Wednesday, Sep 27, 2023
5:20PM to 7:20PM
Humanities Quadrangle 134
Join us for an evening with Jeanne Rosine Abomo (Washington University, Saint Louis) in conversation with Iliana Vásquez González (Yale University). Abomo and Vásquez will delight and instruct us with a discussion of Abomo’s past and current research on science fiction, utopic literarure and film, African critical theory, and trans-continental connections, always inching towards the fundamental question, How do we anticipate the glorious future of poscolonial africa? Whitherto wakanda?
We asked our interlocutors to prepare some notes and glosses for us, to help jumpstart our conversation. These are linked below to our partner seminar, Iberian Connections.
Jeanne Rosine Abomo Edou is an afropolitan, a transcultural identity that makes her Fang-Beti by birth, Francophone by cultural assimilation, Hispanophone by intellectual curiosity, and English-speaking by academic conformity. She is an educator (trained at the High Teacher Training College in Yaoundé - Cameroon) and holds two master’s degrees (in Teaching Spanish as a foreign language and Hispanic Literature). Between 2019 and 2022, she completed her doctoral studies under joint supervision from the Universities of Maroua (Cameroon) and Alcalá (Spain) and will defend her first Ph.D. dissertation in the Spring of 2024. The fellowship Erasmus+ allowed her a grant as a researcher at the “UNESCO Chair of Afro-Ibero-American Studies” at the University of Alcalá. Since the Fall of 2022, she has been studying in a dual Ph.D. program in Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a member of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (CRE2) at the same University. In her various publications, she focuses on the visibility of the Afro-diasporic community (through the Afro-realistic, Afro-futurist, and Afropean paradigms) and the African Renaissance. Chronologically, her research covers the second half of the 20th century and includes the contemporary period. She has studied the Afro-Colombian and Afro-Peruvian diasporas in their struggles for visibility. Then, she examines the postcolonial novel of Central Africa (Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon) to reinterpret the imaginations of the future of the continent.
This series is inspired by the spirit of Sheherazade, Dhuoda, Christine de Pizan, Teresa de Cartagena, the pequeñas mujeres rojas and so many others for whom the practice of literature—in many of its facets—was the matter of survival. They existed in circumstances of physical and sexual violence, of civil war, of racial discrimination, of isolation; they also lived in circumstances that cannot be properly expressed outside their own experiments with literature.
Our guests write from many directions, for many audiences, for many souls. Novels, reviews, the lives of afrodescendent people, dance, race, sexual violences, asylum briefs, and so many other forms of polyhedric writing that explore the limits of literature—and those of survival. They will be in conversation about their work, about their thought and, certainly, about the joys and frustrations of the literary worlds they inhabit. To see our full Fall schedule, please visit our Iberian Nights page.