Illistration by Samuel Price; Source photograph by Zach Gibson / Stringer / Getty
February 28, 2025

Les Encres de l’Atlantique: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Discussion
Reid Hall | 4, rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris
Free and open to the public
Register here

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.

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.

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 in 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 StruggleBetween 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.

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