Between 2014-2023, I traveled to mainland France, the French Caribbean, and Senegal (West Africa) to ask black artists, cultural change-makers, historians and policymakers what is the place of the fraught histories of the slave trade and of slavery in contemporary visions of more just and better human futures. Reclaiming black history as human history, the wide variety of perspectives, whether inspired by Edouard Glissant’s creolist poetics of relation or pan-Africanist or black diasporic thought, or Jacques Derrida’s spectral poetics, ultimately converges on the need to ask ourselves a series of nuanced questions. What does it mean to be sovereign in an interdependent world? What models of emancipation nurture and promote poetics, ethics and a politics of nonviolence? What is the place of the histories of suffering of other communities around the world in black French communities’ endeavor to imagine and build a culture of human solidarity? What does it mean when specters and stories of the past converge with specters and stories of the future, twenty two years after the passing into law in France of La Loi Taubira recognizing slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity? Resisting systemic racism in mainland France and the French Overseas Departments is not new, but what has changed with the passing of the Taubira law was that resistance became normalized and institutionalized. This watershed moment in recent history and memory studies opened a space for reaffirming the connectedness of human struggles for freedom and justice and for renewal of efforts to continue to imagine models of community building and human solidarity beyond dehumanizing colonial models.

Safoi Babana-Hampton, Director