For centuries, the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade have shaped the cultural, political, and historical narratives of the Francophone Afro-Caribbean world. Yet, many of these histories remained unspoken, fragmented, or overshadowed. In an effort to uncover some of these silenced stories, Safoi Babana-Hampton, Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University, has produced and directed a documentary that features artists, historians, and policymakers who challenge Eurocentric narratives to reclaim, reshape, and preserve the memory of the Black Atlantic experience.
Funded in part by the MSU Humanities and Arts Research Program Large-Scale Development Grant and bringing together a transnational team of media, cultural, and political personalities,the 119-minute documentary, “Chœurs Atlantiques | Tales from the Atlantic Beyond,” takes viewers on an immersive memory journey to three continents, beginning at the Bay of Diamant in Martinique and traveling to Guadeloupe, France, and Senegal, shining a light along the way on what it means to be Black in today’s globally interconnected world.
“Chœurs Atlantiques” explores how Black and Afro-descendant artists engage with the historical legacies of the slave trade, slavery, colonialism, and racial injustice and how they use their art to advance our understanding of this history.
For Babana-Hampton, the documentary is the culmination of years of research, artistic inquiry, and intellectual exploration. The project’s roots trace back to the 2009 International Council of Francophone Studies annual convention in New Orleans where Babana-Hampton participated in a panel on French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s concept of “hauntology” and its applications to Francophone post-carceral writings by former political prisoners in Morocco, a former French colony. Similar debates have taken place on a global scale on how legacies of past suffering and historical violence guide transitional justice work and shape contemporary cultural responses to various forms of injustice in the present, as well as visions of more just futures.
“This documentary project, born out of this broad reflection, was the next logical direction for me as a Francophone postcolonial studies scholar,” Babana-Hampton said. “The film shines light on how featured Francophone Afro-Caribbean art/artists open a window from which to understand the way that the Black French experience changed 20 years after the passing of the Taubira law. Engaging with Derrida’s ‘hauntology’ from a decolonial lens, the documentary highlights the various ways that specters of the past and those of the future converge in their art to imagine and build emancipatory projects.”
The Taubira Law, named after then Deputy of French Guyana, Christiane Taubira, who was the driving force behind the legislation, passed in France in May 2001. It was the first law in the world to recognize the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity.
“Resisting systemic racism in mainland France and the French Overseas Departments is not new, but what has changed with the passing of the Taubira law was that resistance became normalized and institutionalized,” Babana-Hampton said. “This watershed moment in recent history and memory studies opened a space for reaffirming the connectedness of human struggles for freedom and justice and for renewal of efforts to continue to imagine models of community building and human solidarity beyond dehumanizing colonial models.”
The voices of the Atlantic
Between 2014-2023, Babana-Hampton traveled to France, the French Caribbean, and Senegal to ask Black artists, cultural change-makers, historians, and policymakers about the fraught histories of slavery and the slave trade and how they inform contemporary visions of more just and better human futures.
“By screening resistance in French Afro-Caribbean art, and voices reclaiming Black history as human history, the wide variety of perspectives ultimately converged on the need to ask ourselves a series of nuanced questions,” Babana-Hampton said. “What does it mean to be sovereign in an independent world? What models of emancipation nurture and promote a poetics, ethics, and politics of nonviolence? What is the place of the histories of suffering of other communities around the word in Black French communities’ endeavor to imagine and build a culture of human solidarity? What does it mean when specters and stories of the past converge with specters and stories of the future, 22 years after the passing into law in France of La Loi Taubira recognizing slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity?”
“Chœurs Atlantiques” is structured around the artistic and historical work of key figures from the Francophone Black diaspora. Babana-Hampton was inspired by a visit to the Mémorial CAP 110 in Diamant, Martinique. This art installation, erected in 1998 by Afro-Martinican artist Laurent Valère, consists of 15 concrete abstract figures arranged in a triangle formation facing the ocean, leaning forward, their eyes cast downwards and their mouths open, as if vocalizing a scream. The memorial pays tribute to the enslaved Africans who died in a shipwreck off the coast of Martinique in 1830, and more generally, the thousands of enslaved Africans who were taken to Martinique as part of the transatlantic slave trade.
“Valère’s creative engagement with the local history of his island, which is part of France’s national history, in order to challenge prevailing representations of France’s colonial past, inspired a quest into cultural and artistic responses by Black or Afro-descendant French artists and cultural change-makers to the ‘shipwreck’ of Francophone Afro-Caribbean history,” Babana-Hampton said. “The convergence of art and history in the story of the Mémorial CAP 110 was the basis for bridging voices of artists, historians, and policymakers in this film as a primary narrative approach.”
“Chœurs Atlantiques” features a range of artistic and scholarly voices, including poets, musicians, visual artists, elected officials, and historians. Through their creative and activist work, these individuals confront the “shipwreck” of historical memory — the unknown chapters of the history of the French slave trade and colonial slavery. By revisiting and reinterpreting these histories, they seek to carve out space for a more inclusive and equitable reckoning with the past.
Art as activism and historical reflection
A central theme of “Chœurs Atlantiques” is the role of art in confronting historical legacies of violence and human suffering “to inspire positive social change through a lens that is reflective of our diverse humanity.”
