This essay explores the use of understated modernist performance tropes in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film BLOW-UP. The filmmaker relies on directorial prerogatives such as camera angles, lighting mise-en-scene, editing. subtle gestures and facial expressions, and other minimalist cinematic techniques to convey meaning and mood — rather than overt…[Read more]

This article investigates the mixed ideology of Vittorio DeSica’s classic neorealist film, BICYCLE THIEVES (1948) from a cinematic and political perspective.

This essay investigates the possibility that APOCALYPSE NOW presents “mixed messages” about the Vietnam War to a divided U.S. audience.

This essay explores the use of architecture in the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni.

This essay analyzes the process of adaptation from Susan Orlean’s book THE ORCHID THIEF to the motion picture ADAPTATION (directed by Spike Jonze)

This chapter traces the social and aesthetic implications of the five Academy Award contenders for Best Picture in America’s Bicentennial year, 1976.

This essay uses a psychoanalytic and Marxist methodology to analyze the appeal of Classical Hollywood Cinema.

When we think of the literature produced before, during, and after the two World Wars we rarely think of the Caribbean as a site of significant literary output. Typically, we privilege a white, male, European literary voice. If we do consider literature from elsewhere, it usually follows a pattern of normative privilege. Therefore, it is useful to…[Read more]

This essay explore​s​ the use of *A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Crisis of 1789* in the French literature classroom and how it helps address gaps in digital humanities and French language pedagogy while interrogating the colonial positionality of the French Revolution’s digital archive. In 2015, the Newberry Library received a Digit…[Read more]

L’étoile absinthe (The Absinthe Star) begins with an image of the Caribbean sun––this infra-rouge mass floats in the sky like a large bird, circling the potomitan. Readers of the novel will immediately notice a patch of text on the very first page is missing, as though time were slowly eating away at the final distinguishable traces of Alexis…[Read more]

This interview with Susan Pickford considers her translation of Jean Métellus’s 1986 play Anacaona. Susan contacted me via the University of Liverpool’s Francofil Listserv, where she first heard of the blog series. She informed me of her translation of Anacaona, and I leaped at the opportunity to interview her via e-mail about a Haitian auth…[Read more]

This is a bilingual edition of Charles Moravia’s poem “La Vision de Président Wilson,” or “President Wilson’s Vision” first published in the Haitian daily, Le Matin on November 4, 1918 in response to Woodrow Wilson’s (in)action regarding post-war peace and reconciliation in Europe.

This article analyzes Raoul Peck’s use of epistolary narration and montage in his 2012 documentary “Assistance mortelle” (Fatal Assistance), which delves into the immediate aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake and the geopolitics of the recovery process.

Après le passage des ouragans, des incendies et des séismes, les médias reviennent toujours à l’apocalyptique, un discours qui vise à répertorier les dommages d’un désastre jusqu’à perdre toute trace d’intimité humaine. Depuis le 12 janvier 2010, des auteurs, artistes, académiciens et acteurs sociaux – activistes et militants – haïtiens se batte…[Read more]

“‘The Underlying Gesture’. Towards the Notion of Gesture in Jean d’Udine and Sergei Eisenstein”. In: Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina, Valentina Valente (eds.), From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media. Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2019, 102-115.

The recent surge of interest in Afrofuturism has resulted in some groundbreaking work looking at the ways technology and race intersect in film, fashion, music and literature, as is evidenced by the important collection of essays “Afrofuturism 2.0” (2016), edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. However there has not yet been an aca…[Read more]

The recent surge of interest in Afrofuturism has resulted in some groundbreaking work looking at the ways technology and race intersect in film, fashion, music and literature, as is evidenced by the important collection of essays “Afrofuturism 2.0” (2016), edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. However there has not yet been an aca…[Read more]