Director of Graduate Studies; Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Comparative Literature, and Francophone Studies
About
Languages: French, Spanish, Douala and Lingala
Affiliations: Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures
Teaching interests: As an educator, my main goal is to offer students theoretical, interdisciplinary and international perspectives both inside and outside of the classroom. I teach students to critically read discourses that surround them, particularly discourses produced within institutions. For example, when I am teaching about race, and particularly when I am addressing contexts outside the United States, I use visual, literary, theoretical and historical perspectives in order to provide students with a more complete picture of the complexities of the context. I am driven to increase the visibility of literature by marginalized people outside of the US through my scholarship, teaching and mentorship.
Recent courses:
- Global Blackness Experiences (Complit 140)
- Archiving Images from the Global South (Complit 750)
- Gender and Sexuality: None Western Sexualities (Complit 761)
- French Critical Theories (French 855)
- Jean Genet and Minorities: A Process of Aesthetization (French 656)
Research interests: Throughout my career, my work has focused on historically disempowered groups from a variety of regions: prison writing in France; Black African cinema; West African literature; Francophone women writers; and, critical race theory with an emphasis on the aesthetic and political movement of négritude that arose within the diasporic émigré communities of Paris in the 1930s. This has included multiple geographical areas—Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and Iran—a focus which I believe is essential to understanding the multi-layered, internationally connected productions of discourses and master narratives. I believe that employing approaches drawn from different disciplines in conjunction with a focus on these rich and complex geographical regions allows for a better understanding of the interconnected forms of socio-cultural disenfranchisement that have arisen in the course of the preceding century and which continue to assert their force through different versions of state-controlled political discourses. My current work focuses on LGBTQ+ issues, with an emphasis on archives of blackness in Africa, Europe and the Americas. My attention to visual archives considers how images shape the substance of our personal and collective memories, as they locate visions of the past, and project scenes of the future. Not just a repository of records, the archive governs that which can be uttered in the present. Yet it cannot be seized in its entirety: incommensurable, it looms larger than those who amassed the parts that constitute its whole. Focusing specifically on the visualization of Africa through images, I interrogate the ways in which societies witness, express and document their heritage and continuing identities through a vast array of tangible and intangible forms and formats. With this project, I have produced two documentaries and working on a third.
Book publications:
- Ekotto, F. and Celis, A. 2020 Co-Editors of Volume IV of The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature by John Whiley & Sons, Inc.
- Ekotto, F. 2019 Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of A Young Artiste From Bon Mbella, Translated by Corine Tachtiris. Bucknell University Press.
- Ekotto, F. 2018 Nimrod: Selected Work, Edited by Frieda Ekotto. (The University of Michigan Press in African Perspectives).
- Ekotto, F. and Harrow, K. 2015. Rethinking African Cultural Production (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.)
- Ekotto, F. 2011. Race and Sex across the French Atlantic: The Color of Black in Literary, Philosophical, and Theater Discourse (New York: Lexington Press.)
- Ekotto, F. and Bénédicte Boisseron. 2011. Editors. Voix du monde : Nouvelles francophones (Bordeaux : Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, France.)
- Ekotto, F. 2010. Portrait d’une jeune artiste de Bona Mbella (a novel, Paris: L’Harmattan.)
- Ekotto, F. and Adeline Koh. 2009. Editors. Rethinking Third Cinema: The Role of Anti-colonial Media and Aesthetics in Postmodernity. (Germany: LIT Berlin.)
- Ekotto, F. Aurélie Renaud, and Agnès Vannouvong. 2008. Toutes les images du langage : Jean Genet (Presse de l’Université de Paris Sorbone/Biblioteca Della Ricerca, Transatlantique 9.)
- Ekotto, F. 2005. Chuchote pas trop (a novel, Paris : L’Harmattan.)
- Ekotto, F. 2001. L'Ecriture carcérale et le discours juridique : Jean Genet (Paris : L’Harmattan.)
- Ekotto, F. and M. Delvaux. 1998. Special issue of L'Esprit Créateur on the topic of "Narrative and Confinement."
Other publications:
- Ekotto, F. 2022 “Francophone Writing.” In Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies. Ed. Gene Jarrett. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Ekotto, F. 2021 “The Ties That Bind : African Writers and Writers of the Black Diaspora.” In Detroit Public Library Brochure.
- Ekotto, F. 2020 “Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter” in Reframing PostColonial Studies. Palgrave Mcmillan.
- Ekotto, F. 2020 “Aimé Césaire in the Era of Black Lives Matter” in The Wiley- Blackwell Companion to World Literature. Volume IV. John Whiley & Sons, Inc.
- Ekotto, F. 2019 “L’Art de regarder: Frieda Ekotto à Frida Khalo/Une lettre” in V I B R A T E ! Resounding the Frequencies of Africana in Translation. Absinthe: World Literature in Translation.
- Ekotto, F. 2019 “La diaspora. Esquisse d’une nouvelle épistémologie pour les Noirs américains” in Afrocentricités: Histoire, philosophie et pratiques sociales. Sous la direction de Pauline Guedj et Nadia Yala Kisukidi. No 52 mai 2019 Editions Kimé: Paris, France. pp.147-154.
- Ekotto, F. 2019 “L’Afrique et la Chine: Qu’en est-il de la culture?” in Something We Africans Got. Issue #8, May 2019.pp. 218-220.
- Ekotto, F. 2018 “Truth in Translation: A reading of the Film Sisters in Law” in Mamadou Diawara, Elisio Macamo and Jean-Bernard Ouedraogo (Eds), Translation Revisited: Contesting the Sense of African Social Realities, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) pp.521-530.
- Ekotto, F. and Mélissa Gélinas. 2016.The First Issue of Obieg Quarterly: http://obieg.u- jazdowski.pl/en/dakar
- Ekotto, F. 2016 “Framing Homosexual Identities in Cameroonian Literature” in Tydskrif vir LetterKunde 53 (1) pp. 128-140.
- Ekotto, F. (Forthcoming) “Chaque fois un nouveau souffle” in Etudier l’exil (Accepted for publication in France. Collection of Essays)
- Ekotto, F. 2016 “Papy Ekengue: Une poésie de l’ordinaire-poésie une nouvelle expression de l ’Afrique” in Créer en Postcolonie: 2010-2015 Voix et dissidences Belgo-Congolaises. Sous la direction de Sarah Demart et Gia Abrassart. Bozar Books, Africalia. Belgium. Pp.191-198.
- Ekotto, F. March 2016. “Une poétique de la mémoire: Lire Matière grise, le film du réalisateur rwandais Kivu Ruhorahoza (2011) in Présence Africaine, no 85.
- Ekotto, F. 2015. “Body Talk and Thoughts on Power” in Body Talk, Edited by Koyo Kuoh for The Exhibition in WIELS, Brussel, Belgium.
