On fatal boat crossings and undying love
Every year our Fauvel Lecture features guest speakers who address the latest trends in French & Francophone cultural studies, engaging issues of socio-political relevance through original analyses of literature, new media, and other texts broadly defined. In particular, the Fauvel Series focuses on issues of diversity, inclusion, and finding common ground in the increasingly diverse societies of the Francophone world.
The 2024 Fauvel Lecture was given by Prof. Vlad Dima (Syracuse U.) who discussed the Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop and her hallucinatory film Atlantique (2019). Prof. Dima argued that while French cinema tends to foreground the theme of love, African francophone productions obscure it to such an extent that it becomes a rather glaring gap. The lack of attention paid to the theme of love mostly has to do with favoring politically conscious commentary—in other words, love is considered an unserious topic in comparison with the urgency of resistance against the colonial/postcolonial machine. However, the same lack paradoxically underscores the effectiveness of colonialism in barring colonized people from access to and enjoyment of fundamental human emotions. It is no wonder then that African francophone films lean into featuring representations of the inhuman, of the less-than-human, such as zombies and spirits. Mati Diop’s Atlantique, Prof. Dima argued, seems to suggest in fact that (postcolonial) love is only permitted by way of death.
