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African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures

Speakers 2020

  • Stoll, Henry

    • Henry Stoll
    • Department of Musicology, Harvard University
    • Abstract Title: "Mais li pas en criole": Singing French, Sounding Sovereign

    Bio: Henry is a Ph.D. candidate in historical musicology at Harvard University. His research favors the music of Latin America and the Caribbean, specializing in opera, transatlantic history, and Haiti. At Harvard, he is an affiliate of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute and is a candidate for the Certificate in Latin American Studies. His research today is funded by a Frederick Sheldon Fellowship, a John Carter Brown Library Associates Fellowship, and grants from the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the Charles Warren Center. Henry is a very proud alumnus of Rutgers, having received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from the Mason Gross School of Music and the French department.

    Abstract: With the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), Haiti expelled its French oppressors, becoming the first independent nation in Latin America, the first to abolish slavery, and the only to be established by a slave rebellion. Its first leaders set about making Haiti a nation worthy of the world’s approbation, building palaces, schools, fortresses, theaters—and, as I will show, commissioning music for the glorification of their country. In this paper, I will introduce the music of early Haiti through an opera written and performed for the Haitian monarchy: L'Entrée du Roi, en sa capitale (“The Entrance of the King in His Capital,” 1818). Interspersed with parodies on melodies from the French Revolution, the opera is most remarkable for its opening scene—a dialogue between two Creole-speaking lovers, Marguerite and Valentin. This transliteration of Haitian Creole dates among the earliest writings in the language and is doubly notable for its verisimilitude and latter-day legibility. Many Haitian proverbs discuss the relationship between Haitian Creole and French—Pale franse pa di lespri pou sa (Speaking French doesn’t mean you’re smart), Kreyòl pale, kreyòl komprann (Creole spoken, Creole understood), Li pale frances (He speaks French [so he is likely deceitful]). And indeed, hidden in Marguerite and Valentin’s chirpy banter is a critique of Haitian decolonization—of linguistic prestige, Enlightenment thought, and the act of translation. I ask, why is theater—particularly musical theater—so valuable to the study of intercultural encounters and Afro-diasporic voice? And ultimately, what is the relationship between translation and sovereignty? Excerpts from this opera will be heard.

  • Tadjo, Véronique

    • Véronique Tadjo
    • Writer, Artist and Academic, London and Abidjan
    • Abstract Title: Viruses are our New Enemies: Interpreting the Ebola Epidemic and its Many Narratives

    Bio: Véronique Tadjo is a writer, artist, and academic. Born in Paris, she grew up in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Her work includes poetry collections and novels among which The Shadow of Imana; Queen Pokou ; Far Away from my Father and In the Company of Men, published this year by Other press in the US and Hope Road in the UK. It is based on the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. She is also an author of books for young people. She has lived in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa where she was Head of French and Francophone Studies for seven years at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She now shares her time between London and Abidjan. Véronique Tadjo received the Literary Prize of L'Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique in 1983 and the UNICEF Prize in 1993 for Mamy Wata and the Monster, which was also chosen as one of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century. In 2005 Tadjo won « Le Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire” and in 2016, « Le Prix Bernard Dadié pour la Littérature ».

    Abstract: The world seems to be under attack. Today our lives have been shaped by the Covid19 pandemic. We experience suffering, the threat to our lives and the loss of “normality”. We can learn from what has happened in the recent past in Africa. At the end of 2013/beginning of 2014, an outbreak of the Ebola virus erupted in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The epidemic was finally contained in 2016 after about 28, 646 people were contaminated, and 11,323 people lost their lives. As African writers, artists and academics, we need to interpret and reclaim the memory of this period of intense anguish but also of intense human solidarity. In other words, which lessons can we retain for ourselves and for the world? How can we translate what has been for too long left unspoken?

  • Tamba E. M’bayo

    • Department of History, West Virginia University
    • Abstract Title: When Public Health and Politics Converge: The Ebola Epidemic and Coronavirus Pandemic in Sierra Leone

    Bio: Dr. Tamba M’bayo is an associate professor of history at West Virginia University, where he teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in African history. His first book was on Muslim interpreters in colonial Senegal, a product of his research interest in the colonial and post-colonial history of French West Africa. Dr. M’bayo’s current research for his second book will trace Sierra Leone’s long history of epidemic episodes from 1787 to the Ebola outbreak of 2013. Provisionally titled “From ‘White Man’s Grave’ to Ebola: Sierra Leone’s History of Epidemics, 1787- 2015,” the study seeks a more profound understanding of the dynamics of cultural, social, political, and environmental conditions that have influenced disease eruptions in the country. During the 2019-20 academic year, Dr. M’bayo conducted archival research for his book in Sierra Leone as a Fulbright US Scholar.


    Abstract: During the Ebola epidemic (2013-2015) and the Coronavirus pandemic (2019-2020), public health concerns took center stage in Sierra Leone, as in other countries, due to the threat posed by widespread disease outbreaks to not only people, but also the country’s health system and economy. Public health discourse became highly politicized as political leaders, government officials, and ordinary citizens engaged in vitriolic debates about public health emergency, quarantine, lockdown, curfew, handwashing, masking, social distancing, and limits on public gathering and funerals for the infected dead. Against this backdrop, this paper utilizes public health as a lens through which to examine its intersection with politics and assess Sierra Leone’s responses to both the Ebola epidemic and the Coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on the extant literature on epidemics and pandemics, oral interviews, news and social media accounts and participant-observation, the paper argues that despite the problems posed by its weak health system and inadequate financial resources, Sierra Leone appeared to be in a better position than it was during the Ebola epidemic to plan early and respond promptly to the Coronavirus pandemic, at least to minimize its spread and fatalities.

  • Wendell Marsh

    • African American and African Studies, Rutgers University-Newark
    • Abstract Title: Translating the Life of an African Muslim-Scholar Saint

    Bio: Wendell Marsh is Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a post-disciplinary scholar of Islam in Africa, textuality, and the theory and practice of African Studies. His first research project on the Muslim polymath from colonial Senegal Shaykh Musa Kamara stages a reflection on the entanglements of Africa, Islam, and modernity, by way of a close study of the forms of textual knowledge produced by and about Kamara over the course of the twentieth century.

    Abstract: The colonial-era Senegalese Muslim intellectual Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864-1945) is best known for his over 1,700-page Arabic-language text about the history and social organization of the greater Western Sahel, Zuhūr al-basātīn fī tārīkh al-Sawādīn (Flowers in the Gardens in the History of the Blacks). Long celebrated by nationalist historiography as proof of an autochthonous historical consciousness and a spirit of tolerance, his status as a point of reference has been renewed in the contemporary context of Islamist political violence in the region. However, these receptions do not account for Kamara's own intellectual project, nor do they exhaust the possible readings of him in the present. In pursuit of these other readings, I discuss in this paper Kamara’s less well-known auto-hagiographic Tabshīr al-Khāʾif (The Spreading of the Good News of the Fearful). Given the dual meaning tarjama, both the name of genre in which Tabshīr is written and a word to describe the process of translation between languages, I argue that the interpretation of the excess of a life situated in history and its translation into the ideal Islamic form of life beyond time or space is the primary task of this text.

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