Live stage performance by Jacques Martial, in English
Performance followed by a dialogue between Jacques Martial and Alex Gil
Event location: Miller Theatre, Broadway at 116th street
This event is free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., line forms at 5:30 p.m.
This year marks the centennial of the birth of Aimé Césaire, one of the greatest French-speaking writers of the 20th Century. Born in 1913 on a small island in what was then known as the French West Indies, Césaire published Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land) in 1939, at age 26. It would become a seminal text in the renaissance of black dignity and black pride throughout the world.
Jacques Martial is currently president of the Parc de la Villette, one of the largest public cultural venues in Paris, and is also a well-known theater, cinema, TV actor, and theater director. This performance is a production of Martial's Compagnie de la Comédie Noire in coproduction with l'Artchipel, Scène Nationale de Guadeloupe. Joining him in a dialogue after the performance is Alex Gil, a specialist of twentieth-century Caribbean literature and Digital Humanities at Columbia, and an expert on the works and legacy of Aimé Césaire.
Event co-presented by the Columbia Maison Française and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/NYPL. Partial support provided by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. and Air France
Comments