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 […]