Kaiama L. Glover (KLG): In our last two conversations, we talked about digital ventures in pedagogy, as well as about the practice of building a digital world in alignment with the Black feminist ethics of generosity, citation, refusal, and care. Now we’ll look in a slightly different but related direction and think about how other media contexts, particularly old media—remember those, like TV and newspapers?—and alternative media, like photography and film, can also provide spaces of public intellectual engagement.

We’ll start with the question everyone should know is coming by now, which is your thoughts on this frame: the matter of silence, power, narrative, and historical knowledge, and then, the particularly disordering force of women who refuse those silences that, historically, have been posed by people in power.

Maboula Soumahoro (MS): I have to say that it was refreshing to go back to [Michel-Rolph] Trouillot and Silencing the Past, which I hadn’t read in years. It was refreshing, but it was also, perhaps, a little disheartening, because it’s been twenty-five years. One of the questions could be, “What hasn’t the world gotten from this beautiful writing, and these deep, deep analyses that were provided to us twenty-five years ago, and these reflections and analyses that go back to the Second World War, to the nineteenth-century United States, to the Caribbean, and the plantation economy, to slavery, and to all those periods of time, back to ancient Greece?” That’s what is disheartening.

But what I do want to reflect on today is the way power operates through silence and invisibility. What I mean, and what we all mean by that, in this Western world—because this is our locale—is that the reflection and the construction of the past, this official reconstruction of the past that becomes the history of all the nations we are grounded in, within the Atlantic world, in particular, they are, of course, constructions and have little to do with truth and reality.

We need to keep in mind the complication of our approach to the past and to what Trouillot calls “pastness.” What we need to understand is that, in those narratives that do not have to be fictions, the fundamental question is the purpose of those narratives and the production of those narratives and the circulation of those narratives. Who is in charge of that narration of things past, and what is the current use of the past and of this constructed, even construed, past for the present? How can I say it? This back and forth between the meaning of the present and the past and the relation that ties both. There can only be a past because there is a present, and a present because there is a past, and what we are trying to envision is the future based on our understanding of the present in relation to our understanding of the past. The three tenses are to be taken into account.

How does power unfold in this production, circulation, understanding, and even memory? And all of that meaning in the control of the narration of this past? These questions are of the highest importance. And when it comes to the role to be played by women—and the role played by Black women in particular—we could, in this Western framework, think of men and women beyond gender studies as the ultimate embodiment of difference: difference in the bodies. We could talk about the differences and the hierarchies along ethnic lines, along religious lines, along racial lines, along social lines. But when it comes to this Western configuration of men and women—two bodies that are understood as different, and two shapes of bodies, because they’re understood as different—they need to be placed within a hierarchy within which man is on top and woman is at the bottom.

This is an interesting way to organize things, precisely when we remember that this rigid framework is resting only on this men/women dichotomy, that it erases any third gender, any third body. When we pay more attention today to trans identities, and when we pay more attention today to Black women’s identities, we are really talking about bodies, racialized bodies, gendered bodies that come to disrupt this attempt to organize, in such a rigid matter, this Western world. So, of course, when thinking about the Black feminist tradition, we are talking about the ultimate possibility of challenge, because the woman’s body was understood in this Western world as the opposite of the empowered body that is the male body. And the Black woman’s body was constructed in this Western world as the total opposite of the white body, male or female.

We are both lucky and unlucky enough to be at the vanguard. That’s the vanguard in action. That’s the vanguard anchored in the body. That’s the vanguard that has manifested itself intellectually and politically and religiously, all those forms, because that is embodiment. Black women bodies disrupt, and trans women bodies disrupt as well, and they’re really the marker of hierarchies. This is where these hierarchies can be located. So when we think about silence, power, and history, we are really talking about these erasures, these moments of not being taken into account, these marginalizations that are systematic in this part of the world that is called the West.

KLG: Merci, Maboula. Thank you. I know you think a lot about embodiment, materiality, and bodies, and when we are in the context of social media and disembodied space, I think these become even more crucial questions. But let me turn to you, Mame-Fatou.

