Cotton Candy: Édouard Duval-Carrié in North Florida

This lecture analyzes the "Memory Windows," works by Haitian-American artist Édouard Duval-Carrié that feature in his recent exhibition at Florida State University, “Decolonizing Refinement,” a show that draws parallels between processes of production and commodification across the plantation Americas.

Munro will compare and contrast the cemetery and the art museum as historical sites, places of memory where the past may be read and reinterpreted, and think more about the possible relations between these two contrasting yet complementary symbols: the Confederate flag and lynching photographs. Munro's discussion will be framed by the exhibition’s broader conceptualization of the notion of refinement, its focus on the production and culture of sugar and cotton, and the artist’s self-reflexive meditations on his own art as a form of commodity, a product of time, history, and place.

Dr. Martin Munro is Eminent Professor of French and Francophone Studies and the Director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University. He is the author of eleven books and edited collections, most recently Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times (Virginia, 2015), and The Haunted Tropics (UWI Press, 2015) an edited volume of Caribbean ghost stories. 

This lecture is made possible by the Kathryn B. Gore Chair in French Studies, Department of French & Italian.