{"id":60900,"date":"2021-10-18T20:56:58","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T20:56:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/villa-albertine.org\/magazine\/maboula-soumahoro-putting-atlantic-atlanta\/"},"modified":"2023-08-23T07:53:24","modified_gmt":"2023-08-23T07:53:24","slug":"maboula-soumahoro-putting-atlantic-atlanta","status":"publish","type":"app_magazine_article","link":"https:\/\/villa-albertine.org\/va\/magazine\/maboula-soumahoro-putting-atlantic-atlanta\/","title":{"rendered":"Maboula Soumahoro: Putting the \u201cAtlantic\u201d in \u201cAtlanta\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maboula Soumahoro is a lecturer at the University of Tours, specializing in American and African-American studies and the Black\/African diaspora. Her visit to Atlanta as part of a residency with Villa Albertine is not her first visit to the United States, but is still a discovery for the author of Black is the Journey, Africana the Name,\u00a0<\/em>soon to be published. This immersion in the capital of Georgia, in the southern United States, brings Soumahoro back to a subject that has occupied her since her first thesis work: how to give an account of a history, of realities that are expressed first and foremost outside of academic language?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In your latest essay, Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name<\/em> (to be published shortly), you suggest the development of an imaginary Atlantic, a conception of this ocean that is common to Europe, America, and Africa as a space in its own right. The name of Atlanta, GA, clearly resonates with this notion. Before taking up your residency there, what does it represent in your own imagination?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Atlanta is a city that is completely foreign to me. I only spent four days there five years ago when I was invited to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) conference. I obviously knew about the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and I was able to visit Spelmann College and Morehouse College, which are mythical places for me. I visited the predominantly Black part of the city too, and the church where Martin Luther King was a minister. In my mind, Atlanta epitomizes that history, which I\u2019ve studied, but I don\u2019t know it as intimately as I know New York.<\/p>\n

As for the name of the city and its meaning, I have to confess that it was Pascale Beyaert, the former cultural attach\u00e9 there, who drew my attention to the \u201cAtlantic\u201d in Atlanta. This Atlanta-Atlantic association is still very new to me. I am familiar with the Atlantic, the Caribbean, Central and Latin America, but I entered the United States through New York, as did European immigrants who came here by way of Ellis Island. In my original idea of Atlanta and of the southern United States, I didn\u2019t make the connection.<\/p>\n

There was a time, though, when I was particularly interested in the history and culture of the Gullah (or Geechee) people, African Americans from the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia. As a student, I read a lot about that community and the descendants of slaves on the Georgia plantations, whose isolation led them to invent a Creole language\u2014not the African American dialect, but more like what you might find in the West Indies. I discovered the history of the Gullah through Julie Dash\u2019s film, Daughter of the Dust,<\/em> and through some of my reading. I dreamed of visiting them\u2014not so much by going to the Sea Islands, from where they were driven out by real-estate development\u2014but to the coasts where they migrated. I\u2019m delighted to be able to get away for three months to immerse myself in that reality.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s talk about the topic of language and translation. In Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name<\/em>, you write about your relationship with your mother\u2019s language, Dioula, which she didn\u2019t teach you. Will this residency be an opportunity for you to explore that subject in greater depth? <\/strong><\/p>\n

The entire project revolves around the issue of translation, but in a wider sense\u2014translation beyond language, if you will. I have my own obsessions, beginning with my relationship to my mother\u2019s language and the loss of a degree of closeness that can never be recovered. I decided to learn Dioula and Bambara, but I won\u2019t have learned them from my mother, and nothing will ever make up for that. So I\u2019m interested in the notion of translation as transformation, circulation, a way of finding equivalences, between two different places. The result will probably be a performance or a multimedia installation, which will allow me to use different types of language and expression.<\/p>\n

Another private example: during my studies, I acquired what you might call \u201cacademic\u201d language, which is rather restrictive in use and elitist, and often fails to reach ordinary people. But my personal path has been an upwardly mobile one, and I\u2019ve always wondered how I could share my knowledge, my travels, everything I\u2019ve accumulated, with people who are not trained in academic language. This question has obsessed me since my dissertation on the Nation of Islam and the Rastafarian movements, which interested me because I listened to a lot of rap and reggae. So why was it that, as soon as I started writing my dissertation, I immediately cut myself off from those communities, from the possibility for them to access my writing? What is this language which, at a given moment, sets us apart? And above all, does this language really tell us more than a piece of music? I don\u2019t think so. And what I want to do today is raise awareness of that.<\/p>\n

In what way? What can a performance or installation achieve that a social sciences book cannot?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what this project will lead to, but I know there will be music, videos, interviews\u2026 It\u2019s also a way for me to bring together all my different worlds, to break down the barriers between them. I was really inspired by Omar Berrada, a Moroccan-born researcher who teaches in New York, whose performance I saw at Lafayette Anticipations, the Galeries Lafayettes Foundation for Contemporary Arts. I believe it was in 2018 or 2019 when he gave a performance-lecture looking back on his personal story from Morocco to France while also sharing some of his scientific knowledge. I particularly remember what he said about his grandmother or great-grandmother, who had arrived in the Maghreb from sub-Saharan Africa and whose accent made it hard for her to pronounce certain Arabic words. He used the trace of her otherness as an audio starting point for an exploration and a projection of images from his personal archives interspersed with ethnographic films, texts, music, PowerPoint presentations, etc.<\/p>\n

