NCID-1065
Frieda Ekotto
Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Comparative Literature, and Francophone Studies, Professor of French, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 Afroamerican and African Studies and Comparative Literature (University of Minnesota)
About
Frieda Ekotto, Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Ford Foundation seed grant for research and collaborative work with institutions of higher learning in Africa and most recently a recipient of Nicolàs Guillén Award for the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2014) and the Benezet Award from the Colorado College Alumni Association Board (2015) as well as a recipient of an Honorary Degree from Colorado College (2017).As an intellectual historian and philosopher with areas of expertise in 20th and 21st-century Anglophone and Francophone literature and in the cinema of West Africa and its diaspora, she concentrates on contemporary issues of law, race and LGBTI issues. Her primary research to date has focused on how law serves to repress and mask the pain of disenfranchised subjects; her intention in this work is to trace what cannot be said in order to address and expose suffering from a variety of angles and cultural intersections and reassess the position and agency of the dispossessed.She is the producer of the documentary Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters (2017) (Link to Trailer: https://vimeo.com/215521141). She is the author of 12 books in print. The most recent one is editor of Nimrod: Selected Writings (University of Michigan Press, 2017). The first English translations of key essays, stories, and poems by the Chadian author Nimrod. She has also lectured throughout the United Sta,EST Algeria, Australia, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Canada, England, France, Ghana, India, Ivory Coast, Peru, Malaysia, Mali, Malta, Morocco, Nigeria, Tunisia, South Africa, and Singapore, among other countries.
Current Work
Archiving Cultural Production by Sub-Saharan Women in AfricaI am working to document the cultural production by African women through visual art. I am hoping to create part of the archive for women in Africa. I am an African scholar who has inspired others from underrepresented backgrounds to write themselves into history, to document the often untold stories in the decolonized archive.The immense cultural and creative contributions of African women have remained underrepresented and unaccounted for: invisible. Additionally, African women increasingly produce artistic work across different cultural spheres, living and travelling between Africa and elsewhere. These women have, and continue to, redefine artistic creations. This project will illuminate these contributions and the highly complicated nature of African cultural production in a contemporary world, compelling us to diversify knowledge and appreciate the work of women on and beyond the African continent.The three feature-length films will serve as an unprecedented visual archive with stories that focus on: 1) African women and the production of culture and art, 2) vibrancy of silence on LGBTQ African women, and 3) cultural legacies of Queen mothers in Africa.The first film features six women and their roles, across three generations, as historians, philosophers, curators, writers, visual artists and musicians. It resonates with forgotten and untold stories of women's participation during colonial times, feminism, and a new politics of sexuality and gender for LGBTQ individuals.The first film Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters was premiere at the University of Michigan in October 2017. The film has been screened in Brussels, China, France, Canada, Ghana, Germany, Mali, Mexico and India. More plans are underway to continue outreach and engagement, as well as pre-production of the next two films.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Race, Gender and Sexuality in Sub-Saharan Africa