“Art and culture, as the stories told by artists featured in the film remind us, have always been the most powerful tool of preservation of one’s humanity, of affirmation of one’s freedom, and of resistance to all forms of oppression,” Babana-Hampton said, “because it communicates in a way that touches human minds and hearts more directly and universally than ideological and political discourses can.”
In societies that have experienced slavery, colonialism, segregation, and state violence, official historical accounts often tended to omit or distort key aspects of that past. As Babana-Hampton explains, it was essential to frame the film’s narrative around diverse forms of historical archives, including oral history, oral traditions, music, and artistic performance “by communities born out of legacies of past violence, as essential sources of knowledge about chapters of history that were excluded from Eurocentric official historiographies.”
“The documentary project combines creative storytelling with archival research, oral history research, scholarly research, diverse music traditions, as well as artistic performance, such as the island conch shell music,” Babana-Hampton said, “to ponder what it means to be Black today in a globally interconnected world for Afro-descendant French communities in the French Caribbean and mainland France.”
Oral storytelling, art, and culture, as noted by Dr. Patricia Donatien in the film, were often the only means available to communities born of violence for transmitting their history and expressing their identity and sense of belonging.
“The film’s artistic and intellectual vision rests on the premise that opening lines of dialog between these various forms of archives and of historical knowledge is key not only to understanding Black French history, but to also recognizing that it is a shared human history,” Babana-Hampton said.
“Chœurs Atlantiques” also engages with the concept of the Atlantic Ocean as both a physical and symbolic space.
“The Atlantic Ocean appears in the work of the featured Black artists and public intellectuals as a site of crimes against humanity tied to the global enterprise of the slave trade that involved protagonists and actors from three continents,” Babana-Hampton said. “Thinking the legacy of the Atlantic alongside the legacy of marooning and of slave revolts allows for understanding their centrality in contemporary artistic work and cultural activism led by French Afro-descendants.”
A transnational collaboration
Bringing “Chœurs Atlantiques” to life required collaboration across multiple continents. Babana-Hampton worked with an interdisciplinary team of more than 36 scholars, artists, musicians, and media professionals from France, the French Caribbean, Senegal, and the United States.
“I am grateful for the generous support received to make the next phases of production as well as the realization of the film’s initial vision possible,” Babana-Hamptom said. “I am also grateful to every film collaborator for bringing their unique mark to this project and for the honor of forming a team with them.”
This collaborative spirit extends to the film’s production process. The documentary was made possible through partnerships with cultural and historical museums, as well as public television networks.
Babana-Hampton was the first recipient of the HARP Large-Scale Development Grant, which was presented to her in 2021 to support this documentary film project. The $100,000 award is funded through MSU’s Office of Research and Innovation in support of faculty who are engaged in large-scale arts and humanities projects.
Film screenings
As part of the Black History Month celebrations at Michigan State University, the MSU community received a sneak peek of “Chœurs Atlantiques | Tales from the Atlantic Beyond” before it was released to the public at large, bringing a francophone and global perspective to Black History Month campus programming. This pre-release screening took place Feb. 19 and was organized in collaboration with Dr. Anjam Chaudhar and Dr. Brenda Nelson from MSU’s Office of Cultural and Academic Transition. The event also was made possible through the generous support of MSU Culinary Services and in partnership with the U.S. French-Chicago Consulate-Villa Albertine; MSU Institutional Diversity and Inclusion; MSU African Studies Center; MSU Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; MSU Department of History; and MSU Department of Romance and Classical Studies.
Following the pre-release screening at MSU, the documentary will make its way through the film festival circuit and will be screened at locations around the world.So far, the film has been selected for screening at:
- The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, which will show a public screening on April 10, 2025, followed by a public talk by Babana-Hampton who was invited to deliver the annual Fauvel Lecture on April 11, 2025. This lecture, entitled “The Historical Memory of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Emancipatory Projects by Black French Caribbean Artists Today,” will discuss the “Chœurs Atlantiques”documentary.
- Frantz Fanon Auditorium, Fort-de-France, Martinique, May 2025, as part of the event series themed “Rézistans” (Resistance) organized annually in May at the National Cultural Center of Tropiques Atrium to commemorate the abolitions of slavery and the historical and contemporary forms of resistance.
- University of Cape Town, South Africa, June 2025, as part of the annual meeting of the Conseil International d’Études Francophones, an international professional association whose objective is the development of studies, research, publications, and productions in French or relating to the French-speaking world in a broad sense that includes France.
Babana-Hampton hopes the stories in “Chœurs Atlantiques”will reach diverse audiences on campus and in the community and contribute to public conversations around the film’s themes.
“Understanding the Black French experience, past and present, within this complex lens and through these deeply interwoven narratives, makes it possible to recognize both the agency of all historically oppressed communities as well as the interlocked nature of their fight for freedom and justice, and ultimately their endeavor to imagine and build a culture of human solidarity, as a safeguard against all threats to freedom and human dignity, beyond dehumanizing colonial models,” Babana-Hampton said. “Despite the difficult themes they navigate, the stories featured in the film are ultimately stories of hope and of human resilience, and of manifestations of beauty in the face of adversity.”
This story originally appeared on the College of Arts and Letters website.
