VIRTUAL: Great Falls Forum with Emmanuel Kayembe

This event is past.

  • Oct 15, 2020

Register here to attend!

The 2020-2021 season of the Great Falls Forum continues on Thursday, October 15th, featuring Dr. Emmanuel Kayembe, Fellow for Franco-American Studies at the University of Southern Maine, with a talk entitled “Francophonie, Immigration, Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Identities in the USA.” The program will take place from 12 noon to 1 PM virtually via Zoom and streamed to the Lewiston Public Library Facebook page.

Using French and Francophone migrations’ history in the USA as a pretext, Dr. Kayembe will discuss the need to rethink what it means to belong to a community, a territory, or a country, because no one can be called an absolute autochthone. In his Great Falls Forum talk, he will discuss the modern state of “cultural between,” not belonging to a specific race or people.

Dr. Emmanuel Kayembe received his Ph.D. in French Language and Literature from the University of Capetown in 2011. He is a former Research Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies, and served as a Senior Lecturer and a Teaching Assistant respectively at the University of Lubumbashi and at the University of Cape Town, before joining the University of Botswana, where he taught French Language, Literature and Culture from 2013 to 2017. He is currently working as a Fellow for Franco-American Studies and an Instructor of French at the University of Southern Maine. Apart from having extensively published on Francophone literatures and cultures, he has a research interest in fundamental questions about the Francophonie in the world. He is a member of the Centre de la Francophonie des Amériques (Québec) and a Board member of the Alliance Française de Portland (Maine).

The Great Falls Forum is a monthly, brown-bag speaker series featuring statewide and regional leaders in public policy, business, academia and the arts. Admission is free to all Forum events. The Forum is a co-sponsorship of the Sun Journal, Bates College, and LPL. Recordings of the virtual Great Falls Forum programs will be archived on the Library’s YouTube channel following the live event.

For more information, please contact the Lewiston Public Library at 513-3135 or LPLReference@lewistonmaine.gov.