Curriculum Vitae
Hanétha Vété-Congolo is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College, Maine-USA, Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, President emerita of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Founder and Coordinator of Lyannaj des chercheurs guadeloupéens, guyanais et martiniquais aux États-Unis. She is a member of AI4A- Artificial Intelligence for Afrika, the Africa Academic Hub Initiative and affiliated to the Africana, the Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Programs of her institution. She is also Board member of Women in French and Membre d’Honneur of the Research Group on Black Latin America at the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, France (CRESEM/GRENAL, Languages and identities).
Her scholarship focuses principally on Caribbean and (West/Central) African critical thought, philosophy, literature, culture, and orality and, on discourses by and about women of the Caribbean and, West and Central Africa. Vété-Congolo is author of Nous sommes Martiniquaises. Pawòl en bouches de femmes châtaignes : Une pensée existentialiste noire sur la question des femmes (2020), L’interoralité caribéenne : le mot conté de l’identité (Vers un traité d’esthétique caribéenne) (1st ed. 2011. 2nd ed. 2016), and editor of Pensées et philosophies d’Afrique. Pour demain : voir, comprendre et penser l’Afrique d’aujourd’hui (with Hady Ba and Oumar Dia. Présence africaine 201, 2022), Penser le sujet femme noire francophone. Recherches féministes, vol. 34, N.2, 2022 (with Agnès Berthelot-Raffard), The Caribbean Oral Tradition (2016), Léon-Gontran Damas : Une Négritude entière (2015) and Le conte d’hier, aujourd’hui : Oralité et modernité (2014), MaComère : Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (2004).
Among others, her articles have appeared in the C.L.R. James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Journal of Contemporary Thought, Journal of World Philosophies, Ethiopiques : Revue négro-africaine de littérature et de philosophie, The CLR. James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas, Journal of Black Studies, Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore, Wadabagai, A journal of the Caribbean Diaspora, Postcolonial Text, Présence francophone, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Les Cahiers du GRELCEF, Women in French, Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis.
Her poetry collections, Avoir et Être : Ce que j’Ai, ce que je Suis was published with Le chasseur Abstrait in 2009 and, Mon parler de Guinée in 2015 with L’Harmattan, coll. Poètes des cinq continents. Her unpublished collection of poetry Womb of a Woman was Shortlisted for the 2015 Small Axe Literary Competition.
- Nous sommes Martiniquaises. Pawòl en bouches de femmes châtaignes : Une pensée existentialiste sur la question des femmes. Paris: L’Harmattan, coll. Genre, École et Sociétés, 2020. 351p.
- L’interoralité caribéenne: le mot conté de l’identité. Connaissances et Savoirs, Paris : 2016. Second Edition. 520p.
- Penser le sujet femme noire francophone. Recherches Féministes, Vol. 34.2, 2021. (co-edited with Agnès Berthelot-Raffard)
- Pensées et philosophies d’Afrique. Pour demain : voir, comprendre et penser l’Afrique d’aujourd’hui (With Hady Ba and Oumar Dia). Présence Africaine : Revue culturelle du monde noir 201. Paris : 2022, 255p.
- The Caribbean Oral Tradition: Literature, Performance, and Practice. Palgrave MacMillan, Studies in Oral History, 2016. 201p.
De/Coloniality Now: Reflections on a Shared Effort
I am a scholar of African studies, Caribbean studies and more generally of Black studies whose scholarship and teaching practice(s) investigate forms of past and present coloniality and center decolonial paradigms. I was invited by Prof. Nadja Germann and Prof. Johanna Pink respectively from the departments of philosophy and Islamic studies to impel a long-term collaboration with the De/Coloniality Now Initiative, an initiative that gathers together faculty from various disciplines and aims at problematizing in a critical way the question of epistemology and that “seek(s) to overcome colonial hierarchies within the system of global knowledge-production…include the reflective examination of coloniality in European societies and institutions…understand the impact of coloniality on today’s world and the ways in which people and institutions…remember, perpetuate, and contest the legacy of colonialism with a focus on the present day.” My contribution is multifold and consists in participating in think up retreats and workshops with the De/Coloniality Now Initiative, holding public lectures on my work and decolonial methodologies, and intervening as a guest speaker in seminars addressing the question with students. An ensuing outcome will be the writing and publication of an article with Prof. Germann encapsulating the shared experience of drawing on diverse transnational and transatlantic methodologies and perspectives to combine efforts to work for a decolonized academic world.
