Events
Cosponsors
- Maison Française
- Institute of African Studies
- Office of the Divisional Deans in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Notes
- Registration required. See details.
New Books in the Arts & Sciences—panel discussions celebrating recent work by the Columbia Faculty.
Phantom Africa
by: Michel Leiris, Translated by Brent Edwards
Brent Edwards discusses his new English translation of Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa with invited colleagues. One of the towering classics of 20th century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of French Surrealist writer Michel Leiris’s compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal—by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic, and morose—as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition in sub-Saharan Africa, the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, led by anthropologist Marcel Griaule. Hired to serve as the “secretary-archivist,” Leiris kept a diary where he noted not only a given day’s activities but also his impressions, states of mind, anxieties, dreams, and even his erotic fantasies, and decided to publish it on his return to Paris. The book, never before available in English translation, bears witness to the full range of social and political forces reshaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.
Participants
- Author Brent Hayes Edwards Professor of English and Comparative Literature Columbia University
- Speaker Denis Hollier Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture New York University
- Speaker Brian Larkin Director of Graduate Studies Barnard College, Columbia University
- Speaker Souleymane Bachir Diagne Professor of French Columbia University
- Speaker Emmanuelle Saada Associate Professor of French and Romance Philology; Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies Columbia University