On Wednesday, February 19th, there will be a special screening of Chœurs Atlantiques | Tales from the Atlantic Beyond, a film directed by Safoi Babana Hampton. Professor Babana Hampton has expertise in French and Francophone Cultures and Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities. This new film is being screened as part of MSU’s events marking Black History Month.
MSU-ISP Global DEI, in collaboration with MSU Culinary and with the support of the US French-Chicago Consulate-Villa Albertine, MSU IDI, the African Studies Center, the History Department, and the Department of Romance and Classical Studies, is excited to present the pre-release screening of Chœurs Atlantiques | Tales from the Atlantic Beyond (movie trailer).
Logline:
Chœurs Atlantiques | Tales from the Atlantic Beyond is a poignant personal memory quest that begins at the Bay of Diamant, in Martinique, and carries us to three continents, to shine light on what it means to be Black today in a globally interconnected world, as seen through the eyes of Afrodescedant French Martinican artist Laurent Valère and in his transatlantic dialogs with the Black diaspora.
Funded by generous grants from the MSU HARP Program & the MSU Research Foundation, the film was selected for screening at the upcoming annual meeting of the International Council of Francophone Studies (CIEF), in South Africa, was invited by the FEMI Festival Régional Et International Du Cinéma De Guadeloupe and is currently in the film festival circuit.
Date: February 19, 2025
Time: 4:30 – 8:30 PM
Location: Kellogg Auditorium
To register: Eventbrite Registration (Seats are limited)
The MSU Choir will open the event with a gospel song.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with its director, Safoi Babana-Hampton, and a reception.
Join us in honoring Black History Month with Part 2 of Francophone film exploration of Black resistance through a historical and global lens.
Director’s Statement:
“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 converged on the need to ask ourselves what does it mean to be sovereign in an interdependent world, what models of emancipation nurture and promote a poetics, an 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 Over-seas Departments is not new, but what has changed with the passing of the Taubira law was that it 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.”