Mame-Fatou Niang (MFN): I want to start by acknowledging this moment and what it means for me to be in this space to discuss this hashtag, #UnsilencedPast, with my colleague and big sister, Maboula Soumahoro. Maboula is only three years older than I am, but she’s one of the reasons that I do what I do. I was engaged in what we call in French the voie royale [proper path], in the whitest of studies, and in the mid-2000s—this is around the time of the 2005 fall riots. I didn’t know Maboula personally, but in this very white state of French epistemology, her singular voice and her presence became a fixture in national and public debates around race and identity. I was aware of the vitriol being shown toward her, but her relentless engagement, and that evidence that she carried around like, “l’heure de la récré a sonné!” [“playtime is over!”], it was something that really opened something in me. It freed me, liberated the master’s student that I was at the time.

And even when I saw Maboula being publicly attacked, I also saw what Saidiya Hartman called “the moment of tenderness”—moments pointing to the fact that a future is possible. For me, that future was in Black studies, a field that I was repeatedly told to not engage with. I address myself to become my subject of study, and I was going to engage with the gazes surrounding my body as a Black woman in the West, engage with the noisy silences that have haunted me, those white noises that would not leave my head from the minute I finally allowed myself to hear them. Maboula has been central to many of my projects, from the documentary Mariannes Noires to the photo series coproduced with Pittsburgh visual artist Njaimeh Njie, on Black Islam in Paris. She’s a sister. She’s a cheerleader, and she has the best laugh, and I just wanted to start with that.

Now, reflecting on the framing of the series through the lens of [Maryse] Condé and the disorder brought by Black woman voices, and through Trouillot’s study of history, power, and silence, I will briefly talk about two elements that have been the cornerstone of my work for the past decade now: companionship and pleasure. These are two politics that I actively engage with in my teaching and in each of my projects. First, companionship: To be Black within the European modernist project is to live on the fringe of official narrative. It is to exist in the dead angles and silences. But it also means that we are never alone. Once we realize that silence is our companion, we are never alone. We are constantly surrounded by the silences of history. And my body of work is what I call a “sonarcheology” of sounds and silences, both in writings and in our lived environment. I investigate the means that Black people have developed to domesticate, to harness those silences.

For example, this is what we’re doing right now when we push against the rhetoric of surprise around the current climate. While many seem lost or struck by the novelty of the event, we have lived with the silences, and through this companionship we’ve acquired a deeper sense of the present. And this brings me to my second point, which is about the politics of pleasure. Even when writing from a place of rage, of despair, of mourning, I try as much as possible to ground it, to root it in pleasure. And that contrasts so much with what I see in front of me, in the eyes of my detractors—something that I long thought to be power but that actually revealed itself to be sheer fear: what [James] Baldwin was saying, sheer terror. Once you realize that grounding yourself in pleasure is something that you actually carry with you, the balance of power internally shifts in your head. And that’s what has been carrying me for the past ten years.

And it’s true, at a global level, that systemic racism is smothering our communities, taking our sisters’ lives, crushing our brothers’ hopes and lives, but this politics of pleasure is really an affirmation that I carry with me, an affirmation of self, but also a refusal to be erased, to be silenced.

KLG: I knew this conversation would be a good one. And especially, I love where we have gotten words that are resonating: study, and this notion of companionship as being part of the practice of study, as part of the politics of studying in the way that we do. I would have framed it as lineage, finding oneself in the lineage and identifying the door that is Maboula’s presence. So, going back to your point, Maboula, about the body, her material, physical, actual visible presence. How did that door open for you, Mame-Fatou, as a scholar?

And from there, I have a lot of questions. I want to think about the continuum between academia and activism, which I know is something that has been a double-edged sword for both of you—the extent to which, by doing activist work, there are ways in which your academic contributions are obscured, or put into question, or undermined even. And yet, and still, you are both persistent in engaging in these other media spaces: newspapers, television, etcetera. I wonder if you can talk to us about how your public interventions are informed by your training as scholars.

