Since January 2011, an archived rendition of the “Anthem of the Movement for the Liberation of Women” (MLF) has garnered more than 300,000 views on YouTube. The song was collaboratively written by MLF leaders and sung for the first time in March 1971 to commemorate the lives of the women who died during the Parisian… Read more →
Tag: french empire
Colonial Colette: From Orientalism and Egyptian Pantomime to Polaire’s Jamaican “Slave”
I first read excerpts of Colette’s Sido in my IB French class in 2007, so when the recent biopic starring Keira Knightley and produced by Wash Westmoreland came out, I knew that I had to see it. Colette was one of the most prolific French writers of the early twentieth century, well known for her… Read more →
Feeling Grief: On Emotions in the Archive of Enslavement
In September, when an archivist at Fisk University asked me to help identify a ten-page manuscript from 1776 Saint-Domingue, my mind began to race. Saint-Domingue was the French Caribbean colony that became Haiti after a long revolution that lasted from 1791 until November 18, 1803. In the 1770s, the colony was in the throes of… Read more →