The University of Iowa’s Caribbean, Diaspora, and Atlantic Studies Program is pleased to announce

Another Sea to Cross: A Performance Talk by Fabienne Kanor

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

5:00-7:00 P

University Capitol Centre, 2520 D

In her performance talk, with images shot in 2009, Fabienne Kanor weaves together an imaginary dialogue between her father and herself. He’s an immigrant who experienced fear and self-denial, but also showed courage, ingenuity, and dignity. He put her in a school in France where she was a foreigner told to “return to her homeland.”  This is the history that she recounts while she films and interviews her father who reflects on his 1965 arrival in France. It is this story that transports her still, and made her a writer and a filmmaker.

Three displacements are evoked during her talk: the BUMIDOM migrations of French Caribbean people to France in the 1960s, modern migrations of Africans who seek asylum in Europe, and the Middle Passage.

Fabienne Kanor is a novelist, filmmaker, and journalist, born in Orléans of French parents from Martinique. She is the author of five novels, including Faire L’aventure [Live Through the Adventure] which was awarded the prestigious Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout Monde in 2014. Sections of her novel Humus (RFO Literary Award, 2006) were staged in France, Cameroon, Guadeloupe, and New Orleans. Kanor is also the director of eleven documentaries and short fiction films including Un caillou et des hommes [Of Rocks and Men] (2014); Retour au Cahier [Genesis of the Notebook] (2014); Notre Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Our Notebook of a Return to the Native Land],  (2013); Maris de nuit [Night Husbands] (2010), Des pieds, mon pied [Some Feet, My Foot] (2009). As a journalist, she has directed several radio and TV programs for France 3, France 5, Radio France Internationale between 1998 and 2003. She is also the author of two plays including La Traversée aux disparus (2014).

In Fall 2011, she was a writer in residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.

Fabienne Kanor’s audaciously crafted literary work and cinematic aesthetics distinctively problematize migrations, identities, gender, entangled sexualities, and race.

The Caribbean, Diaspora, and Atlantic Studies Program within International Programs, and The “Circulating Cultures” Working Group at The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies sponsor this event.

For more information, you may contact Anny Dominique Curtius, Co-Director of the Caribbean, Diaspora, and Atlantic Studies Program and Director of “Circulating Cultures” at anny-curtius@uiowa.edu