Les Encres de l’Atlantique: Ta-Nehisi Coates

This event will be held in English.

Please note that doors close 30 minutes after the start of the event, and that entry will be refused after this time.

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Co-organized by Journées Africana - Association Black History Month with the support of the Columbia Global Paris Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

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In honor of Black History Month, Maboula Soumahoro welcomes acclaimed author, journalist and intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates for a discussion on his latest book, The Message. 

The event will explore Coates’ unique perspective on contemporary global issues, with a focus on how his narrative intersects with broader conversations about post-colonialism, freedom, and cultural memory. A discussion will follow, inviting the audience to engage directly with the author’s insights and ideas.

Les Encres de l’Atlantique

Les Encres de l'Atlantique is a monthly series curated by Maboula Soumahoro, Fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination from the class of 2023 – 2024. Following the first six meetings in February and May 2024, this new season promises to dive deeper into black worlds, histories and cultures, while exploring the realities of the African diaspora.

The series, organized by Journées Africana - Association Black History Month, with the support of the Columbia Global Paris Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, takes the form of filmic, musical, academic, sociological and literary stopovers that, as they travel the ocean waves and space-time, probe and anchor themselves in the Black African diaspora.

About Maboula Soumahoro

Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor in the English Department at the Université de Tours. A Fellow of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in 2023 – 2024, she was also Mellon Arts Project International Visiting Professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University in 2022 – 2023, as well as Visiting Professor at Bennington College. A renowned specialist in Africana Studies, she has conducted research and taught at several universities and correctional institutions in the United States and France. She is the author of Le Triangle et l'Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), which received special mention in the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize in 2020. This book was translated into English by Kaiama L. Gover under the title Black is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021). Maboula Soumahoro is the translator into French of Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), published  as À perte de mère. Sur les routes atlantique de l’esclavage (Brook, 2023).  Her academic and literary contribution offers a unique and enriching perspective on black identities.

About Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me,  The Water Dancer and The Message. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard University. Ta-Nehisi Coates also enjoyed a successful run writing Marvel’s Black Panther (2016-2021) and Captain America (2018-2021) comics series.

Sponsors

The Columbia Global Paris Center, established at Reid Hall in 2010, is one of Columbia University’s eleven global centers. It aims to promote research, teaching, and transnational collaboration. Through its scholarly and cultural programming, its Atelier podcast, and its civic engagement initiatives, the Paris Global Center strengthens Columbia University’s connections in France and internationally while providing a platform for intellectual exploration of social and environmental issues in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. 

Each year the Institute for Ideas and Imagination brings together a cohort of 14-15 Fellows, half of them Columbia faculty and post-docs, the other half artists and writers from around the world, to spend a year together in work and conversation. The Institute fosters intellectual and creative diversity unconstrained by medium and discipline through the interaction of the arts and academia.

Columbia Global brings together major global initiatives from across the university including the Columbia Global Centers, Columbia World Projects, the Committee on Global Thought, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and Undergraduate Global Engagement.

Venue

Nestled in the Montparnasse district, Reid Hall hosts several Columbia University initiatives: the Columbia Global Paris Center, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the Columbia Undergraduate Programs, the  M.A. in History and Literature, and the GSAPP Shape of Two Cities Program. This unique combination of resources is enhanced by our global network whose mission is to expand the University's engagement with the world through educational programs, research initiatives, regional partnerships, and public events.

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.

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of the Columbia Global Paris Center or its affiliates.