Archipelago of Voices: Revisiting the Black Atlantic
Eliana Alves Cruz and Mame-Fatou Niang
Conversation
Sa., 11.10.2025
15:15–16:15
Safi Faye Hall
In Portuguese and English with simultaneous translation into German, English, and Portuguese
Free entry
Bringing together Afro-Brazilian thought and diasporic feminist perspectives, this conversation and reading reimagines the Black Atlantic, as coined by Paul Gilroy, as a constellation of interconnected yet distinct histories, refusing Blackness as a monolith and following instead the fractures and continuities that shape Black experiences. The event foregrounds voices that question a dominant historiography by centring women whose work navigates between the political and the poetic. From Rio de Janeiro to Paris, their currents entwine, inviting new perspectives for understanding solidarity and belonging across oceanic space.
In the historical fiction of Eliana Alves Cruz, the sea carries stories of enslavement and resilience across centuries, while in Mame-Fatou’s work, the Black Atlantic is examined through border liminality, exploring and negotiating identity in francophone worlds and their diasporas. Their conversation and the themes they trace as part of this edition of Middle Ground echo Beatriz Nascimento’s insistence that the ocean is both a site of trauma and a living archive of Black presence, holding within its depths the memory of disruption, relocation, and transformation.