Madan Sara: Screening + Discussion
Date
Thursday March 30, 20233:00 pm - 5:00 pm
MADAN SARA: Screening and Meet the Director!
Film screening at 3pm, then discussion at 4pm!
Panel discussion will be with with director Etant Dupain; PhD candidate (Toronto Metropolitan University), researcher and dance artist Emilie Jabouin; researcher, artist and women’s right activist Nadine Mondestin, and Dr. Bianca Beauchemin postdoctoral fellow (Queen’s University) and scholar of Black diasporic feminisms and the Haitian Revolution.
The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) demonstrated to the world the freedom-making possibilities of the Black Radical Tradition, and in turn, galvanized the entire Black diaspora to fight against colonialism and enslavement.
However, contemporary discourses of Haiti do not echo these past exploits, as dominant narratives of Haiti persistently obscure the self-determination and resilience of everyday Haitian peoples.
Countering these deceptive mainstream narratives, Etant Dupain’s documentary film Madan Sara highlights the strength and discipline of Haitian market women who continuously fight not only for their families, but also for their nation writ large.
About the Participants:
Etant Dupain is a journalist, filmmaker, and community organizer. For over a decade, he has worked as a producer on documentaries and for international news media outlets including Al Jazeera, TeleSur, BBC, CNN, Netflix, PBS, and Vice. Etant founded an alternative media project in Haiti to enable citizen journalists to provide access to information in Haitian Creole for and about internally-displaced people, aid accountability, and politics. Now, moved by the strength of his mother and the women known as the Madan Sara who make Haiti’s economy run, he’s making his first personal film.
Emilie Jabouin (Zila for stage), is a curious intuitive dance artist and researcher who uses her story-telling abilities for collective liberation, and engages in performance and research projects that focus on social transformation, reparations and collective healing. Emilie's research focuses on black women's histories and everyday lives, while her dancing, drumming and singing influenced from Kilti Ayisyèn [Haitian folk culture] are meant to share these stories for people to feel free and transcend this current world. Her creative consulting through her company, Emirj [Emerge] Projects (www.emirj.ca) guides creatives to manifest the full potential of their creativity.
Nadine Mondestin is translator, editor and independent scholar in the performing arts, humanities, and social sciences. Her primary focus is African diasporic expressive cultures (in particular dance and movement) and their intersections with the knowledge commons, social justice, and heterodox economics. https://tap.bio/@proteanintl
Dr. Bianca Beauchemin is the 2022-2023 recipient of the postdoctoral fellowship in Black Feminist Thought at Queen’s University. She was also awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship while completing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Gender Studies. After this fellowship year, she will begin her appointment as an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. She has published a book review of Brittney C. Cooper’s Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. In her doctoral manuscript Arousing Freedoms: Re-Imagining the Haitian Revolution through Sensuous Marronage, she re-narrates the Haitian Revolution through Black feminist and Black queer epistemologies and methodologies. Disrupting the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, she explores the ways in which embodiment, labor, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders, re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation.