Dr Belinda Jack has worked in the field of Francophone Studies since her undergraduate days. Her first book, 'Negritude and literary Criticism' (1996) was based on her Oxford DPhil. thesis and remains in print. She is currently involved with a project translating Maboula Soumahoro's Le triangle l’hexagone which will be published in English as Black is the Journey, Africana the Name later this year.
In this highly original book, Maboula Soumahoro explores the cultural and political vastness of the Black Atlantic, where Africa, Europe and the Americas were tied together by the brutal realities of the slave trade and colonialism. Each of these spaces has its own way of reading the black body and the black experience, and its own modes of visibility, invisibility, silence and amplification of black life.
Maboula Soumahoro brings historical, intellectual, artistic, political and personal archives from the three continents into conversation. By weaving together her personal history with that of France and its abiding myth of color-blindness, she highlights the banality and persistence of structural racism in France today and shows that freedom will be found in the journey and movement between the sites of the Atlantic triangle. Africana is the name of that freedom.
