Global France Seminar presents, Doyle Calhoun “The Suicide Archive: Reading for resistance from the time of slavery to the ‘Arab Spring'”

Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge

When: Monday, September 28 @ 5:15 PM

Where: Building 14, 14E-304 (map)*

Abstract: From the time of slavery to the Algerian war for independence to the “Arab Spring,” people have responded to enslavement, colonisation and oppression through acts of suicide. While often occluded from or obscured in colonial archives, self-killing has long been at the centre of African and Caribbean engagements with the colonial past. Reading across literature, film, oral history, archival documents, legal history, and scientific texts, The Suicide Archive (2024) shows how aesthetic forms (literature, film, visual art, performance) preserve powerful histories of resistance and loss. In so doing, the book offers an innovative reading of African, Caribbean, French and global literary history

Bio: Doyle D. Calhoun is University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Peterhouse and affiliated lecturer in Film & Screen Studies, African Studies, and History. He is currently a 2026–27 Fellow of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His research focuses broadly on the literatures and cinemas of Africa and the Caribbean, with particular emphasis on Senegalese cultural production in Wolof and French. He is the author of The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire (Duke University Press, 2024), which received the Alda and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies from the Modern Language Association and Book of the Year from the African Literature Association. It is forthcoming in French as Mourir pour n’être à personne (La Découverte). He has edited and translated several volumes, including (with Cheikh Thiam) Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures (Yale University Press, 2025), (with Alioune Fall and Cheikh Thiam) The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2026), and La Noire de…: The Lives and Legacies of an African Classic (a special double issue of the film journal Framework, 2026). His articles have received several prizes, including the Malcolm Bowie Prize (French Studies), the William R. Parker Prize (PMLA), and the Ralph Cohen Prize (New Literary History), and his work has been supported by fellowships from Fulbright, the Camargo Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Bibliothèque Marmottan. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2022.