The Henry Peyre French Institute

FROM UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION TO CAPITALIST SLAVERY
Friday, March 1, 2024 * 5:00 pm
Open to the Public
HOSTED BY
French
Henri Peyre French Institute
ADMISSION PRICE: Free
REGISTER : Registration not required.
This talk by Nick Nesbitt (Princeton University) will examine the complex legacy of the Haitian Revolution in its relation to global capitalism. The Haitian Revolution incontestably constitutes the most advanced political intervention of the age of revolutions from the perspective of its immediate and universal abolition of slavery. At the same time, from the perspective of Marx’s critique of the subject of human rights and the capitalist social form, we must continue to interrogate the subject of 1804 and universal emancipation, to ask whether, paradoxically, that henceforth free subject is not precisely the necessary subject of global capital, a peripheral subject now free to offer up their labor power as the unique commodity capable of feeding what Marx called Capital, the automatische Subjekt.
https://www.gc.cuny.edu/events/universal-emancipation-capitalist-slavery

👉 Le festival Haïti Monde est heureux de compter parmi ses intervenant.e.s Jasmine Claude-Narcisse ! Retrouvez-la au 360 Paris Music Factory le samedi 3 juin 2023 à 18h ! ✨

Jasmine Claude-Narcisse est maîtresse de conférence en études haïtiennes francophones et créoles à York College, CUNY (The City University of New York). Ses recherches portent sur la rhétorique du Soi et l’autobiographie dans la littérature francophone caribéenne et aux linéaments de la littérature francophone. De ses multiples champs d'action et d'intervention, on note l'organisation à Queens, NY, de la Journée du livre haïtien de 2005 à 2012 avec le support de l'université et en qualité de présidente et gérante du Haitian Book Centre. En titre d’assistante de direction puis membre permanent du Conseil d’Administration de l’Institut français Henri Peyre (The Henry Peyre French Institute), elle initie et dirige au Graduate Center, CUNY, en 2012, un programme continu sur Haïti incluant entre autres la série multi-culturelle Haïti-Rencontres et un séminaire de trois ans culminant sur un colloque international de trois jours en mars 2016 sur le thème brûlant "Impunité, Responsabilité et Citoyenneté en Haïti". Elle s’est activement impliquée depuis cinq ans avec le collectif Jean-Claude Charles travaillant à travers des conférences, séminaires et publications critiques divers à la propagation de son œuvre-charnière.

Pour prendre vos billets, c'est par ici 👇
https://le360paris.com/evenement/festival-haiti-monde2/

Join us for the next in our fascinating seminar series with Stephanie Grace Petinos.
The Living Relic and the Disabled Body
Wednesday, May 8th 2019
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM EDT
Room 9206
This event is free and open to thet public.
Please RSVP
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-object-seminar-breaking-boundaries-with-stephanie-grace-petinos-tickets-60144270131

A body becomes a relic when a holy person, typically a saint, dies. In addition, the objects with which the holy person has had contact become relics by association. These relics are objects of devotion and of healing, sacred commodities that circulate and/or attract pilgrims. The power of relics is derived from the divine that flows within the objects and from the ability of these objects to channel and harness that divinity. If relics are marked by having been directly touched by God, then, a body touched by God before death becomes a living relic. The living relics in medieval sources take many forms, including men, women, and animals; and, in many cases, the resulting living relic restores a fractured or severed body, re-enabling a disabled body. These once-disabled bodies do not simply return to being their pre-disabled bodies, but, rather, are relicized, objectified, becoming a sort of divine cyborg with the potential for patriarchal, ecclesiastical, and familial subversion.

About the Speaker:

Stephanie Grace-Petinos is a Lecturer of French at Western Carolina University. Her areas of specialization include medieval French literature, medieval spirituality, materiality, and disability studies. She is working on her first monograph, which focuses on re-attached/ re-enabled bodies in medieval literature, hagiography, and visual culture, tentatively titled Divine Cyborgs and the Logic of the Living Relic. Her published articles include “Woman as Victim and Vehicle of Redemption in the Search for Holiness: Marie de France’s Fresne” in the online medieval journal Hortulus; “Renunciation as Point of Departure in Marie de France’s Eliduc” in Anamesa;the chapter “Happiness via Spiritual Transcendence in a Selection of Old French Texts” in Regimes of Happiness: Comparative and Historical Studies. Anthem Press; as well as the forthcoming articles “Precarious Bodies in the Old French Ami et Amile” in Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures: Medieval Vulnerabilities, and “The Ecology of Relics in Philippe de Remi’s Le Roman de la Manekine” in Medieval Ecocriticisms. She received her PhD in French with a certificate in Medieval Studies from The Graduate Center in 2016.

