CSGGE Lunch Series: Felisa Reynolds

Thank you for your interest in the lunch series on "Gender Equity in an Inequitable Era".  On Thursday, February 11th we will hear from Felisa Reynolds, Associate Professor in Department of French and Italian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her talk, "Maryse Condé: Gender, and the Racial Logic of Francophone Classification " will be in-person and also offered virtually through Zoom.  Lunch will be provided for in-person attendees. 

This presentation draws from Dr. Reynolds' book project French or Francophone Literature: The Legacy of the Manifesto for a World Literature (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming), which examines why the distinction between French and Francophone literature remains stubbornly intact twenty years after the publication of the manifest Pour une littérature-monde (“For a World Literature in French”), and what that persistence reveals about the racial logic organizing literary consecration in France. The chapter on Maryse Condé, which this presentation examines in detail, focuses on the reception of her work within the French literary field and argues that her decades-long exclusion from the Nobel Prize in Literature and from the highest echelons of French literary recognition was not incidental but structural, organized by the intersection of race and gender in ways that the field has never been asked to name, let alone justify. 

This series is co-sponsored by the LAS Office of Inclusive Excellence.