Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

In the past two decades, she has actively engaged in two professional trajectories: one in the academe; the other in cultural diplomacy. Her inquiry is one highly informed by the pedagogical communities that she has had the fortune to be a part of. Upon moving to the Netherlands, she had the privilege of teaching in various institutions: Radboud University; University of Amsterdam; Hogeschool Utrecht; University College Utrecht; and she maintains an affiliation with Gender Studies at Utrecht University. From 2009-2019, she served as Assistant professor and was promoted to Associate Professor of Caribbean and Postcolonial Studies and French at the Graduate Center (City University of New York). Previously, she worked at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York as Director of Development and at the Québec Government Office in New York as Attachée for Inter-Governmental and Academic Affairs. Most recently she was a student at the Black European Summer School in Amsterdam and Critical Muslim Studies: Decolonial Struggles and Liberation Theologies in Granada. She is Series Editor for Brill’s Caribbean Series and a Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Haitian Studies, as well as a member of the FACE Foundation’s French Voices selection committee.

• author of Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (Lexington Books, 2015)
• second editor with Kaiama L. Glover of Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine (2016), a special issue of Yale French Studies
• co-editor with Kaiama L. Glover, Jean Picard Byron, and Mark Schuller of The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative (Liverpool University Press, 2016).

"A ‘New’ Antillean DOM Arts Scene, or the pragmatic aesthetics of patience: Artincidence, Annabel Guérédrat, Daniel Goudrouffe, and Henri Tauliaut, in dialogue with Jeannette Ehlers" in Adlai Murdoch, The Struggle of Non-sovereign Caribbean Territories. Rutgers University Press, 2021.

Co-authored with Darren Staloff. "Haiti in the Presidencies of John Adams and John Quincy Adams" in Cécile Accilien and Valérie Orlando, Teaching Haiti Beyond Literature: Intersectionalities of History, Politics and Culture. University Press of Florida, 2021.

"Raphaël Confiant and Jewishness: The Fraught Landscapes of French, Martinican, and Franco-Martinican Intellectualisms" in Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman, Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice. University of Virginia Press, 2019.

“’Bloodied Flower’: On Translating the Burden of the Floral in Marie Chauvet’s La Légende des fleurs” in Christian Flaugh and Lena Taub Robles, Marie Chauvet’s Theaters: Thought, Form, and Performance of Revolt. Leiden/Boston: Brill (2018): 220-29.

 “A Polyvalent Mediterranean, or the trope of nomadism in the literary œuvre of Igiaba Scego and Abdourahman Waberi,” RELIEF. Revue éléctronique de littérature française. 11.2 (2017) http://doi.org/10.18352/relief.970


 “On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’… Herskovits, Métraux, Race, and Human Rights.” In Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Kaiama L. Glover, Mark Schuller, Jhon Picard Byron, eds. The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, Volume 7 (2016): 52-73.

“Lovers, Conversations, and the ‘Critical Use of Memory’: Raoul Peck’s Fatal Assistance (2013) and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour (1959).” In Toni Pressley-Sanon and Sophie Saint-Just, eds. Raoul Peck: Power, Politics and the Cinematic Imagination. (2015): 171-194.

“Ananda Devi and Dany Laferrière: The Culture Industry, Poverty Discourse, and Postcolonial Literatures in French.” Frame: Tijdschrift 28.2 “The Postcolonial Cultural Industry.” (Fall/Winter 2015): 31-50.

“'The Origins of Totalitarianism': from Resistance to Human Rights in Marie Chauvet's Les Rapaces.” Special issue co-edited by Kaiama L. Glover and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, eds. Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine. Yale French Studies. 128 (Spring 2015): 57-73.

 “Living in Haiti: Space and the Urban Environment in Kettly Mars’s L’heure hybride and Aux frontières de la soif. “Haiti in a Globalized Frame.” Special issue co-edited by Charles Forsdick and Martin Munro. Francosphères 4.1 (September 2015): 106-120.

 “The Questions We Are Asking: Hegel, Agamben, Trouillot, Mbembe, and Haitian Studies.” Journal of Haitian Studies.19.1 (Fall/Winter 2013 -2014): 6-60.

“Aesthetics of ‘Ex-centricity’ and Considerations of ‘Poverty.’” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. 39 (November 2012): 166-176.

“Towards an Intellectual History of Possession: Reading ‘la crise’ as a Textual Space in Vodou and André Breton’s Haitian Lectures and Nadja.” Studies in Religion/ Sciences religieuses. 41.2 (June 2012): 280-305.