Today! Please join us!
Nathalie Etoke
Object to Subject: Afro Diasporic French Identities
SEMINAR
Fri, May 3, 2019, 05:00 PM – 07:00 PM
French Student Lounge (Room 4202)
The next seminar in the exciting series:
THE OBJECT SEMINAR: BREAKING BOUNDARIES
Please RSVP, see below for link for free tickets:
This event is free and open to the public

How do black individuals address the conundrums of inclusion and exclusion, acceptance and rejection in France? How do they navigate a racialized space that denies the existence of race? What are their thoughts on French national identity? What do they think about the portrayal of black people in the media? What is their relationship to Africa, to the memory of colonization and slavery? How do they deal with racism? Self-examination is the core component of Afro Diasporic French Identities, a documentary that I directed in 2011. By definition, race and racism set up a hierarchy of power through which human beings are objectified and oppressed based on the color of their skin. In the context of this seminar, I will look at the ways in which documentary can be used as an object that renders black subjectivities visible while questioning the universalist French narrative of citizenship. Outside of discourses on immigration, integration, religion or juvenile delinquency, the black experience does not exist in the French imagination. Despite having French citizenship, the individual whose physical features connect her to far-off lands is objectified with the following adjectives: “foreigner”, “immigrant”, and “black/noir (e)”. Through a series of interviews grounded on reflexive jazz esthetics that blend music, multiple voices, dance, spoken word and performance, Afro French Diasporic Identitiesaddresses the racializing of citizenship and the hermeneutics of the lived experience of black people in France. The documentary operates as a theoretical object that creates a space where I investigate the specificities, challenges, and contradictions that race and citizenship represent at this juncture in French society.

About the Speaker:

Nathalie Etoke is an Associate Professor of Francophone and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She specializes in literature and cinema of Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, black French studies, q***r studies in Africa and the Caribbean, and Africana existential thought. Her research examines the ongoing struggles for social justice and freedom for people of African descent around the world, accounting for the consequences of racial slavery, colonialism, and sexual violence in the longue durée of imperialism since 1492. Her articles have appeared in Research in African Literatures, French Politics and Culture, Nouvelles Études Francophones, Présence Francophone, the International Journal of Francophone Studies and the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. She is the author of L’Écriture du corps féminin dans la littérature de l’Afrique francophone au sud du Sahara and Melancholia Africana l’indispensable dépassement de la condition noire (2010), which won the 2012 Franz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. In 2011, she directed Afro Diasporic French Identities, a documentary on race, identity and citizenship in contemporary France.

The Object Seminar: Breaking Boundaries
SEMINARS

Join us for the first seminar of this exiting new series:
The Object Seminar: Breaking Boundaries
What happens when we incorporate the non-human material world into academic conversations? As part of the Object Library's ongoing inquiry into routes to knowledge beyond traditional methods and existing discourses, this series of seminars co-presented with Henri Peyre French Institute invites the public to join us in study once again, taking material culture as our point of departure. With topics ranging across new areas of research, each presenter is encouraged to bring-a-thing-along or propose an object that might sit in creative tension with the seminar discussion. All are welcome, but a commitment to attend is necessary, as is reading in advance any materials supplied.
The final event, held in the Object Library, will lodge seminar-related objects—both suggested by seminar attendees in response to our conversations or brought along to the final session—into our temporary installation, 365 Things.
The Henri Peyre French Institute is proud to organize this seminar series in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY and its Object Library project. The Henri Peyre French Institute is dedicated to promoting a broad, transdisciplinary, and transnational understanding of major cultural issues across French and Francophone studies through public programs concerning the arts, history, society and politics. This current seminar series seeks to showcase work in these areas that breaks boundaries, asks new questions, and alters current paradigms.

Frédéric Baitinger
Thou Shalt Enjoy Thy Object As Thyself
Fri, Mar 8, 2019, 05:00 PM – 07:00 PM
Room 9207

This is our new metaphysics, our new religious commandment: thou shalt enjoy thy object as thyself. As in the famous poem by Baudelaire The Pipe, we are no longer consumers, but we are literally consumed by our objects. They have become our primary source of enjoyment, not to say of addiction. We are completely riveted to our phone, to our computer, to our Facebook account, our Instagram account, our Seamless account, our Spotify account, etc. In a sense, one could even say that our relationships to objects are about to replace the relationships we had before to others, not to say to our significant other. For each one of our needs, there always exists an object, an app, or a delivery service that will satisfy it. It is thus as if each one of us could live, and be entirely satisfied, while being only connected to objects, and not, as it was the case before, to real people. This is why the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested, as early as in the mid 70s, that what lurks underneath this omnipresence of the object is, actually, the “absence of sexual relationship between the sexes.” And this absence of sexual relationship between the sexes is itself grounded on an ultimate object—called object a—which encapsulates each one of us in its own perverse fantasy.

