-
this week in books: histoire du Sénégal
This week was largely devoted to brushing up on my Senegalese history. I’m revising an article – crossing my t’s and dotting my i’s (as well as changing most of my which’s to that’s…good lord did I not go to middle school?) and I realized that while the literary premises were sound, the paper was really…
-
because it was there…
Hi, how are you today? I’m fine, you know, surviving the sudden blizzard, rocking some Boubacar Traoré, and…oh yeah…wait…not fine at all – eating puréed lentils!!! Why, you ask? Gentle reader, (is that phrase trademarked? can I use that?) because I lost my mind for about five minutes and decided that lentil soup was fine,…
-
RIDM Screening 122: Atalaku
Directed by Dieudo Hammadi, Atalaku is set during the latest elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo. http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi1422763033/ Here’s a quick timeline: 1960: Patrice Lumumba becomes the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Republic of Congo (the one that becomes the DRC, not the other one). He is deposed by the president, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, and…
-
RIDM Screening 84: A jamais, pour toujours
Confession: I am basically posting this for good form, because it is a documentary that I saw, and thus feel obligated to include it in the series. (Plus, duh, I like bragging about all these awesome films I’m seeing. Aren’t you tempted to move to Montreal now so you can watch great documentaries and go…
-
RIDM Screening 69: Ayiti Toma
Focusing on foreign aid (before and after the earthquake), the slave trade and colonialism, and vodou in Haiti, this documentary provides a far-reaching scope of a complex society. If there is one flaw the film suffered from it was the ambitious attempt to cover everything. How can you not try to cover everything when you’re…
-
RIDM Screening 30: The Square
This was my first screening so far of the Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal and I can safely say that it was fantastic way to start. First, a word on the festival: Since 1998, the RIDM has been bringing filmmakers from Quebec, and from around the world, to the city of Montreal for about a…
-
Maryse Condé, desire, return
If you’re familiar with Guadeloupian writer Maryse Condé, you might also be familiar with the striking similarities between the female protagonists in both En attendant le Bonheur (originally published as Heremakhonon, 1976) and Histoire de la femme cannibale (2005). Both Véronica of the former title and Rosélie of the latter travel an uprooted Pan-African non-trajectory, originally…
-
globalization and marriage
They arrived on her parents’ front porch one crisp autumn day. They were parched and sad. Little surprise, as they had travelled all the way from Holland to an unforgivingly suburban spot in the polluted metropolitan Atlanta-scape. They were trimmed and placed in filtered water for a couple of days, which made them come…
-
drinking game with Balzac
Do you ever find yourself going through a text, doing the close reading and, in particular, “tracing” one element throughout, and feel like you are playing a drinking game with yourself? I’m reading La Duchesse de Langeais for the second time, having noticed that in addition to several interesting portrayals of slavery (both conceptual and…
-
tragically missed pun of the day…
Roger Célestin’s book From Cannibals to Radicals (University of Minnesota, 1996) focuses on the structure of exoticism as a trajectory from Home to Periphery (and back) as negotiated by the traveler/writer/philosopher. Rather than sticking to nineteenth century French texts (from which the term issues) he goes as far back in time as Montaigne and all…
Indirect Libre
books etc., emphasis on the etc.
Indirect Libre 