Maboula Soumahoroo: Black is the Journey, Africana the Name

HUMA Book Launch

Author: Maboula Soumahoroo (University of Tours, France) 

Introduction: In this highly original book, Maboula Soumahoro explores the cultural and political vastness of the Black Atlantic, where Africa, Europe and the Americas were tied together by the brutal realities of the slave trade and colonialism. Each of these spaces has its own way of reading the black body and the black experience, and its own modes of visibility, invisibility, silence and amplification of black life. Maboula Soumahoro brings historical, intellectual, artistic, political and personal archives from the three continents into conversation. By weaving together her personal history with that of France and its abiding myth of color-blindness, she highlights the banality and persistence of structural racism in France today and shows that freedom will be found in the journey and movement between the sites of the Atlantic triangle. Africana is the name of that freedom.

How can we build and reflect on a collective diasporic identity through a personal journey? What are the limits and possibilities of this endeavor, when the personal journey is that of oft-erased bodies and stories, de-humanized lives and when Black populations in Africa, the Americas and Europe identify and misidentify with each other, their sensibilities shaped by the particular locales in which their lives unfold?

This book makes an important intellectual contribution to contemporary public conversations and theoretical inquiry into race, racism, blackness, and identity today, as it probes and questions the academic methodologies that have functioned as structures of exclusion. See the book: Black is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021).

About the author: Dr Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor in the English department of the University of Tours, France, where she also received her PhD. A specialist in the field of Africana Studies (Atlantic), Dr Soumahoro has conducted research and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France: Bennington College, Columbia University (New York and Paris), Barnard College, Bard Prison Initiative (Bayview Correctional Facility), Stanford University (Paris), Sciences Po (Paris and Reims), the prisons in Bois-d’Arcy, Villepinte (juvenile detention), and Fresnes.

Soumahoro is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated in English by Dr. Kaiama L. Glover as Black is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021). This book was distinguished by the committee of the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize in 2020.