MS: I think that what could be interesting today for our U.S.-based or, at least, Atlantic-based or outside-of-France audience is to understand the context of France, in which Black studies, Africana studies, Pan-African studies is not an academic field. And it’s important to remember that fact, because even though things are quite difficult in the States as well, at least there is an institutional presence of specific topics. We are not there yet in France.

But even though these departments, programs, and initiatives exist in the United States today, we also need to remember how they came into being and when they came into being. It takes us back to the civil rights movement and the social mobilization of the time period. I am really focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. We’re not going to get into the details of the long civil rights movement. We are all aware of the long history of the civil rights movement, but we’re really talking about departments and programs that emerged in the late 1960s and on.

I am insisting on these facts because in France, we are in the late 1960s and 1970s. That is to say, academics who perhaps at first really thought of themselves as scholars and professors are perceived and presented as activists. But, to talk about my personal experience, I never thought of myself as an activist, and to this day, I don’t present myself as an activist. But what I know and what I have noticed within the public sphere, and also within academia, is that I am systematically presented as an activist. I feel ambivalent about this term because, on the one hand, of course, I understand my activism, but on the other, my activism is really about a general interest in social justice, and social justice involving academia—meaning more topics, a greater diversity of what is taught and what is circulated, what is valued, what is recognized as scientific scholarly knowledge within academia. I understand the stakes. I understand what is silenced, what is erased, what is never passed down—that is to say, what is never taught and what is systematically left out of the general narrative, national, scholarly, political, all those things.

So, I understand that. But I also want to highlight the fact that I don’t belong to any organization, that I support many causes, that I can sign petitions, and that I can march a little, but that’s not my job. I find it very interesting that people want to place me in the category that is, based on reality, simply not mine. What it reveals is the stakes. What it reveals is what is supposed to be invisible, and what is invisible is power. So everything that is normal, everything that is acceptable, everything that is respectable, everything that is legitimate, is supposed to be invisible. I enter this space and those spaces as highly invisible, so what do I disrupt? What do I make visible, through my body, through this reading of my body, through the reading of my scholarship, and through the reading of my alleged activism? I’m the one who is in the struggle, in the fight. What I think could be more interesting is to look at what remains invisible, and what also reveals the ongoing struggle and fight, even for maintaining the status quo.

There is an active activism. There is an active activism that operates, again—I think we’re going to say it a few times within this discussion—through silence and normativity, and that is the embodiment of power. So, how does my body enter those spaces? My body, because it becomes so visible, actually highlights what has been made invisible, and what is more active, and what has much more power than I have—much more, so much more. What I disrupt might cause a certain level, but a minimal level, of discomfort. It becomes uncomfortable for people. But I think my personal discomfort is much greater, and the collective discomfort is much greater.

MFN: Thank you, Maboula, for giving this very specific context for talking about race and racism in France and in French academia. It’s always funny to me when we are told to keep militancy or activism out of our world as scholars, and how academia is about scientific objectivity, when academia has been and is still a breeding ground for active militancy aimed at upholding or reproducing hegemonic discourses. Academic discourse is activism. To me, the question is not whether activism is seen with a bad eye in our world. It’s more a question of whose activism is seen under a keen light. Understanding that perspective—that holding the mirror up to my interlocutor, whether it’s at MLA, NEMLA, at my professional organizations’ meetings, or even on TV—has been liberating. I don’t have to justify myself.

But as a scholar who straddles France and the United States, I understand the nuance that the word activist can have. I still grapple with the translation of “scholar-activist.” In the United States, I am a scholar-activist, and I can present myself as such. But in France, because “activist” and “militant” are such loaded words—used as Maboula said, to disqualify a scholar, especially if the scholar is a woman, or God forbid, a Black person—I’m really struggling. Ten years later, I’m still struggling with that term.

