About this conference
Join us for the annual French Graduate Student conference “Haunted History in France and America: When the Ghosts of Slavery Resurface.” 2018 marks the 170th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in France’s former colonies. Unlike France with its Taubira law of 2001, the United States has yet to acknowledge slavery as a crime against humanity. In France and in the United States, people call for the creation of slave memorials, but the symbolic act of remembering must be followed by actions that bring meaningful change not only in the lives of slaves’ descendants but also in racial equality. Institutionalized racism along with socioeconomic disparity between Whites and Blacks continue to intensify racial division. The conference will grapple with topics such as trauma theory in relation to slavery, public space as a historic landscape, the problem of disguising and displacing slavery, myths and silence in the discourses of abolition, memory politics, the struggle for freedom as an imaginary narrative, the role of Saint-Domingue in the first emancipation, and antebellum America.
Keynote speaker: Dr. Crystal Fleming, Stony Brook University
PROGRAM:
8:30am – 9am, Coffee & Pastries, rooms C201 – C202
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9am – 9:15am, Welcoming Remarks, rooms C201 – C202
Dr. Francesca Canadé Sautman (Graduate Center CUNY)
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9:15am – 10:40am, Panel 1, rooms C201 – C202
Artistic Representations of Nation and Trauma
Chairperson: Kameron Blake (Graduate Center CUNY)
Sanyu Ruth Mulira (New York University), “Lumina Sophie dite Surprise: An Unlikely National Heroine”
Connor Pruss (University of California, Los Angeles), “ ‘Un Spartacus noir’: Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture in France and in Haiti”
Logan Smith (Miami University), “Reading Trauma in Traversée de la mangrove : A Structural Analysis of Communal Trauma”
Dr. Alexandra Roch (Université des Antilles, Martinique), « Dénoncer et surpasser le traumatisme colonial de la blès dans Un Dimanche au cachot de Patrick Chamoiseau »
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10:45am – 12:10pm, Panel 2, rooms C201 – C202
Materiality and Aesthetics
Chairperson: Elizaveta Lyulekina (Graduate Center CUNY)
Nathan H. Dize (Vanderbilt University), “Monumental Toussaint: French lieux d’oubli and the Commemoration of Abolition”
Hadley Galbraith (University of Iowa), “Bigidi and the Aesthetics of Survival: For a New Way to See Movement”
Natália Marques da Silva (Florida International University), “Whose Safe Voyage? Ex-votos and Slavery in 18th-Century Saint Domingue”
Thierry Caro (Université de la Réunion & École des hautes études en sciences sociales), « Les esclaves de Bourbon dans la littérature : mémoire et découvertes »
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12:15pm – 12:55pm, Lunch (catered), room 4202
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1pm – 2:10pm, Panel 3, rooms C201 – C202
A Transnational Lens
Chairperson: Angélique Aristondo (Graduate Center CUNY)
Wassila Hacid (Université de Haute-Alsace), “A Different Kind of Slavery: The Algerian War Through the Eyes of an African-American”
Hugo Bujon (Emory University), « Perpétuellement le Maafa : du Cahier d’un retour au pays natal aux monuments d’occident »
Valeria Liljesthröm (Université Laval), « Survivances de l’esclavage dans l’œuvre de Dany Laferrière »
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2:15pm – 4:10pm, Panel 4, rooms C201 – C202
Re-imagining and Staging Slavery
Chairperson: Sarah Yahyaoui (Graduate Center CUNY)
Dr. Bodia Bavuidi (Université de Toronto), « Lire le social au sein du système esclavagiste dans Moi, Tituba, sorcière de Maryse Condé »
Claire Sinquin (Université Laval), « L’Esclavage des Nègres (1785) d’Olympe de Gouges : Avant-gardisme et subversion révolutionnaire »
Jeannot Moukouri Ekobe (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), « Nation sur mesure ou l’ellipse des expériences liminales dans la narration nationale : cas de l’esclavage en France »
Rosnen Orozco Agudelo (Université nationale de Colombie), « Le projet de la Créolité : à la chasse des fantômes esclavagistes de la littérature des Antilles »
Rhimi Mohamed Lamine (Université de Tunis) « La ‘poétique du divers’ vs ‘l’assimilation’ : Édouard Glissant, architecte d’une ‘totalité généreuse’ »
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4:15pm – 5:40pm, Panel 5, rooms C201 – C202
Memory and Trans-Temporality
Chairperson: Dr. Jerry W. Carlson (Graduate Center CUNY)
Dr. Domna Stanton, Distinguished Professor (Graduate Center CUNY), “Contradicting Re-collections: Histories and Memory-Traces of the Enslaved in the Seventeenth-Century French Atlantic”
Dr. Lorelle Semley (College of the Holy Cross), “Beyond the Dark Side of the Port of the Moon: Using Historical Fiction to Rethink Bordeaux’s Slave Trade Past”
Dr. Stéphanie Mulot (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès & University of the French West Indies), “Slave Memory Representations and Tourism in Guadeloupe: The Memorial ACTe Center in Questions”
Dr. Véronique Hélénon (Independent Scholar), “Slavery and the French Colonial Memory”
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5:45pm – 7pm, Keynote Address, rooms C201 – C202
Introduction by Claudine E. Jean-Baptiste (Graduate Center CUNY)
Dr. Crystal Marie Fleming (Stony Brook SUNY)
“Disappearing Acts: Fugitive Formations of French Anti-blackness”
Cosponsored by the Henri Peyre French Institute, the Doctoral Student Council, the PhD Program in French at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and The Haitian Studies Institute at Brooklyn College CUNY.
