Dr. Sabrina Parent on military revolt in colonial Senegal

A LUCAS seminar organised jointly with French

Dr. Sabrina Parent (Université Libre de Bruxelles), ‘From Senghor to Bouchareb, the living memory of Thiaroye’

Monday 24 October, 5pm, Michael Sadler Building LG15.

All welcome

In 1944, in Thiaroye, Senegal, the French colonial army severely repressed a rebellion organized by repatriated West African soldiers who had participated in the war effort and who demanded a stipend equivalent to that of white French soldiers. Over the past sixty years, African artists, such as L. S. Senghor, Fodeba Keita, Sembene Ousmane, B. B. Diop, Doumbi-Fakoly, R. Bouchareb, and C. F. Faye, have offered a series of representations of the massacre. We will discuss how Thiaroye remains an event that authors and filmmakers reinterpret, revisit and engage with from the perspective and vantage point of their own historical situation.

An associate professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Sabrina Parent is the author of two monographs (Poetics of the event, Garnier, 2011; Cultural Representations of Massacre, Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) and several articles mainly devoted to literary and artistic representations of historical events. Her current research interests focus on contemporary artistic productions of Belgian colonial past.