Events

This event will be held in English.

This series is co-organized by Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and Black History Month - Journées Africana.

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The Reid Hall Caféothèque will be open before the event with wine and snacks for sale.

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To kick off the series “Les Encres de l’Atlantique”, a six-date rendezvous celebrating Black History Month globally, join us for a conversation in English with poet Jay Bernard, scholar David Scott, and Maboula Soumahoro around the film Lovers Rock, the second of the five-film anthology Small Axe released by director Steve McQueen in 2020 as a monumental and ambitious attempt to cover the contemporary Afro-Caribbean experience in the United Kingdom. Followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Lovers Rock (2020)
68 min

Lovers Rock (dir. Steve McQueen) is a coming-of-age story rich in West Indian culture and follows Martha, a 15-year-old girl, who climbs out of her parents’ house late on a Saturday evening, to attend a Blues Party in Notting Hill with her best friend. She succumbs to the music and meets a young man who sweeps her off her feet; but she meets others who make her realize that her life is not quite as secure as she might think, seeing the potential dangers that lie just around the corner in adult life. This is a story about falling in love.

Les Encres de l’Atlantique
February 2024 — Black History Month

Les Encres de l’Atlantique is a series of six events that will take place in February and May 2024. Presented by the Black History Month - Journées Africana association, this series explores Black worlds, stories, and cultures in cinematic, musical, academic, sociological, and literary forms. Flowing through oceanic and spacetime currents, these conversations delve into and anchor themselves in the Black African diaspora. At the heart of this “Black Atlantic,” there is but one question: how to describe or inscribe this diaspora? An infinite number of responses and forms emerge, urgently, when this question is posed.

Speakers

Jay Bernard (FRSL, FRSA) is an interdisciplinary writer and artist from London whose work is rooted in social histories. Jay was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020 and is the winner of the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for their first collection Surge. Recent work includes My Name is My Own, a physical performance piece in response to June Jordan premiered at Southbank Centre’s Poetry International; Joint, a poetic-play about the history of joint enterprise; Crystals of this Social Substance, a sound installation at the Serpentine pavilion; and Complicity, a pamphlet based on the collection at the Tate. Jay was a 2022-2023 DAAD literature fellow in Berlin, and is a 2023-24 Fellow of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

David Scott teaches in the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. He is the author of Formations of Ritual (1994), Refashioning Futures (1999), Conscripts of Modernity (2004), Omens of Adversity (2014), Stuart Hall’s Voice (2017), Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History (forthcoming 2024), and (with Orlando Patterson) The Paradox of Freedom (2023). Scott is the founder and editor of the journal Small Axe and director of the Small Axe Project. He is a 2023-24 Fellow of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor in the English Department of the University of Tours and president of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating Black history and cultures. Notably, she is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone : réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated in English by Dr. Kaiama L. Glover as Black is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021) and prefaced by Saidiya Hartman. She was the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta (2021–2022) ; Mellon Arts Project International Visiting Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University ; and Visiting Faculty at Bennington College (2022–2023). From 2013–2016 she served as a member of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery. She is a 2023–2024 Fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination. She translated Saidiya Hartman's classic work, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) from English as À perte de mère – Sur les routes atlantiques de l’esclavage, released in September 2023 (Brook).

Organizer(s)/Sponsor

Columbia Global Centers | Paris addresses pressing global issues that are at the forefront of international education and research: agency and gender; climate and the environment; critical dialogues for just societies; encounters in the arts; and health and medical science.

Each year the Institute for Ideas and Imagination brings together a cohort of 14-15 Fellows, half of them Columbia faculty and post-docs, the other half artists and writers from around the world, to spend a year together in work and conversation. The Institute fosters intellectual and creative diversity unconstrained by medium and discipline through the interaction of the arts and academia.

The Black History Month association was founded by Pierre-Marie-Boisseau and Maboula Soumahoro in Paris in 2011. Rooted in knowledge and passion for "Black worlds," this association mobilizes culture and history in the broadest sense to share a little-known and poorly understood vision of this part of humanity.

Black History Month has become essential in France, as it responds to the need for knowledge and recognition of our country’s entire population. But this iteration must truly become French; it is therefore necessary to designate a francophone name, if only to no longer be afraid to pronounce Black in French: “noir.” Following the Law of 2001, especially Article 1, actions must follow the dictates of the Republic. Far from directly transposing Afro-American influence, we believe that it must be thoughtfully adapted to the French national context, and thus reach all facets of our society. Therefore, since May 2013, the Black History Month association proposes the “Journées Africana,” taking place around May 10 in honor of the Taubira-Delannon law (2001).

Venue

Nestled in the Montparnasse district, Reid Hall hosts several Columbia University initiatives: Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia Undergraduate Programs, M.A. in History and Literature, and the GSAPP Shape of Two Cities Program. This unique combination of resources is enhanced by our global network whose mission is to expand the University's engagement the world over through educational programs, research initiatives, regional partnerships, and public events.

This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of Columbia Global Centers | Paris or its affiliates.