Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall (October 29th)
Multipurpose Room, Africana Studies and Research Center (October 30th)
Françoise Vergès
Consulting Professor, Goldsmiths College, University of London;
Research Associate, Collège d’études mondiales;
President, Committee for the History and Memory of Slavery (2004-2012)
Lecture Series
Panel Discussion and Film Screening:
MARYSE CONDÉ: UNE VOIX SINGULIERE
Directed by Jérôme Sesquin, 52 min.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013, 5:00-7:00 p.m.
The presentation will explore the construction of France as a « country of white and free men » that externalizes servitude in the “countries of black and enslaved men.” The end of the post-slavery colonial empire redrew France’s historical cartography. France reinvented itself within the borders of the Hexagon, people coming from the former colonies were identified as “immigrants” in need of “integration,” greater assimilation was proposed to the overseas territories. France had no longer a “colonial problem.” A mutilated cartography, that excises overseas territories and denies the role of colonial history in the making of French society, emerged. It informs French politics and thought today
Film Summary
“What is important is the encounter, the exchange. Being focused on one’s origin and closing oneself to the world is a mistake” - these words of Maryse Condé could summarize her portrait realized in 2012.
The film retraces Maryse Condé’s life and written career through a journey from New York to Paris to Saint-Laurent du Maroni (French Guiana), evoking the triangle created by slave trade and colonial slavery. With humor, Maryse Condé remembers her nomadic existence, her childhood in Guadeloupe, her student life in Paris, her discovery of independent Africa, her love of New York. Never hiding her contradictions, she gives the portrait of a writer, a black woman, a teacher, a mother and of an activist.
The film also uses archives on Guadeloupe, France and Africa, testimonies of Condé’s students at Columbia University, and interviews with personalities.
Bio
Françoise Vergès grew up in from Reunion Island in an anti-colonialist family. In France, she was an activist in feminist and human rights movements before getting her Ph.D. at the University of Berkeley in Political Theory (1995). She has written on vernacular practices of memories, slavery and the economy of predation, postcolonial psychiatry, postcolonial museography, and the routes of migration and processes of creolization in the Indian Ocean world.
She has also collaborated with filmmakers and artists (Isaac Julien, Yinka Shonibare, Arnaud Ngatcha…), was a project advisor for Documenta 11 and contributed to the 2012 Paris Triennial (Program “The Slave in Le Louvre”). She has also been working as a curator on exhibitions about colonial practices.
