Join the French Department to celebrate the 75^th anniversary of Yale French Studies, the country’s oldest English-language journal devoted to French and Francophone literature, language, and culture. To mark the occasion, we offer two dramatic readings in French: An excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mains sales that appeared in the first volume of Yale French Studies will be paired with a selection of scenes from Monique Wittig’s Le Voyage sans fin to highlight the publication of our next volume # 142, “Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig.” The volume’s editors, Morgane Cadieu (Yale) and Annabel L. Kim (Harvard) will be on hand for this special evening. Reception to follow. 

Thursday, November 2^nd at 5 p.m. // HQ, Room 134 

RSVP here. 

Lecture  Title: “Sapho on the Small Screen, Becoming Lesbian in Modern France”

Event co-sponsored by YRIHS and the Modern European Colloquium.

see Professor Tamara Chaplin’s web page

Lecture Title: Madness and Colonialism in Frantz Fanon’s thought.

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) is principally known as a theoretician of race relations and decolonization, in particular in the two main books he published during his lifetime: Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). What is less known is that he was in parallel a dramatist, a pioneering psychiatrist and an early and recognized theoretician of ethnopsychiatry. With the publication by Jean Khalfa and Robert JC Young of Alienation and Freedom, 800 p of unpublished or presumed lost texts by Frantz Fanon became available (La Découverte, 2015 and 2017, Bloomsbury 2018 and 2020).

These works reveal an astonishing dramatist, an original psychiatrist, and above all the significance of these dimensions of his thought for the understanding of his political texts. This talk will look at these links from two perspectives 1) the nature of the decolonization process when read through Fanon’s theatre and his texts on psychiatric internment, violence, and his pioneering model of social therapy and 2) Fanon’s analysis of “identity” first as a pathology and then as a mystification when presented as a cultural foundation for newly decolonized states, in relation to his systematic questioning of any “constitution” of the self in his psychiatric and ethnopsychiatric theories and practice. 

  Professor Jean Khalfa is Trinity Professor of French Studies at Trinity College, Cambridge.

On Saturday, April 29, Villa Albertine will host the second US Goncourt Prize Selection at Albertine Bookstore, culminating in a ceremony featuring a conversation with the Prize’s student jurors–undergraduate and graduate students from American universities. 

The 6 shortlisted books are:

• Giuliano Da Empoli, Le Mage du Kremlin 
• Brigitte Giraud, Vivre vite
• Cloé Korman, Les Presque Sœurs 
• Makenzy Orcel, Une Somme humaine 
• Pascale Robert-Diard, La Petite menteuse
• Monica Sabolo, La Vie clandestine