Garden Room, Faculty House at Columbia University
Institute for Research in African American Studies, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
IRAAS Conversations
November 2, 2022 at 6:00pm est
“Black is the Journey, Africana the Name”
with
Maboula Soumahoro, University of Tours- Paris
Kaiama L. Glover , Barnard College
Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University
Hybrid event
Admission In-Person : Registration is required.
Registration does not guarantee admission. Limited space capacity . Face Masking is recommended* Registration: https://forms.gle/X3YRrSUHeSStVARy9
Location: Columbia University Faculty House – Garden Room
60 Morningside Drive NY, NY
Online attendance via Livestream: https://bit.ly/3yAbph8
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Book Description: Maboula Soumahoro explores the cultural and political vastness of the Black Atlantic, where Africa, Europe, and the Americas were tied together by the brutal realities of the slave trade and colonialism. Each of these spaces has its own way of reading the Black body and the Black experience, and its own modes of visibility, invisibility, silence, and amplification of Black life. By weaving together her personal history with that of France and its abiding myth of color-blindness, Maboula Soumahoro highlights the banality and persistence of structural racism in France today, and shows that freedom will be found in the journey and movement between the sites of the Atlantic triangle. Africana is the name of that freedom. How can we build and reflect on a collective diasporic identity through a personal journey? What are the limits and possibilities of this endeavor, when the personal journey is that of oft-erased bodies and stories, de-humanized lives, and when Black populations in Africa, the Americas, and Europe identify and misidentify with each other, their sensibilities shaped by the particular locales in which their lives unfold? This book makes an important intellectual contribution to contemporary public conversations and theoretical inquiry into race, racism, blackness, and identity today, as it probes and questions the academic methodologies that have functioned as structures of exclusion.
