Thursday, October 24, 2019
This lecture series explores contemporary debates in France about colonial memory, race, and intersectionality within the framework of French citizenship. Panelists will be looking at the trajectory of the citizenship question in the French Caribbean and intertwinement of the colonial past and function of memory in the construction of contemporary political subjectivity.
Born and educated in Martinique, Silyane Larcher graduated from the Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in philosophy and historical and political sociology (2011). She is a tenured Research Fellow at the CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research). She works on the history of citizenship in the French Atlantic (post)colonial context, with a particular interest with the tensions between race, gender and universalism. She published scholarly articles in major academic journals in French and English. She is the other of L’autre citoyen. L’idéal républicain et les Antilles après l’esclavage (Armand Colin, 2014) and (co-edited with F. Germain), Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848-2016 (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). Her next book is about the historical and sociopolitical conditions of afrofeminism in contemporary continental France.
Mrinmoyee Bhattacharya, (PhD, UC Davis) is Dean's Postdoctoral Scholar in French. Her work centers on the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and political theory, with a particular focus on French Republicanism. She has published articles in Research in African Literatures, Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation and The French Review. Her current book project, "Legitimation Crises of the Republic," demonstrates the central role of minorities in the emergence of French political culture.