Polo Moji: Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives

HUMA Book Launch

Author: Polo B. Moji (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Introduction: Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (2022) 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. The book subverts Walter Benjamin’s ‘flaneur’, the emblematic white male dandy and archetype of spatial liberty, by re-casting this figure as an AfroFrench woman. Reading AfroFrench narrative forms produced by women (novels, short stories, music lyrics and films), the book methodologically draws on literary and cultural criticism and critical black geographies to pose questions about racial and gendered spatial binaries by focusing on representations of navigating the city. Its theoretical intervention is to read flânerie as both the site of an ethnographic gaze and a movement and poetics of relationality. Through the figure of the black flâneuse and the analytical framework of “walking as method”, 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.

Some of the questions addressed are: How do gendered racialisations inform which bodies are citizens vs strangers? How do race, gender and social class play into the dissecting, (re)mapping and/or repurposing of space and places? In what way do perceived oceanic mobilities of trans-Mediterranean / Atlantic crossings relate to the everyday of racialised subjects? Which affiliations are enacted by AfroFrench negotiations of space, and what are their political valency? See the book: Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge, 2022). 

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^{Extracts made available with the kind permission of the author.}

About the author: Polo B. Moji has a PhD in Comparative and General Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) in 2011. Her research interests are comparative approaches to literature, African and Afrodiasporic narrative forms, literatures in translation (French/Francophone), intersectional feminisms and critical Black urban geographies. She has co-edited the special journal issues "Ghostly Border-Crossings: Europe in Afrodiasporic Narratives" (2019), "The Cinematic City: Desire, Form and the African Urban" (2019) Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City (2021). Her recently published book is Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge, 2022).

Discussant: Philippa Tumubweinee, University of Cape Town School of Architecture, Planning & Geomatics (APG)