Writing and the Relation

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

17.15-18.30

Lecture Hall Ernest Vilgrain (Amphi 1A), Building Halle aux Farines, Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7, Paris Rive Gauche site

With Rozena Maart, University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban, South Africa

Introduction by Sylvie Laurent, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, France

How do writers consider the representation of human relations, and particularly between characters with various racial, gender-related, sexual, or national (self)identifications? In what way does that influence – or not – both their mind’s eye and their literary praxis? How do they negotiate – and possibly anticipate – what Paul Ricoeur has called the "hermeneutic circle" by which the story-told is supposed to facilitate and forge the reader’s identification? Has their work and art a political value and if so is it intended to be transcended? Has literature an identity and if so, is it related to the author as both artist and subject?

Professor and writer, Rozena Maart will address the main theme, Writing and the Relation by offering a tour-de-Azania of what writing means when inscribing relations of blood, sex, gender and sexuality, inking blood in textual coloniality, under and between  apartheid ‘s reign when its tongue was twisted, locked in a tight vaginal grip with the British Empire and its allies. She will show you how she has written her history  in then out of the absences of her present, past and future, somewhere then everywhere, on walls, on the inside of thighs, under chairs and on top of them, between legs and at the  top of mountains, in psychiatric wards where Fanon  diagnosed revolution and down medical halls and soccer fields where Biko announced Black Consciousness. The relation is you, her, she, he, zhe, mademoiselle, monsieur, meneer and mevrou, auntie and uncle, you who believe you have no relation, no relation to writing or the already inscribed, and your tour-de Azania, the original name of South Africa, will be spiked with the memory of Edouard Glissant’s creole words that spoke the forbidden, Biko’s fisted smile that fought for freedom,  Fanon’s fearless fight in bringing the mind into the centre of colonial discourse, Paulette Nardal’s siore where she hosted discourses of negritude in Paris on dinner plates, Derrida’s determination to reveal White Mythology, Lllian Ngoyi’s march against the apartheid laws—these are her relations.

Cracks in the Reflection – Blacks of/in Europe or Diversity between Knowledge and Social Transformation

Thursday, April 7, 2011

16.00-17.30

Lecture Hall Ernest Vilgrain (Amphi 1A), Building Halle aux Farines, Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7, Paris Rive Gauche site

A round-table discussion moderated by Arlette Frund, Université François Rabelais-Tours

In this round-table panelists will be invited to examine the ways in which Blacks of/in France can be exemplary of the condition of Blacks of/in Europe, and in a larger perspective of other minority-subject groups. France struggles with the specter of its centrality – currently fading away in economic globalization and political multipolarity – the republican pact, which represents the hard-core thought of the nation. It appears more and more as an idealization successively challenged by decolonization and, in the last thirty years, the peripheral jolts of regionalism or the collective mobilizations of minority-subject groups, be they cultural, ethnico-racial, gender-related or sexual. This historical and sociocultural process remarkably calls into question the redefinition of citizenship – the French ethos of identity but also the emblem of the collective mirror-image. Between the traditional republicanism and the contemporary republicanist multiculturalism is there a third way for the French republic? Would constitutional and institutional changes, with subsequent political and educational adaptations make it possible to seriously challenge the current sociopolitical domination of Blacks, non-Whites, non-French individuals, and members of other minority-subject groups? What is the just and fruitful equilibrium to be found for public policy – between on the one hand the much-needed fight against stigmatization and stereotyped cultural representations and on the other hand the no-less necessary implementation of an organizing anti-discriminatory legal body? How are these issues of social transformation related to the conditions of production of knowledge, especially in the academic and scientific circles? In what ways is this state of matters analogous and/or isomorphic to/with  Europe as a geographical space, a political body, a multicultural collective-self at war with its own mirror-image? In this multi-layered crisis what is the role and agency of self-identified Blacks of/in France and Europe? Is the cure to be found in coalition-building, and possibly – as previously attempted in other countries like the US – one that would aim at comprehending the different black lived experiences, the various modes of being black? Could they be desiring modes of being black – continuous and discontinuous, socially given and imaginative, here and there, everywhere?

Participants

Françoise Vergès
Françoise Vergès is currently Consulting at the Center for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, andpresident of the Comité pour la Mémoire et l’Histoire de l’Esclavage (France).

