Global France Seminar presents, Judith Miller “Thinking About African Francophone Theatre”

Presented by Judith Miller
Professor, Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture, New York University

Abstract: With its many languages and cultures, the African continent has always had a plethora of vibrant theatrical traditions, of rituals that can be understood as dramatic, of artists who embody characters — including those from the spirit world.  Within this expressive landscape, there is also now what we might call a rich and fraught tradition of theatre in French. As early as the 1930s, young African writers and intellectuals, prompted by their colonial schoolmasters, began producing works inspired by French classics, but already inflected by African expressive forms. Today, in 2025, Professor Sylvie Chalaye, of the University of Paris III, and the foremost authority on Francophone African theatre, has catalogued several hundred plays written in French and staged both in France and in the fourteen countries that comprise what were once French colonial “possessions” in Africa — as well as in the former Belgian colonies of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. For many years, Judith Miller has been teaching these works, staging them with students, and translating them — always with the goal of making known to US-based readers and audiences the extraordinary breadth of experiences, political positions, and corrosive humor fundamental to Francophone African theatre. In her recent anthology, Contemporary Francophone African Plays: An Anthology (Bucknell University Press, 2024), she has gathered plays ranging from pungent satires of colonization (such as Bernard Dadié’s Beatrice of the Congo and Sony Labou Tansi’s I, The Undersigned, Cardiac Case) to spoken-word performance pieces tracing African identity in the diaspora (for example, Koffi Kwahulé’s SAMO: A Tribute to Basquiat and Penda Diouf’s Tracks, Trails, and Traces.) For her participation in MIT’s French and Francophone Studies Colloquium, she will discuss the exemplary nature of these plays and engage with what is still fraught in the “universe” of French-language African theatre. She will also share what have been the major challenges she has faced in translating these works for the American stage.

Bio: Judith Graves Miller is a translator and researcher of French and Francophone theatre. She has retired twice:  once from a long career at The University of Wisconsin-Madison and then from a long career at New York University, where she also served as Dean of Arts and Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi. She has written numerous books and articles on theatrical texts and productions, translated some forty plays and other texts, and directed many plays in French with her students. Her most recent work includes an anthology of Francophone African plays (Contemporary Francophone African Plays: An Anthology, Bucknell, 2024); a translation of Sylvie Chalaye’s Race et Théâtre: un impensé politique(Race and Theatre in France, Liverpool, 2025), and a translation of and commentary on Haitian author, Guy Régis Jr’s play Les Cinq Fois où j’ai vu mon père (The Five Times I Saw My Father, (Yale) Theater, forthcoming, 2026.)