As far as my scholarship and my public interventions, whether through films, documentaries, or just being on TV or writing articles, I see them as part of the same project. I had that issue with Mariannes Noires, where people were asking me, “Is it scholarship? Is it a fun project with a student?”—I made the film with a nineteen-year-old student. People ask, “Should it count for your tenure dossier? Is it art? Is it scholarship?” I don’t see that boundary. For me, my art is scholarship. It’s militancy. It’s born out of and nourishes what I write. For example, chapter five of my latest book was an analysis of Mariannes Noires.

To reflect on that idea—what you talked about, Kaiama—of the media as a space of pedagogical intervention outside the classroom, or outside the university community, I think of our use of the term intervention in the clinical sense of actively working, intervening on behalf of a sick relative, in this case, the French body. For my current book project, Reformulation of Blackness in Twenty-First-Century France, I am working on actually extracting the diseases in that French body through media installations. There is a chapter titled Les Trois Grâces de l’anti-noirité française: innocence, ignorance, arrogance—the three graces of anti-Blackness in France: innocence, ignorance, and arrogance—where I analyze French attitudes toward anti-racism. In the French context of memory, identity, and the writing of history, I define innocence as the state of being left in the dark by institutions. It’s the childish state in which the L’Education Nationale, the French public system, keeps the children innocent through public education and a plethora of cultural institutions like museums, etcetera, and reinforces that mythical republican narrative of a Frenchness that is one and singular and that cannot be hyphenated. Ignorance, in the French context, is the willful and active process of maintaining that innocence once you realize that the narrative is a myth. And it takes an active, strong, and determined will to remain ignorant. I argue that ignorance is not passive. It is never passed down collectively, nor is it inherited. It is cultivated at an individual level, and it has to be cherished, watered like a plant and groomed in order to bloom. And the last concept is arrogance. Arrogance is defined as the need to not need to know—the arrogance of not needing to know—the being so full of the universalist narrative that you cannot envision that it could be flawed. That’s the same arrogance that drives people to constantly question me or Maboula’s intelligence or credentials, when we ask them to shut up and listen, and listen not to what is being said, but listen to what is left out, what is forgotten, who is forgotten, why, when, and what do these silences—just like Maboula said—say about inequalities of power?

I often come back to Trouillot’s notion of the unthinkable, with this difficulty for France to come to terms with history—not as they wanted it to have happened, but how it actually happened—for example, the impossibility of thinking about the Haitian Revolution. This is what we have to push against, this discourse around, “Oh, race and racism, we’re past that. We have that universal magic pill that places us light-years ahead of the United States.” And Black French women’s voices complicate those ultra-localized—and this is at the heart of Maboula’s book—those very linear, hexagonalized understandings of how time and space intersect.1 I am thinking here about Audrey Célestine’s Une Famille Française, or A French Family, an autobiographical account of how her own family’s circulation between Martinique, Algeria, and northern France subverts the simplistic view of how Frenchness is constructed and functions. Also thinking of the French historian Olivette Otele’s book Afro-Europeans: An Untold History. When it was promoted on Twitter, somebody smartly commented that the book looked really nice, but it was not about the story being untold—it’s more that it was a nonevent. There was no story of Afro-Europeans. So, that arrogance of not even wanting to listen is astounding.

It is very interesting when we look at the way we minorities in France address this space, and—this is an image that I use a lot, holding the mirror—we’ve always been thought of as this sick abnormal body, and now we allow ourselves to be the doctors being au chevet de la France [at France’s bedside]. It’s like, these are the three diseases that I was able to see in my patient today, my beautiful France.

KLG: This is about taking seriously the idea of a socio-diagnostic to address what is in fact a pathology—one that can, with certain efforts, be routed out. It goes back to Maboula’s ambivalence between despair and optimism, which, one might argue, is the perspective of any doctor faced with a critically ill patient to some extent.

I had the opportunity, with my colleague Tami Navarro at Barnard College, to interview the poet and the performance artist Staceyann Chin. At one point in our conversation, we were talking about various media platforms, and she said, with an equal measure of weariness and resolution, “I’m not quite sure what the answer is. I just know that for as long as I can speak, for as long as I can talk to an audience, that I will be present in the conversation, and the way I can be present right now is by staying on social media.”

