On Monday, Oct. 27, the Africana Studies Department, in collaboration with the Falvey Library, French and Francophone Studies, Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, along with several other departments, hosted the annual Senghor Damas-Césaire Lecture. 

For this year’s lecture, the department brought in Silyane Larcher, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Black Studies at Northwestern University. Her discussion was titled “Gendering Black Political Thought in the French Context: A Journey with French Caribbean Women’s Feminist Discourses.” 

Interim Director of Africana Studies, Crystal Lucky, Ph.D., began the event by  discussing the annual lecture.

“I don’t remember which year this is for the lecture, but we’re delighted that it has become a regular and integral part of the Africana Studies program,” Lucky said. 

Lucky introduced Dr. Étienne Achille, an associate professor in the French and Francophone Studies Department, to introduce the speaker. 

Achille elaborated on the academic background of the speaker.

“Dr. Larcher is a political theorist and a social scientist,” Achille said. “She is from Martinique, in the French Caribbean, and received her MA in Philosophy from the University Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris, and a Ph.D. in Political Studies from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.” 

Achille also went into further detail of many of Larcher’s milestones throughout her career in academia, including her books, recognitions and research positions. 

Larcher began her lecture by illustrating what she would be discussing.

“So I will present you a hypothesis I am working on right now from my next book, and I will bring you into my intellectual reflection in how I shaped my research object to be able today to interrogate with you the idea of a French Caribbean tradition of feminism,” Larcher said.

She stated that her study of Afro-feminism, which she focuses on in her upcoming  book, started when she realized that “there was a lack in the narrative of gender studies, women’s studies and feminist studies in the French academic context, where the voices, the presence, even the corporality of non-white women were not in the discussion.” 

Noticing this absence, Larcher felt encouraged to focus her research on these  previously silenced women.

She stated that she especially focused on the young women in France in 2013 and 2015 that openly discussed their experiences of sexism and racism during the Black Lives Matter protests on social media.

“Those women were able to connect to the current moments, and I mean the global  movement of Black Lives Matter to a very specific context in the French space,” Larcher said. “Their activism started on social media, through their Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts.”

Larcher explained that to explore and recognize the voices of these women in France, she conducted a series of 35 interviews.

Through these conversations, Larcher  discovered a lot about the experiences of these women, including their feelings of not being treated and perceived like white French women, experiencing microaggressions and discrimination and feeling isolated in various environments.

This, she discovered, came from the “intersectional dimension of sexism and racism.” 

For the rest of her lecture, Larcher focused on specific French Caribbean women and their influence on literature and political thought.

“How Black French Caribbean women have shaped and developed their own political thought could be considered as a form of feminist perspective specific to the French colonial and postcolonial context,” Larcher said. “My goal here is to shed light on what I want to think of as an authentic, theoretical, and political tradition of French feminism from some of their key figures.”

The next event hosted by the Africana Studies Department is a screening of a new  documentary called “Invisible Warriors,” a film that focuses on African American women in World War II.

This will be held on Wednesday, Nov. 12 in Driscoll Hall 132 from 5 to 7p.m.

Students are encouraged to attend the ACS approved event.