Border Story Fest

[ Image: 2014 Border of Lights by Johannil Napoleon / Photo Edison Suero ]

Border Story Fest

Dominican Republic and Haiti

Join for a conversation about the history of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. How is it that borders perform? Two scholars who have written works of theater about the Dominican and Haitian border will be joining us in a conversation. Novelist and playwright Évelyne Trouillot (Université d’Etat d’Haïti) and historian Edward Paulino (CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice) will discuss why they chose the form of theater to write about this topic. Through characters and the personification of the border itself, Professor Trouillot’s play, The Blue of the Island, and Professor Paulino’s one-man show, Eddie’s Perejil, explore the shared history and present-day tension between both countries. These theater practitioners will also reflect on a series of monologues about the 1937 Parsley Massacre that will be performed at Duke the evening prior to this panel. The event will be moderated by Duke PhD student Nehanda Loiseau (Romance Studies, Francophone Theater). We look forward to an enriching conversation.

Free and open to the public. Light lunch served. Co-sponsored by Duke University’s Department of Romance Studies, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Haiti Lab, the Forum for Scholars and Publics, Duke’s Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Telling Our Stories of Home” conference.

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“Lamenting ongoing government actions against Haitians in the Dominican Republic, the panelists insisted that keeping history alive through scholarship and the arts is necessary to prevent the additional violence of forgetting or rewriting the past.” —Margaret (Lou) Brown, Crossing Borders: Experience, Scholarship, and Art, Forum Online