Black History Month at AUP: A book forum on Gary Wilder's "Freedom Time"

This February AUP is celebrating Black History Month with an excellent line-up of guest speakers and events! Join us for the third event of this incredible program for "A Book Forum on Gary Wilder's "Freedom Time: A  Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke, 2015) at Reid Hall. This event is sponsored by the AUP Center for Critical Democracy Studies and Columbia’s Global Center in Paris.

Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.

FORUM PARTICIPANTS (in French and in English)

GARY WILDER
Professor in the Ph.D. Programs of Anthropology and History and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) and of The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
MICHEL GIRAUD
Research sociologist at CNRS specializing on Antillean identity and the problem of assimilation. He is associated with the Centre de Recherche sur les Pouvoirs Locaux dans la Caraïbe (CRPLC) at the University of the Antilles-Guyane.
SILYANE LARCHER
Political scientist, fellow at the CNRS, attached to the research group Recherches Migrations et Société (URMIS) at University of Paris 7-Denis Diderot. She is the author of L’autre citoyen. L’idéal républicain et les Antilles après l’esclavage (Armand Colin, 2014).
MIRANDA SPIELER (moderator).  Associate Professor in the Department of History at the American University of Paris. She is the author of Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (2012), forthcoming in French as Liberté, Liberté Trahie (Alma, 2016).

For more information about this event, please contact Miranda Spieler (mspieleraup.edu).