Raphaël Liogier
The New Challenge of Apprehending Global Identities
SEMINAR
Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 05:00 PM – 07:00 PM
Room 9207

The Internet is an object that is in one way non-human (even being the very ground in which so-called Artificial Intelligence grows) but is also filled with human narratives, and that is in another way empty but also filled with an in-finite amount of information (images, desires, discourses, etc.). Facing globalization in today’s digital age, advanced industrial societies seem to be put in jeopardy by an identity crisis fueled by individual and community-based frustrations, which seems to be related to the following paradox: human beings have never been so look-alike on a global scale—sharing for instance the same aspiration to modern comfort—but they have never been so different on a local scale, even within the scope of a single neighborhood, partly because global micro-global-communities based on Internet social networks (from manga enthusiasts to LGBTQ activists to neo-Salafists) create territory-less identities (that we could call Global Identities), interfering with traditional territory-based identities (family, ethnicity or nation). It is urgent to study them and the complex interactions between traditionally based and territory-less identities. And for that aim, it is therefore necessary to construct and implement a new social sciences discipline in its own right that can be named Global Identity Studies.



The Object Seminar: Breaking Boundaries series is co-organized and sponsored by the Henri Peyre French Institute, and The Object Library from the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Join us!

The Henry Peyre French Institute - Events 66 followers

Edward Glissant at the Graduate Center--FREE Event

About Édouard Glissant at The Graduate Center

Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) is widely recognized as a poet, novelist, theorist, and thinker of difference. His concepts of opacity, poetics of relation, and the all-world have been particularly strong touchpoints for scholars across disciplines since the 1990s, as has his participation in anti-colonial political movements.

Born in Martinique and a longtime Parisian, Glissant spent sixteen years teaching at the Graduate Center as a Distinguished Professor in the French Department (1995–2011), where he connected with countless students in his weekly seminars and Friday evening Poetry Club meetings at his apartment.

This autumn, curators Hans Ulrich Obrist, Asad Raza, and Gabriela Rangel will bring Glissant back to New York with the exhibition Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking at the Americas Society (680 Park Ave.), featuring his work alongside that of Cuban anthropologist Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991), an expert on Afro-Cuban religions. Their scholarship will be read through modern and contemporary artists, such as Roberto Matta, Wilfredo Lam, Tania Bruguera, and Anri Sala.

During the run of the exhibition, from October 9, 2018 to January 12, 2019, the Graduate Center will host events about his wide influence on today’s scholarship. Ephemera from his time here will also be displayed in a showcase in The Object Library on the ground floor.



Related events:

Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation, Tuesday, November 6, 6:30pm, Segal Theater – Film screening of Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation, directed by Manthia Diawara. Following by a discussion with Manthia Diawara.

Édouard Glissant’s Tout-Monde: Transnational Perspectives. A Symposium Honoring the Memory of Édouard Glissant, Friday, November 16, 1:00 – 6:00pm, Elebash Recital Hall – Organized by the Henri Peyre French Institute; co-sponsored by IRADAC, The Center for the Humanities and ARC.

Édouard Glissant: Seminar Series
This November at the Graduate Center, CUNY, the Henri Peyre French Institute, the PhD Program in French, and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY invite you to attend a series of seminars honoring the legacy of Édouard Glissant, who taught here from 1995 to 2011.

Join us for the Symposium, Friday, November 16th 2018
as we remember Glissant's important and poetic legacy.

Édouard Glissant's Tout-Monde: Transnational Perspectives Édouard Glissant's Tout-Monde: Transnational Perspectives Symposium Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 12:00 PM – 06:00 PM Elebash Recital Hall About the symposium The year 2018 marks what would have been the 90th birthday of Édouard Glissant (1928-2011), the eminent thinker of Relation and the All-World (Tout-...

A fascinating look at France's taste for tea on the HPFI Food Blog, by Anna Soo-Hoo

"Tea with a Spot of Gallic Flair" by Anna Soo-Hoo Tea being made into a French drink almost as if by the sheer attitude of the fashionable crowd— that is a notion suggested in a number of magazines and newspapers during the early 1900s in France. Not only were the tea leaves sourced mainly from Sri Lanka and China at the time, but the term