Françoise Vergès has written on vernacular practices of memories, on slavery and the economy of predation, the ambiguities of French abolitionism, French republican colonialism, colonial and postcolonial psychiatry in the French colonial empire, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, French postcolionality, postcolonial museography, the routes of migration and processes of creolization in the Indian Ocean world.  She has worked with filmmakers and artists – Isaac Julien, Yinka Shonibare, Arnaud Ngatcha – and was a project advisor for Documenta 11 in 2002.

Between 2003 and 2010, Françoise Vergès was Head of Scientific and Cultural Development and Program of Maison des civilizations et de l’unité réunionnaise where she developed the notions of “Museum without Objects” and of “Six Worlds”: African, Malagasy, European, Hindu, Muslim, Chinese, which have made the indiaoceanic world.

Her most recent publication is Ruptures postcoloniales. Les nouveaux visages de la société française with Nicolas Bancel, Florence Berbault, Pascal Blanchard, Ahmed Boubakeur, and Achille Mbembe. Paris: La Découverte, 2010.

Michel Giraud
Michel Giraud is a sociologist, researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) – France, affiliated to the Centre de Recherche sur les Pouvoirs Locaux dans la Caraïbe (CRPLC) of the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane (UAG). He is the author of Races et classes à la Martinique (Paris, Editions Anthropos, 1979) and the co-author of L’école aux Antilles. Langues et échec scolaire en Guadeloupe et en Martinique (Paris, Editions Karthala, 1992), and of many other publications on race, culture, gender and politics in the French West Indies and their diaspora in continental France, including recently “Colonial Racism, Ethnicity, and Citizenship. The Lessons of the Migration Experiences of French-Speaking Caribbean Populations” in Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, Ramón Grosfoguel and Eric Mielants (Co-Eds.), Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States. Essays on Incorporation, Identity, and Citizenship, Temple University Press, 2009, pp. 43-57. “ Question noire et mémoire de l’esclavage ”, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, « 50 ans », 198-200, 2010, pp. 677-706 and “ La promesse d’une aurore ”, Les  Temps  Modernes, « Antilles »,662-663, janvier-avril 2011. His current research focuses on how the French West Indian identities have been, and still are, negotiated since the abolition of slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1848, what are the role and place of identity affirmations (in terms of ‘race’, culture or nation) in the strategies structuring the political field and how in the postcolonial globalization era new meanings of citizenship are emerging in the French West Indies and their diaspora.

Heike Raphael-Hernandez
Heike Raphael-Hernandez is Professor of English at the University of Maryland University College Europe. In 2009, she was invited as Visiting Professor by Berkeley’s African American Studies department where she taught courses on Black Europe.

She is editor of Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (2003) and author of The Construction of a Utopian Aesthetic for African American Literature: Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope and Contemporary African American Women Authors (2008). Among her other publications are AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, co-edited with Shannon Steen (2006) and several articles on contemporary African American writers, African American youth culture, and the Vietnam War and its legacy in African American literature. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript that deals with Global South Immigration in American movies.

Jake Lamar
Jake Lamar was born in 1961 and grew up in the Bronx, New York. After graduating cum laude from Harvard with a degree in American History and Literature, he was hired by Time magazine, where he spent six years, writing mainly on U.S. politics. He quit Time to write his first book. Bourgeois Blues is a memoir about Jake’s relationship with his father and the transformation of American racial politics in the mid-twentieth century. The book was published in 1991 and, the following year, was awarded the Lyndhurst Prize, a three-year grant given to writers, journalists and people in community service.

Inspired by such authors as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Jake traveled to Paris in 1993. He planned to stay for a year but never returned to live in the USA. He has published five novels, among them The Last Integrationist, which, in France, was awarded the Grand Prix de Cognac. His two most recent novels, Rendezvous Eighteenth and Ghosts of Saint-Michel, were set in Paris. Jake has taught at the Ecole Polytechnique, served as writer-in-residence at the MC93 Theater in Bobigny, just outside Paris, and is a frequent commentator on U.S. politics in the French media.

The Black Isles Night – Vision and Self-Perception (I)

Friday, April 8, 2011

16.00-17.30

Lecture Hall 310 (Amphi 310), Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Val-de-Seine, Paris Rive Gauche site

Screening of Leah Gordon’s Atis-Rezistans and round-table discussion moderated by Myron M. Beasley, Bates College, USA