Archives par étiquette : Black Studies

Séminaire “Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes:  Fragmented Untranslatable Blackness”

Mardi 30 janvier 2024 à 18h, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, site Saint-Charles, salle 126.

Séminaire organisé dans le cadre de l’axe « Faire commun » d’EMMA. Intervention de Claudine Raynaud.

“I wanted to write about silences and terror and acts that hover over generations,
over centuries. I began by writing about my mother and grandmother.” (Note 18)

This talk follows from the presentation of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) to map out major directions of African American thought and to delineate the contours, the import, and the limits of what has been labeled Afro-pessimism (Frank B. Wilderson III). Along with Saidiya Hartman (Lose Your Mother, 2006; Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 2019), Christina Sharpe, who teaches Black Studies at York University in Toronto, has been hailed as one of the foremost contemporary Black radical cultural critics. To French readers, Ordinary Notes will recall Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux: the 248 notes of various lengths address the intimate—Notes is an ode to her mother—and the cultural, the collective, the current historical moment of #Blacklivesmatter and the legacy of slavery. Pondering what is seen and not seen of Black life in the United States, Sharpe convokes a series of private and public photographs—she critiques La Chambre claire—in this dense mélange of memories, artwork, and academic “notes,” i.e. observations. She calls us to attention.

Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) was shortlisted for the 2023 for National Book Awards for Nonfiction. Sharpe has authored two studies, of which Ordinary Notes is a follow up: Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) and In the Wake. On Blackness and Being (2016). She has recently edited a collection of Dionne Brand’s poems and is working on three books: What Could a Vessel Be? (Knopf, Canada, FSG, USA, 2025), Black. Still. Life. (Duke UP, 2025) and To Have Been To the End of the World: 25 Essays on Art.

Présentation de l’intervenante: Claudine Raynaud est Professeure émérite en études africaines-américaines à l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, EMMA.

Séminaire “Claude McKay (1889–1948) Reappraised”

Mardi 30 mai 2023 à 18h, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, site Saint-Charles, salle 126.

Séminaire organisé dans le cadre de l’axe « Faire commun » d’EMMA. Intervention de Claudine Raynaud.

Claude McKay is best-known for his often-anthologized Shakespearean sonnet “If We Must Die,” published after the “red summer” of 1919, that Churchill is said to have quoted during WWII. The Jamaican born poet has been heralded as a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance whose novel Home to Harlem (1928) caused WEB Du Bois such nausea that the revered intellectual felt “distinctly like taking a bath.” In the wake of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993) the critical appraisal of McKay’s work, and his place at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, has shifted towards assessing his transnationalism since the self-professed “troubadour wanderer” travelled to the US (1912-1919), then to England, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, and Morocco from 1919 to 1934 when he returned to New York.

His politics (Trotskyist Communism), his sexuality (scholars concur on stressing his bisexuality), and his religion (a late conversion to a brand of left-leaning Catholicism) have even more recently led to recasting him as a Black Queer Marxist (Gary Holcomb’s Code Name Sasha) and revisiting his communist years (Winston James’s The Making of a Black Bolshevik). In France, the Marseilles publisher Héliotropismes has seized upon the recent publication of Romance in Marseille (2021) to probe McKay’s sojourn in the Phocaean city, the location of his 1929 novel Banjo, and to reissue his 1937 autobiography A Long Way from Home. A documentary focusing on the link between jazz music, McKay’s major fictional text, and the city in the 20s brings to life the docks, the “Panier,” and “La Fosse” before its destruction by the Germans in 1943, Claude McKay: de Harlem à Marseille by Matthieu Verdeil.

In view of the current editorial frenzy around McKay’s oeuvre, I wish in this talk to test a few directions for research, notably by focusing on two of the black women who were at one point close to him: Selma Burke and Anita Thompson. On top of Romance, another unpublished novel, Amiable with Big Teeth (2017) (translated as Les Brebis noires de Dieu) has been released, as well as a new translation of Home to Harlem, Retour à Harlem (translated in 1932 by Louis Guilloux as Quartier noir). The edition of an unpublished short text, translated by Jean-Max Guieu, “Dinner in Douarnenez,” is in preparation from Héliotropismes with a preface by Jarrett Brown. In short, Claude McKay is in vogue.

Présentation de l’intervenante: Claudine Raynaud est Professeure émérite en études africaines-américaines à l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, EMMA.

Séminaire “The Undercommons”

Mardi 2 mai 2023 à 18h.

Séminaire organisé dans le cadre de l’axe « Faire commun » d’EMMA. Intervention de Claudine Raynaud.

« … [S]tudy is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice… The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. » (The Undercommons, p. 110)

Pour prolonger notre réflexion sur le « commun » (thème 3 d’EMMA), l’ouvrage à quatre mains de Fred Moten et Stefano Harney, The Undercommons, Fugitive Planning and Black Studies, 2013 propose une réflexion sur l’université et une redéfinition de concepts tels que crédit, dette, gouvernance, ou encore étude, dans une écriture simultanément philosophique, politique, poétique, qui se nourrit de la tradition radicale noire américaine et les études noires. Le concept élaboré, celui des « sous-communs », définit l’espace de la relation entre ceux qu’unit, non pas la propriété ou l’utilisation d’espaces (en) commun, de biens partagés, mais l’appartenance à la communauté des exclus.

« Démanteler notre critique, nos propres positions, nos fortifications, c’est de l’auto-défense alliée à l’auto-préservation. Ce démantèlement vient en mouvement, comme un châle, l’armure de la fuite. Nous courons à la recherche d’une arme, et nous continuons à courir pour chercher à la lâcher. Et nous pouvons la lâcher, parce que, aussi armé soit-il, aussi dur soit-il, l’ennemi auquel nous faisons face est également illusoire. »

Liens vers les textes qui seront étudiés lors du séminaire :
The Undercommons – extrait : https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/fr/file/78431/download?token=X-o6PzqJ
The Undercommons – texte intégral : https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/fr/file/78432/download?token=by67y_fB

Le séminaire se déroulera en salle 126 sur le campus Saint-Charles de l’Université Paul-Valéry. Il sera aussi accessible à distance en visioconférence : pour obtenir le lien, écrire à Marc.Lenormand [a] univ-montp3.fr

Présentation de l’intervenante: Claudine Raynaud est Professeure émérite en études africaines-américaines à l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, EMMA.