Anti-racist, feminist and writer Maryse Condé's legacy

Biographies

• Rokhaya Diallo - journalist, author, director

  Rokhaya Diallo is an award-winning French journalist, author and film-maker. She is a columnist for the Washington Post and the Guardian, and a researcher at the Gender+Justice Initiative Research Center at Georgetown University (Washington). In France, she teaches cultural studies at Paris 1 – Sorbonne and is a columnist for television and radio. Rokhaya Diallo is the author of a dozen books and comic strips, and has made several documentaries. With Grace Ly, she also created “Kiffe Ta Race”, the first French-language podcast dedicated to racial issues and ranked as one of the best podcasts by Apple. In 2022, Rokhaya Diallo founded W.O.R.D., the first school dedicated to public speaking, with the aim of democratizing access to the public sphere. In March 2025, she published “Dictionnaire amoureux du féminisme” with Plon.

• Alice Diop - Director

  After obtaining a Master’s degree in History from Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 2001 and a Master’s degree in Visual Sociology in 2003, Alice Diop graduated from the Femis documentary workshop in 2005.

  Since then, she has been writing and directing creative documentaries that have been screened at numerous international festivals, including the Berlinale, BFI London Film Festival, Karlovy-Vary, Viennale, Cinéma du Réel and others.

  In 2017, she won the César for best short film for “Vers la Tendresse” as well as the grand prize at the Brive Festival. The same year, she won the grand prize in the French section of Cinéma du réel for her feature documentary “La Permanence”.

  His film “Nous”, selected for competition at the Berlinale 2021, won the Berlinale’s Best Documentary Award and the Grand Prize in the Rencontres section. It went on to win the Prix Lumière for Best Documentary in 2023, and was a great success with critics and audiences alike.

  His first feature film, “Saint Omer”, selected for official competition at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, won the Silver Lion and the Lion of the Future, as well as other awards at numerous international festivals. “Saint Omer” also represented France at the Oscars in 2022.

  Alongside her career as a filmmaker, Alice Diop has continued to work in the academic field, driven by her desire for research and her belief in the importance of transmission. Since 2014, she has been a faculty member at Ateliers Varan, a film school founded in Paris by filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch. She regularly runs workshops and master classes at French and American universities: Université Paris 8, Paris 1, La Femis, Science Po, as well as Columbia, NYU, Bennington, Yale and Harvard.

  She was a visiting professor at Harvard University in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies during the 2024-2025 academic year.

  In 2021, it founded the Cinémathèque idéale des banlieues du Monde in collaboration with the Centre George Pompidou in Paris. The CIBM is a research, programming and distribution center dedicated to the cinemas of the world’s suburbs. Its aim is to restore, archive, collect, disseminate and promote the ways in which filmmakers in France and abroad have taken an interest in the margins and peripheries of cities. The success of the three-day program organized by Alice Diop in 2022 prompted the Centre Pompidou to make it a regular event, forging links and exchanges between filmmakers of different generations.

  In residence at New York’s Villa Albertine in 2022, she researched the work of African-American poets such as Robin Costes Lewis, Claudia Rankine, June Jordan and Lucille Clinton. In November 2023, the Festival d’Automne à Paris gave her carte blanche to introduce French audiences to the work of these women, as part of an Afro-diasporic conversation combining theatrical performances, live shows, film screenings and readings. The public and critical success of the event prompted her to launch her first theatrical production for the 2025 season, based on Robin Costes Lewis’s collection of poems, “Voyage of the Sable Venus and other poems”.

  She has directed a short film, “Fragments for Venus”, inspired by the work of Robin Coste Lewis. The film premiered at the opening of the Giornate dei Autori section of the Venice Film Festival 2025, and was screened at the NYFF and BFI London in October 2025.

  Alice Diop is currently working on her next feature film, a free adaptation of one of the monuments of 20th-century literature and anthropology: Michel Leiris’s “Phantom Africa”.

• Felisa Vergara Reynolds - Professor of French literature

  Felisa Vergara Reynolds is Professor of French Literature at the University of Illinois. A specialist in the French literature of the West Indies, West Africa and North Africa, her research focuses on the legacies of colonialism and their traces in postcolonial cultural productions.

  She is the author of The Author as Cannibal: Re-Writing in Francophone Literature as a Postcolonial Genre (1969-1995)published in 2021 by the University of Nebraska Press.

  She is also co-editor, with Kate Hodgson, of the volume Maryse Condé and Caribbean Crossings, to be published this year by Liverpool University Press, which includes her chapter entitled: ” Maryse Condé’s L’évangile du nouveau monde: One Final Crossing, One Final Cannibalization”. She is currently working on a second book, French or Francophone: The Legacy of the Manifesto for a World Literature, to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.

  His published and forthcoming articles include:

  – “Minority Identities Amidst an Oppressive Universalism: The Role of the Podcast Kiffe ta Race in France.” (Liverpool University Press, 2023).

  – ” Archives, Power, and the Limits of Official Memory: The Stora Report and Postcolonial France “, in (Post)Colonial Archives: Commemoration, Preservation, and Erasure (forthcoming in Routledge Studies in Archives).
  – ” The Impossible Return: What Is Maryse Condé to Africa? “, forthcoming in Research in African Literatures.