“Tales From the Hold 3: Shadows Being Identified”

A Faculty Scholar Resident talk by Fabienne Kanor, Marian Trygve Freed Early Career Professor / Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies.

"When not forgotten by history, when not dissolved by the sea, when not strewn by the wind, the « revenants » return". My experimental documentary series project Tales From the Hold poses and holds this question: What remains of the Africans swallowed up in the belly of the Atlantic Sea, and in the nothingness of the colonial plantations? How can I find their traces through time and space? How to rescue them from oblivion and bring them back to us? As I began filming the third episode of my collection, titled “The Last Slave Ship”, in Benin, West Africa, I take a break to present my current work and look back to the genesis of my project.