In 1971, the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant created the avant-garde, educational play Histoire de nègre (Tale of Black Histories) with a group of Caribbean schoolteachers, and it toured throughout Martinique, reaching over 2,000 working-class spectators. In the following decades, however, the play and Glissant’s grass-roots theatrical activism would remain virtually untouched by critics and artists, despite Glissant’s blossoming international reputation, both as a commentator of Caribbean culture and as a theorist of transnational, diasporic modes of belonging. Over the past four years, in collaboration with colleagues in the U.S. and the Caribbean, Emily has been working as dramaturg, scholar, and co-translator to document and renew the play’s anti-racist, consciousness-raising mission. In her talk, she draws from her theorization of “creolization” as a performance-based process of reinventing meaning and resisting the status quo to explore ongoing efforts to restage—and transform—Glissant’s theatrical activism.

Emily Sahakian (Ph.D., Northwestern University and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales) is Associate Professor of Theatre and French at the University of Georgia. Her first book, Staging Creolization: Women’s Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean (New World Studies Series, University of Virginia Press, 2017), explores the works of a pioneering generation of late twentieth-century female playwrights from Martinique and Guadeloupe, and reconstructs these plays’ international production and reception histories, in the Caribbean, in France, and in English-translation in the United States. With Andrew Daily, she is preparing a translation and bilingual, critical edition of Histoire de nègre (Tale of Black Histories), a Martinican avant-garde play devised collaboratively by Caribbean schoolteachers under Edouard Glissant’s direction in 1971, and she is working with the Compagnie SIYAJ from Guadeloupe to restage the play and renew its potential for dialogic education and anti-racist activism.

Emily Sahakian (University of Georgia)
Department of Romance Languages, Department of Theatre and Film Studies
http://www.rom.uga.edu/directory/emily-sahakian

This event is free and open to the public thanks to the sponsorship of the HI Performance Research Workshop, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Department of Theatre and Dance, the Gender Institute, the Honors College and the HI Modernisms Research Workshop.