There was something she was communicating in her tone, and in her body language, about the resignation of who and where she had to be online to do the necessary work, and that this was a source of frustration for her. So I want to ask the two of you your thoughts on the obligation and the desire to do your work—to do your work that is intellectual, that is scholarly, that is in community in conversations like this—and yet your equally great compulsion to push back against existing media representations of Blackness with your own contestatory representations. How much do you have to speak to a crowd that is not your crowd? How much of that feels more burdensome than empowered?

I thought about this a lot, seeing you in these spaces on French television and realizing the extent to which oftentimes, even when you are offered space, how the silences work within that space. That is, how often you are cut short by presenters, or asked questions that are either non sequiturs or inappropriate, and how much negotiation and navigation of those forms of silencing you do. It’s a big question, but I am asking about the labor, and how that labor might interfere with some of the intellectual work that you’re doing.

MS: I think this labor is both burdensome and necessary. The scholarship that we want, the comfortable scholarship—like right now, we are having a comfortable conversation, and we are trying to think collectively—this other scholarship might be less comfortable, but it is still necessary, and still doable in practice, and the practice includes those media interventions. When we go to the mainstream media, we know exactly where we are going, and we know that this is a war—a symbolic war—because in our presence, our bodies, and not only our discourse, we become the impossible. We become the disqualified teacher or professor or PhD only when we teach certain things, or when we write our PhDs on certain topics, or when we publish articles on certain topics. If we were in agreement with the national narrative, we wouldn’t be. As Black women, we could be disqualified as teachers, but that disqualification would not unfold in the same manner.

This is what I mean: If we keep in mind that the PhD is simply the highest degree ever, that there’s nothing more than a PhD—there’s nothing people can say, in theory, in terms of the training Mame received and that I received. We are at the same level. So what is happening when, twelve years later, people are still calling on Twitter for people to read my PhD dissertation and perhaps reveal the truth and say, “She’s a fake doctor.” Or why, when I appear in The New York Times, which they read three times a day, which they love, which they revere, then all of the sudden, The New York Times is not what it used to be. This is what they say. So, when we go to the media, that space is not the only space. It works hand in hand with my teaching and my more scholarly, more traditional activities. But I don’t have the luxury. I don’t have the leisure to restrict myself to academia, because academia is too much of an ivory tower.

Right now, with what is happening in hexagonal France, it’s very important to make visible the connections within and without academia. When we are more comfortable, I will be more than happy to just teach, write, and simply do my work. But we’re not there yet. And so, I think that my media intervention, to a certain extent, might also be understood and approached as just as valuable as what I teach. It is a form of scholarship in practice. The theory is desirable, the loftiness, the abstraction, but we’re not there yet. I do not have the means, and I don’t understand how people think they have the means. We can’t. Our bodies still talk, and they speak very loudly, and it’s still something to be a Black woman in an amphitheater in a university in hexagonal France. It’s just a fact.

For me, the first step was for students, and staff, and colleagues to understand that I can be their colleague, and then through the media, to make all of France understand that I am somebody’s professor. I am somebody’s advisor. I am somebody’s colleague, and you’re going to deal with it. The paradox is that our training as scholars is also the training required for speaking in public, for articulating an argument, for mastering all these social codes, which makes us valuable media guests. So, to a certain extent, these audiences find themselves trapped, because we are products of France. We are the fruits of their education. We are like them. We simply, totally, deeply disagree on everything, but we speak the same language. We speak multiple languages, but one of them is common to theirs, and we are going to use that particular language to not simply converse but have them hear, and then they’ll listen, and then they’ll obey.

KLG: That’s an ambitious program, Maboula, that you have just outlined. I want to ask you, Mame-Fatou, to respond.

