Frieda Ekotto

Frieda Ekotto is Chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. As an intellectual historian and philosopher with areas of expertise in 20th and 21st-century Anglophone and Francophone literature and in the cinema of West Africa and its diaspora, she concentrates on contemporary issues of law, race and LGBTQI issues. Her research focuses on how law serves to repress and mask the pain of disenfranchised subjects, and she traces what cannot be said in order to address and expose suffering from a variety of angles and cultural intersections, thus reassessing the position and agency of the dispossessed. She has published numerous articles in prestigeous literary Journals and author of six books such as What Color is Black ? Race and Sex Across the French Atlantic (Lexington Press, 2011) concentrates on issues of race and the invention of the nègre. She is also co-author of Rethinking African Cultural Production (Indiana University
Press, 2015). She is one the editors of the project The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature (forth coming, 2018.) In 2014, she received the Nicolàs Guillén Award for the Caribbean Philosophical Association and in 2015, she received the Benezet Award from the Colorado Alumni Association Board. In 2016, she was awarded the John H. D’Arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.