Doyle D. Calhoun - Böcker

A call to reenvision and de-Westernize French studies and media studies through transmedial examinations of Senegalese cultural production, media practices, and art forms  In this double volume of Yale French Studies, editors Doyle D. Calhoun and Cheikh Thiam argue for an intentional expansion of what counts as Francophone African writing through the study of cultural production, media practices, and verbal and visual art forms in Senegal and the Senegalese diaspora today. Drawing on contributions from artists, curators, and writers, this volume shifts critical focus away from works and their authors as privileged meaning‑producers to myriad social actors (producers, distributors, consumers) and dispersed networks of production and circulation.  The essays gathered here articulate an interdisciplinary call to reenvision and de‑Westernize French studies and media studies. The contributors foreground the work of African scholars, artists, and intellectuals; challenge entrenched disciplinary divides; and highlight critical approaches that are transdisciplinary, translingual, and transnational.

Throughout the French empire, from the Atlantic and the Caribbean to West and North Africa, men, women, and children responded to enslavement, colonization, and oppression through acts of suicide. In The Suicide Archive, Doyle D. Calhoun charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism, from the time of slavery to the Algerian War for Independence to the “Arab Spring.” Noting that suicide was either obscured in or occluded from French colonial archives, Calhoun turns to literature and film to show how aesthetic forms and narrative accounts can keep alive the silenced histories of suicide as a political language. Drawing on scientific texts, police files, and legal proceedings alongside contemporary African and Afro-Caribbean novels, film, and Senegalese oral history, Calhoun outlines how such aesthetic works rewrite histories of resistance and loss. Consequently, Calhoun offers a new way of writing about suicide, slavery, and coloniality in relation to literary history.

Throughout the French empire, from the Atlantic and the Caribbean to West and North Africa, men, women, and children responded to enslavement, colonization, and oppression through acts of suicide. In The Suicide Archive, Doyle D. Calhoun charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism, from the time of slavery to the Algerian War for Independence to the “Arab Spring.” Noting that suicide was either obscured in or occluded from French colonial archives, Calhoun turns to literature and film to show how aesthetic forms and narrative accounts can keep alive the silenced histories of suicide as a political language. Drawing on scientific texts, police files, and legal proceedings alongside contemporary African and Afro-Caribbean novels, film, and Senegalese oral history, Calhoun outlines how such aesthetic works rewrite histories of resistance and loss. Consequently, Calhoun offers a new way of writing about suicide, slavery, and coloniality in relation to literary history.

Senegalese poet, philosopher, and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor, together with Aimé Césaire and others, developed the influential and perennially relevant negritude movement – a Black artistic, philosophical, and political expression of Black presence in the modern colonial world. The Essential Senghor provides a new opportunity for English-language readers to engage with Senghor’s critical and philosophical writings spanning from 1937 to 1985. This collection includes Senghor’s key philosophical interventions in discourses on freedom, Blackness and being, humanism, history, and more. It portrays Senghor as a pivotal intellectual in the fields of African and Black studies whose work engages a wide range of disciplines, including literature, linguistics, anthropology, religion, and art history. The Essential Senghor invites readers not only to reflect on negritude and its importance for our political present, but also to reconsider intellectual genealogies of decolonial thought, Black liberation, and African philosophy.