Department oF French
The Whiteness Between Us: Early Modern Playbooks of Racial Triangulation
A theorization of the representational juxtapositions, frictions, and connections between Black people and other non-white people in early modern European theatre.
We are thrilled to invite you to save the date for our French GSO Conference entitled Artificiality | Surfaciality, which will take place on April 9 and 10 at Rutgers (French Seminar Room - Academic Building West Wing - 4th floor).
This year’s conference is an international event jointly organized by Rutgers University and Aix-Marseille Université (FR). Graduate students, faculty, artists and professionals will be joining us on both side of the atlantic.
Artificiality | Surfaciality will explore questions of artificiality and surfaciality across literature, film, visual culture, and digital media, with particular attention to surfaces, interfaces, mediation, and the aesthetic and political stakes of artificial forms, fostering interdisciplinary and transatlantic dialogue.
The conference is free and open to public (RSVP here), and a detailed program will be shared soon on our website (here and through the QR code on the poster below). In the meantime, please save the date!
In her latest film, CHOEURS ATLANTIQUES, Babana-Hampton examines current aesthetics for preserving the anti-slavery memory, from the Francophone Caribbeans to Western Africa...
Editing, Translating, Annotating Rousseau
Rousseau as Editor, Translator, Annotator
Ghosts have haunted human awareness for millennia. Despite efforts - especially during the Enlightenment era - to rationalize and suppress its presence, the spectral figures have persisted. Yet, as Jacques Derrida notes, "The ghost is the name for the thing that cannot be seen, that cannot be touched, but that insists and returns.," They have returned and taken up the different forms; a train as a symbol of industrialization's dehumanizing forces, migrants who become figures of fear on account of the cultural and religious marks carried on and some individuals due to physical disfigurement because they do not fit the definition of the perfect "human body". The ghost also haunts across time. Past events knock on the door of the present in powerful and unsettling ways.
This roundtable aims to explore the themes of memory, nature, and relationality. It seeks to understand how these themes are fundamental elements of creation in Patrick Chamoiseau's work.
Join us for a critical exploration of Frantz Fanon’s Négritude, shaped by Aimé Césaire’s influence.
For photography, cinema, and various performance arts, the absence of light is essential. What do we see when we turn our gazes to the camera obscura or the darkened space of the theater? How does this technical obscurity complicate, in turn, the role of light in the visual production of social norms and hierarchies such as race, gender, class and legality?
Join us for a conversation with Senegalese hip hop pioneer and social justice activist Gunman Xuman
In his first monograph (NCSRLL/UNC Press, forthcoming), Yunfei Bai delves into the creative adaptations of classical Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan literary texts by four renowned nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors in France and Argentina, Théophile Gautier, Stéphane Mallarmé, Victor Segalen, and Jorge Luis Borges.
As a clinical psychologist and a psychotherapist, Dr. Ismahan Soukeyna Diop has come to develop a culturally relevant method for psychotherapy, based on oral tradition, and consider Senegalese representations of mental health as a theoretical basis for this method. This presentation will define those bases, explain how they shape people’s individual and social representations and introduce a decolonial method for psychotherapy that uses indigenous content as a lever for the therapeutic alliance.
A leading explorer of the effects and affects of literature, Pierre Bayard is the author of more than twenty-five books, including the world-wide sensation Comment parler dis livres que l'on n'a pas lus? (2007), Et si les œuvres changeaient d'auteur? (2010), Comment parler des lieux où l'on n'a pas été? (2012), L'énigme Tolstoïeviski (2017), and his latest Hitchcock s'est trompé (2023).
Machtat follows the life of Fatima and her two daughters, Najeh and Waffeh, who are wedding musicians, or "machtat," in Mehdia, a small city in Tunisia. Filmed from the point of view of these three female wedding singers, the documentary explores issues of marriage and patriarchal rules in contemporary Tunisian society.
The French GSO had the honor to welcome Gunman Xuman for a conversation on rap and politics on Tuesday, April 20. We talked about his vision of the music industry, the situation in Senegal, the necessity to provide counter-discourses in the media, and much more.