MFN: I second everything that Maboula has said, and I have to add that I’ve centered my work around the politics of companionship and pleasure because I have matured. I’m in my fourth decade on earth, but I used to work with a third force, which was the politics of trolling. I realized that we were being trolled in this project, like Maboula said—that we are the product of an extremely rigorous mold of the French society and French educational system. And even with all that, and even with all the hurdles—like my mom used to say, “If they ask you for fifteen points, go get twenty-five, because they will still find a way to steal five. But you know what, you’ll still have twenty and be on top”—we always had to do more than everybody else. And then with all that, our bodies will always talk before we even open our mouths. So, once I realized that we were being trolled, it was liberating for me, because I ended up trolling the system. And one of the ways I trolled the system was by not caring about the politics of representation, not anymore.

I have centered my work around one question, which is: How is it possible to be Black, a woman, and a human when the Western national fictions were not written with me and my body in mind? Actually, let me rephrase it: How is it possible to be Black, a woman, and a human when Western symphonies were composed with me as the counter model? In my work, I develop this idea of the close listen, which shows that silences can be just as eloquent as the noises of the roman national, the French national narrative. For example, in my movie, I asked the women this question around representation, “What do you think of the representation of Black women in French public spaces?” Seven women, all of them, had this moment of silence before they could come up with an answer. I remember being shocked the first time—it was with Maboula—and then the second day being the same, the third day the same, and I found myself chasing that moment of silence, and it came back the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh day.

And I put it all together. It’s a minute and thirty-two of silence, and that silence is deafening. It’s the silence of numbers. It’s the silence of ethnic statistics, of still being a subject of contention. It’s the silence of our absence. But the way I turned around that obligation of always having to be present while being absent is that I just decided to shy away from the concept of representation—of thinking about how am I seen, how people perceive me, what they think of me—in order to frame my inquiry, my scholarship, and my project around questions of dignity, life, and death. To that end, I have been chasing and capturing silences and sounds in nation and landscape.

To illustrate that, I will talk just briefly about one of my newest projects called “From the Most Beautiful City in the World to the Most Livable City in America: Black Invisibilities in Paris and Pittsburgh.” The project analyzes the impact of rapid urban changes in the Black communities of Paris and Pittsburgh, as well as the ways in which co-creation practices involving artists, researchers, and residents address these changes. The project has multiple components: one short movie of about three minutes that builds on Ayo Coly’s Postcolonial Hauntology, and the notion of postcolonial hauntology.

The protagonist is a little girl who visits la maison de France, the house of France, and she’s warmly welcomed; everybody shows her around. She’s given a tour of the place, and she’s introduced to the great lineage of Napoleon, of Charles de Gaulle. But every time she approaches the basement, the attic, or any of the closets in the house, she hears muffled sounds, like hums and sounds of daily activities—people cooking, laughing, crying, police sirens—and she sets out to investigate what lies behind those beautiful French artisan-made closets. What are literally the skeletons in France’s closet?

Another component is a sound installation called the Sounds of Silence, where I’ve juxtaposed digital sound archives of selected heavily gentrified areas in Paris and Pittsburgh with recent sound recordings of the same places, in 2019, 2020—church bells, Sunday markets, kids playing at a water park, and the hushed ambience of a newly installed yoga studio—and I analyze what the new sound instead of the silence says about the city.

By working with media of my choice—by choosing to publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal, or to write for Slate or for Elle magazine—I also liberate myself from the knowledge that it doesn’t matter. I could publish with Harvard University Press every day, and the vision of my body will not change. I will not allow that external burden to weigh me down so much that I can live an extra sixty years and not enjoy what I’m doing. I allow myself to follow my imagination, my creativity, and wander around, play with tools that are part of the mosaic that helps me tell the same story.

KLG: Yes. I framed the question around resignation, being resigned to inhabiting a body that constantly speaks before you have a chance to open your mouth. You’ve both flipped that on its head and proposed it as resolution, saying, “That’s the fact, but I have the choice to not care.” So many things are coming together. This reminds me of what Marlene Daut said in our first conversation, “There are options where you can simply walk out of the room and decide not to integrate this space.” And it makes me think about what Marisa Parham was saying: “Where can we find the pleasure and play in the work that we’re doing, even if on the other side of that is indignity and death.” You make that very plain.