A/Professor Polo Moji was recently awarded the African Literature Association's 2024  First Book Award for her book Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (2022). This award is  'for an outstanding book in African literary studies, which is the first book by the author.'

Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFench Narratives adopts a transdisciplinary lens that combines critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis to explore the spatial negotiations of black women in France. It assesses literature, film, and music as narrative forms and engages with the sociocultural and political contexts from which they emerge. Through the figure of the black flâneuse and the analytical framework of "walking as method", the book goes beneath spectacular representations of ghettoised banlieues, televised protests, and shipwrecked migrants to analyse the spatiality of blackness in the everyday. It argues that the material-discursive framing of black flânerie, as both relational and embodied movements, renders visible a politics of place embedded in everyday micro-struggles of raced-sexed subjects.

Foregrounding expressive modes and forms that have traditionally received little critical attention outside of the French and francophone world, this book will be relevant to academics, researchers, writers, students, activists, and readers with interests in Literary and Cultural Studies, African and Afrodiasporic Studies, Black Feminisms, Migration Studies, Critical Black Geographies, Francophone Studies, and the comparative framework of Afroeuropean Studies.

To learn more about this book, visit:

Book Review: Touya de Marenne, Eric. Review of Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives. The French Review 97, no. 2 (2023): 136-137. https://doi.org/10.1353/tfr.2023.a914266.

Published Roundtable: ‘Feminist Black Geographies in Literature and Film’, GeoAgenda No. 4/2022. https://scnat.ch/en/uuid/i/7cfd6057-b9d1-54c3-a667-0ba8aa1d31fa-GeoAgenda_No._42022

Podcast interviews:  New Books Network website  and https://raciallandscapes.wordpress.com/podcast/  ( To be published on July, 9^th 2024)