Thursday, September 15
4:45 PM – Neill Hall 401
“Conspicuous ( In) Visibility/ (In)Visibilite Ostentatoire.”
Giscard Bouchotte, Curator and Filmmaker
This lecture will shed light on the unspoken historical explanations regarding the lack of international visibility of Haitian artists and their works at fairs and major international artistic events (Venice Biennale, Art Basel, etc.). Inspired by the exhibition CONSPICUOUS INVISIBILITY, curated at the Clément Foundation in Martinique, July 7 – August 30, 2017, we’ll discuss the mechanisms at work that may explain the (political) absence of Haitian artists in international venues and explain how the inspiration for the artists’ works (visible world/invisible world), ironically contributes to this “conspicuous invisibility” at major international events.
Giscard Bouchotte is an independent exhibition curator and critic, who works with institutions such as the Museum Quai Branly in Paris, La Revue Noire, FOKAL and regional francophone institutions in the Caribbean. In 2011, he curated the Haitian Republic’s first Pavillion at the Venice Biennale, Kingdom of This World. His most recent projects include Périféériques that explores new artistic and social practices in peri-urban spaces and the Nuits blanches in Port-au-Prince, a plea for artists to be engaged in urban initiatives. Bouchotte has also produced and directed two films, Afrique Rive Gauche (2006) and La vie rêvée de Sarah (2007).
Lecture in English.
Tuesday, October 17
4:45 PM – Davis Court Markim Hall
“Hmong Communities in the Midwest at the Crossroads: Memory, History and Place”
Safoi Babana-Hamption
Safoi Babana-Hamption, Associate Professor of French at Michigan State University and film director, will discuss how her films look at memory and the construction of Hmong diaspora identities. Her two films are Hmong Memory at the Crossroads (2015) and Growing Up Hmong at the Crossroads (2017). Both her films address Hmong historical sense of place and history in France and the United States, especially the Midwest. Dr. Babana-Hampton will be joined by three project collaborators from the Twin Cities, Fu Hang, Dr. Yang Dao, and Mo Hang.
This roundtable is sponsored by The Institute for Global Citizenship, the Mellon Foundation and the French and Francophone Studies. It is part of the Institute for Global Citizenship Series “Equity, Justice, & Difference At Home & Abroad.”
Dr. Safoi Babana-Hampton, director, screenwriter, producer, and associate professor of French in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University will speak about her experience directing two films about history and memory in Hmong diasporic communities in France and the United States.
Monday, October 23
4:45 PM – Neill Hall 226
“Memory, Identity and History: Writing From Exile”
Jan J. Dominique
Jan J. Dominique is a Haitian writer and journalist. Born in Haiti, she has also lived in Quebec, during two different exiles: 1970-1979 and since 2003. In Haiti, she worked as a reporter for Radio Haiti Inter, the first Haitian radio to broadcast in Haitian Creole. She has written three novels, Memoir of an Amnesiac (1984, from the French in 2008), Inventer… La Célestine (2000), and L’Écho de leurs voix (2016, The Echo of Their Voices). She has also published short stories, some of them published under the title Evasion (1996, 2005). Mémoire errante (2008), an essay written in the wake of the assassination of her father Jean Dominique, a well-known agronomist and radio journalist in 2000, is concerned about memory and justice in Haiti.
Jan J. Dominique will talk about her trajectory as a writer in Haiti and Quebec, how both the history of her island and of her family, as well as her exile have informed her writing. She will read short excerpts.
Lecture in French with translation in English.
Tuesday, November 28
4:45 PM – Neill Hall 401
“Marcel Heuzé Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate”
Marcel Heuzé
During the depths of World War II, Frenchman Marcel Heuzé mailed letters to his wife and three young daughters from a labor camp in Berlin. His beautiful looping cursive carried tender words of love along with testimony about day-to-day survival. Sixty years later, graphic designer Carolyn Porter found his letters at an antique store in Stillwater, Minnesota and began to transform Marcel’s handwriting into a modern computer font. After having a letter translated, she became obsessed with finding answers to the questions: Who was Marcel? Why had he been in Germany? Why were his precious letters for sale halfway around the world? And most importantly: Did Marcel survive? Carolyn’s obsessive, hope-filled quest for answers has been recounted in the book “Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate.”
Monday, March 26
4:45 PM – Neill Hall 401
“In the wake of Médée : Literature and the Arts of Destruction”
Juliette Cherbuliez
Juliette Cherbuliez, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, will present “In the wake of Médée: Literature and the Arts of Destruction” at 4:45 PM, Monday, March 26 in Neill Hall 401. French tragedy is often considered as representative of the tragic form insofar as it addresses “big” questions: the role of the hero, the place of the sacred, the conflict between private and public obligations, for example. What often goes without saying is that tragedy is also about physical violence in its many forms. My research traces why and how French classical tragedy (Racine, Corneille) is a part of this tradition, despite traditional scholarship that sees it has having stripped the tragic form of any bloodshed or physical violence. I take up Medea, figure of barbarianism, passion, and infanticide, to show how and why we should attend to tragedy’s persistent engagement with violence. My foundational text is Corneille’s 1634 Médée, from which I develop a way of thinking about about the politics of violence’s persistence in literature and art. I conclude with a series of questions about how and why we should think about the function of violence in art, with an unlikely example: Kenneth Lonergan’s masculine American melodrama Manchester By the Sea (2016), and the controversy that surrounded its many accolades.
Tuesday, April 24 at 4:45 PM Neill Hall 401
“West African Immigrants in Harlem: An Oral History of Little Africa.”
Dame Babou
Dame Babou, Senegalese Journalist, will present “West African Immigrants in Harlem: An Oral History of Little Africa.” The history of West African migration to the US, dating back to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, is filled with shining examples of communities that had to be re-imagined and re-invented under extremely adverse circumstances, such as the maroon settlements in the Southern swamplands or post-bellum enclaves such as Africatown in Mobile, Alabama or Gullah Island in South Carolina. Seen from such a long and wide angle, the recent emergence of African hubs in New York such as Fuuta Town in Brooklyn and Little Senegal,alternately called Little Africa, in the area around 116 Street in Harlem, is nothing new: this is, you might say, consistent with a pattern of redrawing the ancient map of transatlantic routes to strike roots in a new land.
Yet there is something unique to the internal dynamics underlying the formation of these “enclaves” in New York: not so much the urban setting, the “African” pool of migration over three decades or the complex trajectories of each and everyone, man or woman, as the fact that these communities have been actively reaching out to each other across languages,religions, and ethnicities, thereby constantly redefining their dual and “open”relationship with both Africa and America.
Little Africa is emblematic of this ethics of openness and inter-cultural transaction, but today the story of how, from the 1980s to the present, West African immigrants who have found and founded a home in the US have been creatively engaged in a balancing act to keep their religious,cultural and ethnic allegiances from congealing into badges of distinction needs to be told time and again, given that this art of the transatlantic pas de deux incurs the risk of disappearing into the black hole of post 9/11 resurgent cultural essentialism and religious fundamentalism, both in Africa and the US.