Global France Seminar presents, Doyle Calhoun “The Suicide Archive: Reading for resistance from the time of slavery to the ‘Arab Spring'”

Presented by Doyle Calhoun, Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge When: Monday, September 28 @ 5:15 PM Where: Building 14, 14E-304 (map)* Abstract: From the time of slavery to the Algerian war for independence to the “Arab Spring,” people have responded to enslavement, colonisation and oppression through acts of suicide. While often occluded from or obscured in colonial archives, self-killing has long been at the centre of African and Caribbean engagements with the colonial past. Reading across literature, film, oral history, archival documents, legal history, and scientific texts, The Suicide Archive (2024) shows how aesthetic forms (literature, film, visual art, performance) preserve powerful histories of resistance and loss. In so doing, the book offers an innovative reading of African, Caribbean, French and global literary history