Christian Flaugh, Associate Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures; and 2019-20 Humanities Institute Faculty Fellow. Photographer: Douglas Levere

This event will be held as scheduled.

This is the rescheduled event for the Scholars@Hallwalls originally slated for November 22, 2019.

Join us at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center for our ninth year of Faculty Fellows talks! This lecture series brings current UB humanities research out into the community – with complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres. Free and open to the public.

Carnival festivals of the Americas, as in French Guiana, Haiti, Louisiana, and Trinidad, are known for black performance modes that gather and engage diverse publics. In this presentation, Christian Flaugh considers what happens when Carnival practices, long informed by transatlantic black migrations, “return” to Africa. How and why might African artists, entrepreneurs, and spectators—long attuned to celebrations and critiques of global worldviews—re-assemble such performance modes for their publics? This talk points to answers that surface in Côte d’Ivoire’s rebranded New Yam Festival, le Popo Carnaval, and in particular its ritual parading, vestiary, and “homecoming” traditions, overlapped with masquerading, town-to-town Carnival parties.

Christian is Associate Professor of French, Africana, and Caribbean Studies. He is the author of Operation Freak: Narrative, Identity, and the Spectrum of Bodily Abilities, and co-editor of Marie Vieux Chauvet’s Theatres: Thought, Form, and Performance of Revolt. In addition to publishing numerous articles, he co-founded and performed with Le Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte (2000-08), consulted with the AT BUFFALO creative team on the performance of “black” archives from Buffalo’s 1901 Pan-American Exposition, and has collaborated on multi-lingual adaptations of African and Caribbean texts.