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'Islands of Labor: Photographing the Black Docker' by Françoise Lionnet

28 September 2018, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm

jano couacaud

This talk is part of the Area Studies in Flux conference, convened by the IAS and SSEES in collaboration with PKU, Beijing, and is designed to go beyond Euro/US-centrism to explore ‘area’ from diverse vantage points and emplaced disciplinary traditions.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Organiser

Institute of Advanced Studies

Location

Gustave Tuck LT
2nd Floor, South Junction, UCL, Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

Photographer Jano Couacaud has documented the physical labor of dockworkers in the capital city of Port Louis (Mauritius) just before automation transformed the way raw sugar was loaded onto cargo ships for transport to European refineries and their markets.

He records the embodied experiences and crushingly repetitive labor of “free” black men whose activity continued to mirror that of their slave ancestors. His book Borlamer is a visual analogue of Sembene’s Le Docker noir or Claude McKay’s Banjo, narratives that take place in the Mediterranean port city of Marseilles. Following Sarah Lewis’s argument that in a democracy, to be “an engaged citizen requires grappling with pictures, and knowing their historical contexts,” I argue that Couacaud’s photographs force us to see the dockers’ contributions to postcolonial nation-building thus to hold the Republic responsible for those whose status as full citizens continues to be in jeopardy, due to racial and ethnic prejudice.

I will use a mixed-media approach that integrates photography and literature, anthropology, phenomenology, and close readings of cultural texts pertaining to the francophone Mascarene Islands. To rethink “area studies” today is to take into account the oceans, archipelagos, and island cultures that have always served as links between continental masses. It is also to encourage the development of multidisciplinary approaches to literature and culture. This is a paradigm shift that is the byproduct of a “post”-colonial world forever struggling to be born from the residues of empire and the forms of conventional knowledge production that have been institutional norms since the nineteenth century.

Find more about the Area Studies in Flux conference here

Bio

A past-President of the American Comparative Literature Association, Françoise Lionnet is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, African and African American Studies, and Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard. In Fall 2015, she held the Mary Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the Newhouse Humanities Center, Wellesley College. She remains a Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, where she taught from 1998-2015, serving first as Chair of French and Francophone Studies, then as Director of the James Coleman African Studies Center. Her current research focuses primarily on Indian Ocean literary, cultural, and historical studies, in relation to Atlantic and Caribbean Studies. She is interested in the longue durée of colonialism in those regions. Her volume on the 18th century Creole abolitionist poet Evariste Parny is forthcoming from the MLA Texts and Translation series in Fall 2018. Her previous books include Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture and Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (both from Cornell UP), Minor Transnationalism (Duke UP), Writing Women and Critical Dialogues: Subjectivity, Gender and Irony and The Known and the Uncertain: Creole Cosmopolitics of the Indian Ocean (both published in Mauritius by l’Atelier d’écriture).

All welcome. Please note that there may be photography and/or audio recording at some events and that admission is on a first come first served basis. Please follow this FAQ link for more information.