The “In All My Dreams” book club, held from October 2019 to February 2020 was an informal gathering of readers interested in discovering or exploring Haitian culture through the prism of one of Haiti’s most important works of literary fiction. During each hour-long meeting, participants came together to travel through the novel in the engaging company of a host of experts in the fields of Haitian literature, history, and anthropology. We provided brief reading guides, accessible from our home page, indicating the narrative ground we covered in each session and offered links to additional resources (for those who enjoy heading down the odd rabbit hole). We encouraged participants to make use of the comments section on each page – to share thoughts or to pose questions during the weeks leading up to or following our ‘live’ meetings.
In the wake of this first iteration of the Book Club, we hope that this site can serve as a place for ongoing query and conversation. The resources here can help guide an individual reading of the novel, contribute to the teaching of the work in colleges and universities, or serve as a resource for those interested in organizing their own book club around Hadriana In All My Dreams.
Hosted by literary scholar Kaiama L. Glover and historian Laurent Dubois, the four sessions of this book club culminated in an event with Edwidge Danticat at the French Embassy of New York and a Hadriana-inspired contemporary Haitian art exhibition.
If you are interested in using these resources for teaching or for your own book club and would like to reach out to us to help, please feel free to contact us at hadrianabookclub@gmail.com. To sign up to receive updates about future events and exhibits that are part of this project, join our email list here.
For those who wish to read the novel in English translation, it is published by Akashic Books (with a 25% reduction on the cover price!) and can be ordered easily online, or from an independent bookstore near you.
For those who wish to read the novel in the original French, we recommend the paperback edition from Gallimard.
About Us
Kaiama L. Glover
Co-Lead
Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies and Director of the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research focuses primarily on postcolonial francophone literature and culture, particularly that of Haiti and the French Antilles. Her book, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP 2010), examines canon formation in the francophone Caribbean and the particular fate of the Haitian Spiralist authors vis-à-vis this canon. Her most recent monograph, Disorderly Women: On Caribbean Community and the Ethics of Self-Regard, is forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2020. In 2018-2019 she was a resident Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, France where she began work on her new book project, “René Depestre: For the Love of Revolution.” Professor Glover has received fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, The New York Public Library, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review. She holds a PhD in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University and a BA in French History and Literature and Afro-American Studies from Harvard University.
Laurent Dubois
Co-Lead
Laurent Dubois is Professor of Romance Studies and History and the founder and Faculty Director of the Forum for Scholars & Publics at Duke University. He is the author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004), 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, and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012). He has written about music and cultural history, in The Banjo: America’s African Instrument, published by Harvard University Press in 2016. The research on this book was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. He has also written about the politics of soccer, with Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (2010), and is the founding editor of the Soccer Politics Blog. His most recent book is The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer (Basic Books, 2018). His writings have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, The New Republic, The New York Times, Aeon, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and Slate. He tweets @Soccerpolitics.
Taylor Faires
Web Designer
Taylor Faires is the 2019-2020 Post Baccalaureate Fellow in the Digital Humanities at Barnard College. Taylor graduated in 2019 with a BA in Political Science and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies from Barnard, where she worked extensively with the topic of ecofeminism in Latin America. In addition to the Digital Humanities, Taylor is interested in theatre and bringing conversations about the environment and sustainability to performance and performance studies.