Sylvie KANDE An author from France and Senegal writing in French [Return to French — Page originale en français]

Born in Paris to a French mother and a Senegalese father, Sylvie Kandé studied the image of Black people in ancient Greek art and literature as a topic for her Masters in Classics at the Sorbonne. She was awarded a Ph.D in African History from Paris VII for her dissertation on the repatriation of Black people to Sierra Leone and the resulting Creole culture that developed in Freetown. The work is published under the title Terres, urbanisme et architecture 'créoles' en Sierra Leone, 18ème-19ème siècles (L'Harmattan, 1998). In 1987, she established herself in the United States. She was the editor of the proceedings of a colloquium held at NYU in 1997 on métissage (mixed racial identity) in the Francophone context. The book - also published by L'Harmattan in 1999 - is entitled Discours sur le métissage, identités métisses. En quête d'Ariel. Her book of poetic prose Lagon, lagunes was published by Gallimard in January 2000 and has been compared to Eliot's Wasteland. She translated Heart of Spain - Photos of the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa (Aperture, 2000) into French, and co-translated Alexis Wright's collection of short stories (an Australian Aboriginal writer), published by Actes Sud under the title Le Pacte du serpent arc-en-Ciel (2002). Her short stories and poems have been published in France in La Nouvelle Revue Française, as well as in Africa, (Stephen Gray, editor, The Picador Book of African Short Stories, 2000) and the United States (Callaloo.) In May 1999, she was invited by the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Washington D.C. to read from her fiction and poetry; in December 2001 by the Columbia University Center for Research in African American Studies; in April 2002 by the New York Teachers and Writers Collective; and in April 2004 by the Blind Beggar Press. She has published numerous papers in scholarly journals on African, African-American and Caribbean Literature and Cinema (Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literatures, Research in African Literatures, Revue Francophone de Louisiane, QBR, le Soleil, Sociétés africaines et Diaspora, Mots Pluriels, Africultures, etc.) She taught African Studies in the Africana program, and Francophone African and Caribbean literatures in the French department at NYU for six years. She also was a research assistant at the NY Metropolitan Museum in the African arts division. She has taught African studies at SUNY Old Westbury, as well as Caribbean history at the New School. She is a member of the PEN American Center, in the subcommittee Prison Writing.

Fiction:

Lagon, Lagunes. Paris: Gallimard, 2000 (80p.) ISBN 2-07-075758-7. (Postface by Edouard Glissant).

Lagon, lagunes, with a postface written by Edouard Glissant, evokes the itinerary of a wandering and rebellious "I", exiled from the shores of conventional identities. Following temporal and spatial clues, "I" attempts to reconstitute from memory traces left by her métisse experience on three continents - Africa, Europe and America. Written in a poetic prose that incorporates a wide range of language variations, Lagon, lagunes comes across as a mosaic of portraits, literary remiscences, signs and anecdotes. It is also a tribute to the African and Greek mythologies of the moon. (From the novel back cover)

La quête infinie de l'autre rive. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. (120p.). ISBN: 978-2-07-013211-9. Epopée en trois chants.

For interviews of the author and reviews of her work, please look at the French page.

Editor ([email protected])
The University of Western Australia/French
Created: 4 July 2000
Updated: 17 March 2011
Archived: 27 November 2013
https://aflit.arts.uwa.edu.au/KandeSylvieeng.html