Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
A Lecture by Maboula Soumahoro
Thursday, November 17, 2022
5:30 PM EST – In-Person Event
Location: Intercultural Center Auditorium, Georgetown University Main Campus
1501 Tondorf Rd, Washington, DC 20007
Presented by Gender+ Justice Initiative, DC Public Library, Black Women Radicals, Women’s and Gender Studies, African American Studies, French and Francophone Studies, and Women’s Center
Moderated by Kwame Edwin Otu, Assistant Professor of African Studies, Georgetown University
Join us in welcoming scholar and professor Maboula Soumahoro for a lecture and conversation on her book Black is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2022). She received the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize in 2020 for the French edition: Le Triangle et l’Hexagone.
In this highly original book, 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.
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name asks the questions: 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?
About the author:
Maboula Soumahoro is a scholar, Afro-feminist and associate professor at the University of Tours. She is the 2022-2023 international visiting professor at the African-American and Africana Studies Department of Columbia University. A specialist in the field of Africana Studies, she has conducted research and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France and was most recently the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta. She is the author of Black is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2022). — Follow on IG: @maboulasoumahoro
More info about the book, Publisher’s page
Accommodation requests can be made at genderjustice@georgetown.edu
This event is free and open to all