The French Center of Excellence is pleased to announce it will host Professor Jennifer Boum Make on February 20, 2026 as part of the AY26 lecture series. Professor Boum Make's lecture, entitled "Exploring the Possibility of Decolonizing Care: Towards Reparative Representations of Outre-mères’ Voices? ", will explore French and Francophone culture, language, and society.
The aim of this presentation is twofold. First, I propose a situated critical interrogation of how caregiving dynamics have been shaped by the enduring legacies of French colonialism–legacies that sustain racial, gendered, and geographic asymmetries between hexagonal France and French Overseas Territories, maintaining fractures in care and practices of neglect. Second, I invite us to consider how care might be rethought decolonially, from the outside of coloniality. My broader aim is to explore how narratives help revitalize and make visible practices of care from the French Overseas territories and former colonies. To this end, I will focus in the context of this talk on the differentiated discourses surrounding reproductive health across hexagonal France and les Outre-mer through a discussion of Anjali and Sophie Adriannsen’s graphic narrative Outre-mères (2025), interrogating the reparative ways to represent and circulate women's silenced experiences of medical violence and potential recovery across hexagonal France and the overseas territories.
Jennifer Boum Make is a Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. Her research is focused on the literatures and cultures of the French Overseas territories, the legacy of colonialism, and care studies. Her first monograph, Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2025), examines the relationship between colonial legacies and caregiving dynamics in the French Caribbean, offering a decolonial perspective on care practices. She is also the co-editor of the volume Graphic Narratives of Resistance: Advocating for Representation and Social Justice in French-language bandes dessinées (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). She is a co-founder of the collective Kwazman Vwa.
This event is sponsored by the Department of French and Italian’s French Center of Excellence, which receives funding from French Cultural Services in the US and the Consulate General of France in Chicago. This series is also supported by the following Departments and Centers at Ohio State: Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Literatures, Near Eastern and South Asian Languages, Germanic Languages and Literatures, History, Design, and the Humanities Institute.
In December of 2020, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States selected the Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University to join its prestigious network of Centers of Excellence. OSU’s Center of Excellence has the goal of promoting French and Francophone culture in the Midwest and beyond.