It was like a revelation\u2014he gave a fascinating presentation and showed it could be done differently, using other tools. I\u2019d started breaking away from the academic rules by using the first person singular in Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name<\/em>. But I soon realized that using \u201cI,\u201d which I\u2019d thought was very radical at first, was nowhere near good enough. By going further, I\u2019ll be able to better bring together the different aspects of my life and experiences.<\/p>\n

But everything must still be defined; it\u2019s really a sort of coming-out. I grew up poor in the projects; when I graduated and moved up the social ladder, there wasn\u2019t much room, in the circles I started to move in, for the person I am deep down. As I get older, I want to be all those things at once\u2014time will tell how that works out.<\/p>\n

Is it also a way of getting around the resistance you encountered at university in France when you wanted to explore Black Studies? Haven\u2019t things changed since your dissertation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s an interesting question, and the answer is necessarily ambivalent. There has been some progress, of course, but no profound structural changes yet. In my view, real progress will inevitably involve the inclusion of other bodies in universities\u2014especially Black bodies. It\u2019s a subject that is increasingly debated, but sometimes (often) by white experts only. And that won\u2019t solve the problem because you can\u2019t dissociate the subject from the people.<\/p>\n

From a more personal perspective, the United States is so far ahead both academically and artistically that I always really enjoy going there, where you can go so much further as a result. Using \u201cI\u201d the way I did or writing a dissertation on the Nation of Islam and the Rastas might seem very avant-garde or radical in France. But in the US, I move in circles where that\u2019s normal\u2014almost conventional even, and sometimes it does you good to feel you\u2019re doing conventional research and not have to justify yourself. Above all, it allows you to dream, to step outside the strictly political or confrontational, and therefore to work with a certain intellectual comfort, to be able to think without having to defend yourself, justify yourself or seek legitimacy.<\/p>\n

But do you think that inevitably entails a form of insularity <\/strong>in terms of teaching, and therefore thinking? Should the possibility of scientific objectivity be completely sacrificed to the prevalence of the necessarily situated subject? <\/strong><\/p>\n

What the HBCUs make possible\u2014and even the universities and intellectual enclaves that would be described in France as \u201ccommunitarian\u201d\u2014is a certain comfort. I mean that in the HBCUs, we don\u2019t just repeat \u201cWe are African American, we are African American, we are African American.\u201d You can train in any discipline you like, but there is always an understanding of the prevailing hostility\u2014of what I have called the \u201cracial load.\u201d Those places were created to take care of people, and I\u2019d like to specify (as there is often a misconception in France) that whites are not excluded from the HBCUs, either as students or professors. So the real question is, why are there so few?<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to draw a parallel with the women\u2019s universities that were opened at a time when women were excluded from university. Today, those universities, like Barnard College at Columbia, which I know very well, are no longer women-only\u2026 but they are still places that address the problem of sexism in universities and allow women to develop leadership skills that would have been harder for them to acquire at a more traditional university. That in no way prevents men from going to Barnard! In France, we need to realize the importance of such places, where minorities are in great number and find a certain comfort while remaining open and keeping the discussion going with different people.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, when you\u2019re in an American context, do you feel like you bring something French with you? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course, because I\u2019m not just a Black woman in the United States, I\u2019m also French. And I\u2019m not an African from the continent or from the Caribbean either. I\u2019m a Parisian. And that obviously impacts my relationship to society. The biggest difference I feel with my African American colleagues is that I\u2019m used to interacting outside my community. I have no problem moving in Black, white, Asian, Latino, and Native circles\u2026 Maybe I can navigate in those different spheres more easily because I\u2019m not burdened by the local or national history. That isn\u2019t me. I think it\u2019s rather like African Americans who come to Paris and are accepted in circles they wouldn\u2019t mix in back in the States because of the strong tensions there. When I\u2019m in the States I can go wherever I like, see any exhibition I like. Sometimes, when you\u2019re a foreigner who is not disliked, there are advantages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":58466,"menu_order":0,"template":"","app_discipline":[],"app_city_tax":[221],"app_magazine_category":[248],"class_list":["post-60900","app_magazine_article","type-app_magazine_article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","app_city_tax-atl","app_magazine_category-portraits"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMaboula Soumahoro: Putting the \u201cAtlantic\u201d in \u201cAtlanta\u201d - Villa Albertine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/villa-albertine.org\/va\/magazine\/maboula-soumahoro-putting-atlantic-atlanta\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Maboula Soumahoro: Putting the \u201cAtlantic\u201d in \u201cAtlanta\u201d - Villa Albertine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Maboula Soumahoro is a lecturer at the University of Tours, specializing in American and African-American studies and the Black\/African diaspora. 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