The Suicide Archive
A book talk
Event Date & Time
|
-
Event Location
135 Jones Hall
27 Pleasant St SE
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
From the time of slavery to the Algerian war for independence to the "Arab Spring," people have responded to enslavement, colonisation and oppression through acts of suicide. Though often obscured in colonial archives, self-killing has long been at the centre of African and Caribbean engagements with the colonial past. Reading across literature, film, oral history, archival documents, legal history, and scientific texts, The Suicide Archive (2024) shows how creative works (literature, film, visual art, performance) preserve powerful histories of resistance and loss, offering an innovative reading of African, Caribbean, French and global literary history.
A note about content: This talk involves discussion of suicide, specifically in the contexts of slavery, colonization and empire. Please use your discretion and take care as you listen and participate.
Doyle Calhoun is University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse, where his research and teaching focuses on the literatures and cinemas of West Africa and the Caribbean. He is the author of The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire (Duke UP, 2024), which received the thirty-third annual Alda and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies (awarded by the MLA), and is forthcoming in French as Mourir pour n’être à personne (with La Découverte). With Cheikh Thiam he edited Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures (Yale UP, 2025). With Alioune Fall and Cheikh Thiam, he also translated and edited The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics (Duke UP, forthcoming 2026). He is the recipient of several prizes, including the Malcolm Bowie Prize (French Studies), the William R. Parker Prize, and the Ralph Cohen Prize. He received his PhD from Yale in 2022.
A note about content: This talk involves discussion of suicide, specifically in the contexts of slavery, colonization and empire. Please use your discretion and take care as you listen and participate.
Doyle Calhoun is University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse, where his research and teaching focuses on the literatures and cinemas of West Africa and the Caribbean. He is the author of The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire (Duke UP, 2024), which received the thirty-third annual Alda and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies (awarded by the MLA), and is forthcoming in French as Mourir pour n’être à personne (with La Découverte). With Cheikh Thiam he edited Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures (Yale UP, 2025). With Alioune Fall and Cheikh Thiam, he also translated and edited The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics (Duke UP, forthcoming 2026). He is the recipient of several prizes, including the Malcolm Bowie Prize (French Studies), the William R. Parker Prize, and the Ralph Cohen Prize. He received his PhD from Yale in 2022.