Ni Chaînes Ni Maîtres: Screening and Discussion

A special screening of Ni Chaînes Ni Maîtres (2024) organized by the Columbia Undergraduate Program in Paris and Dartmouth en France.

6:00 p.m. - Cocktail reception

7:00 p.m. - Screening

Speakers

Ary Gordien holds a PhD in anthropology from Université Paris Descartes and is a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His dissertation was about the imbrication of nationalism and ethnic and racial consciousness at play in the intricate self-identification processes in Guadeloupe. This implied not only interpreting people’s understanding of slavery and its current impact but also providing an anthropological analysis of the reproduction of racial prejudice and inequalities through time. As a postdoctoral fellow, he also investigated the Jamaican reparation commission and several anti-racist organizations in Seine-Saint-Denis, a disadvantaged and multiracial group of regions located in the outskirts of Paris. Based on a reanalysis of his master’s thesis on the French Caribbean gay scene in Paris, he is currently undertaking an ethnohistorical analysis of gay black (both West Indian and African) sociability in the 1990s and 2000s. He is also carrying out a field study of LGBT+ communities self-identifying as people of African descent or, more broadly, as non-white.

Frank Andre Guridy is the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. He is also Professor of History and the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia. He is an award-winning historian whose recent research focuses on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. His latest book is The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024). Guridy is also a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and the Caribbean.

Trica Keaton, PhD, is a professor and interdisciplinary social scientist at Dartmouth College. Her book publications include #You Know You're Black in France When...: The Fact of Everyday Antiblackness (MIT Press), Black France / France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (co-edited, with a Foreword by Christiane Taubira, Duke University Press), Black Europe and the African Diaspora (co-edited, University of Illinois Press), and Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion (Indiana University Press, with a Foreword by Manthia Diawara). Keaton has organized numerous conferences, film screenings, and events on Black Paris, Black France, and Black Europe, toward advancing the field of Black French & European Studies in the U.S. She has received several awards and fellowships, including the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the French Institute for Advanced Study (2024-2025). She has also founded and directs an award-winning study away program in Paris, France, entitled “Afro/Black Paris.”

Simon Moutaïrou is a French Beninese author and filmmaker. After a passionate career as a screenwriter (including Goliath and Boîte Noire, for which he was nominated for a César for Best Original Screenplay), he obtained an advance from the National Centre of Cinematography and Animated Pictures (CNC) in 2022 for Ni Chaînes Ni Maîtres. The film, which he has been working on for many years, marks his transition to directing and recounts the epic story of the “maroons”, the slaves who had the courage to escape from the plantations and escape the colonial order. In 2023, Simon Moutaïrou set up his own production company, Dahomey.

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This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.

Reid Hall, the Columbia Global Paris Center, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination are not responsible for the views and opinions expressed by their speakers and guests.