Center for Humanistic Inquiry Perspectives on Race and Blackness in the Francophone World

This event is part of the French Department's lecture series in honor of Professor Emerita Leah Hewitt and Professor Emeritus Jay Caplan. It is sponsored by the Georges S. Lurcy Lecture Fund, the Turgeon Lecture Fund, and the Center for Humanistic Inquiry.

Speakers:
Professor Lydie Moudileno
Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor of French and American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California Dornsife
“We All Wear the Crown: Longing for African Royalty in the Diasporic Imagination”

This talk will revisit a trope most notably deployed in late seventeenth and eighteenth century slave narratives and abolitionist literature: The “Royal African.” Tracking new iterations of this figure in post-1990s Francophone Caribbean fiction as well as in American popular culture, it will consider some of the ways in which forms of African nobility and claims to royal genealogies continue to seed and reinvent transnational discourses of blackness, modernity, and distinction.

Professor Andrew S. Curran
William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University
“The Bordeaux Academy of Sciences and the Great Race contest of 1741” (Prof. Curran)

In August of 1739, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences publicized a “prize puzzle” in Europe’s best-known scientific journal. The subject was a riddle that had long perplexed Europeans: “what is the cause of the Sub-Saharan Africans’ peculiar hair texture and dark skin?” While this query theoretically limited itself to discussion of African physical features, what really preoccupied the Academy were three hidden questions: the first two were who is Black? and why? The third was an even bigger concern, namely, what did being black signify? In this talk, Curran will both explain the genesis of this competition and its wider relationship to the Enlightenment quest to define the human species.