In parallel with the "Baldwin's Echoes" event, proposed by the Jazzdor Festival around the work of James Baldwin, a course on his work will be offered to students of the licence de lettres modernes of the University of Strasbourg: "Who and What is Negro? African Presences in Western Literature and Arts.
A first musical meeting and exchange with the artists of "Baldwin en transit" is proposed to students on Tuesday 19 October from 12 to 2 pm, at the Portique Library, Esplanade campus. Then, from November 2021 to April 2022, a workshop of reflection and practice will be conducted at the university around Baldwin's work.
This course will study the representations of the black world in Western literature and painting, from antiquity to the present day. It will focus on the major representations of a figure that has remained minor in literary and pictorial works, and will pursue the ramifications through the Middle Ages, the modern era, and the contemporary era. The course will also explore the role of black writers and artists themselves, in the shifts of this history. The critical approach will therefore be that of cultural studies, as initiated or extended in this field by Alain Locke ("Who and What is Negro?"), Stuart Hall, Simon Gikandi; this approach will also be contrasted with James Baldwin's posthumous essay and the film made from it by the Haitian director Raoul Peck ("I Am Not Your Negro", 2018)
The course will be associated with the Jazdor festival and the "Baldwin in transit" project, supported by the University of Strasbourg's "service d'action culturelle", with a screening-debate of the film "I Am Not Your Negro" on Sunday 7 November at 11am (Star cinema, Strasbourg) and a concert ("Baldwin in transit") the same day at 5pm : to give voice to the untouched insurrectionary power of the words of writer James Baldwin, saxophonist and composer Stéphane Payen had the idea of inviting three eminent artists from the Afro-American diaspora based in France to dialogue "in the present" with a selection of extracts from his texts. Integrating the diversity of their voices with the complex forms and grooves of a resolutely modern jazz, this project lays bare the thousand variations of a "black conscience" at work !
References :
- Images du Noir dans la littérature occidentale, du Moyen Age à la conquête coloniale - de la conquête à nos jours, Notre Librairie, n°90 & 91, 1988.
- Mangeon, Anthony (dir.), Harlem Heritage, mémoire et renaissance. Paris, Riveneuve Editions, 2008.
- David Bindman et Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Image of the Black in Western Arts, 5 volumes, Harvard University Press, 2010-2014.
- Ladislas Bugner, Hugh Honour (eds). L’image du Noir dans les arts, collection de la Fondation Ménil, 1979-1989.
- Stromberg, Fredrick. Images noires. La représentation des noirs dans la bande-dessinée mondiale. Paris, PLC, 2010.
- Soutif, Daniel. Le siècle du jazz : art, cinéma, musique et photographie, de Picasso à Basquiat, Paris, ESFP, 2009.
- Le Modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse, Paris, Musée d'Orsay / Flammarion, 2019.
