora literature and modern drama at Hunter College, English Deptartment. He is currently working on long-form essays on Frantz Fanon, Sam Greenlee's Black Power Detective Fiction, and Century-Methodological Approaches to African American Literature. His second book project is entitled Coriolanus Against Liberalism/ Coriolanus & Pan-Africanist Loss. He is also the Hunter College Chapter Chair of the PSC-CUNY Union. His book The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution is the 2017 recipient of the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. It was recently reviewed by Slavoj Zizek in the L.A. Review of Books.

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