Christy Pichichero | Decoloniality, Diaspora, and a Biogeographical Theory of Writing

For the second Postcolonial Spatialities workshop event this quarter, please join Humanities Center External Fellow Dr. Christy Pichichero (George Mason University). Dr. Pichichero will be speaking on “Decoloniality, Diaspora, and a Biogeographical Theory of Writing.”

About the Speaker

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Christy Pichichero (AB Princeton; BM Eastman; PhD Stanford) is a public intellectual and Associate Professor of French and history at George Mason University. This year, she returns to Stanford as an External Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She is a specialist of the early modern French empire, race, and African diasporic studies and author of The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell, 2017; finalist, Kenshur Book Prize). Pichichero is the past president of the Western Society for French History, recipient of a 2021 Presidential Medal at GMU, and her public-facing work has been featured on NPR, NBC News, Forbes, The Hill, and other venues. 
 
Her SHC project, entitled Song of Saint-George: Racism, Resistance, and African Diasporic Lives in the Age of Revolutions (1750-1850), draws on years of archival excavation across three continents and is the first in Pichichero’s two-part book series on African diasporic lives of the French empire between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Shedding new light on better-known figures like the famed composer-violinist-swordsman Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George (1745-1799) and foregrounding understudied figures, such as Saint-George’s free Black mother Nanon and generations of African-descended families connected to the French armed forces, these projects restore the rich diversity of intersectional positionalities that coexisted in France during this era of global trade, war, colonization, and slavery. Pichichero’s research engages theories of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora to trace the structural roots of modern racial formation and resistance amongst African-descended communities in West Africa, the Caribbean, and the European continent.
 
Learn more about her work