HISTORY

Holding a PhD in African history from Sorbonne (Paris VII), Sylvie Kandé is the 2022 receipient of the Tyler Stovall Mission Prize from the Western Society for French History. She wrote an essay on the Créoles/Krio of Sierra Leone for the forthcoming Volume IX of the General History of Africa (UNESCO) based on her first book, entitled Terres, urbanisme et architecture 'créoles' en Sierra Leone, 18ème-19ème siècles (L’Harmattan, 1998), that examines a West African example of the said back-to-Africa movement.

Her work on métissage/hybridity and the conversations between Africa and the West is well known. In 1998, she organized an international conference at NYU and published the proceedings under the title Discours sur le métissage, identités métisses. En quête d’Ariel (L’Harmattan,1999). 

She was twice invited to present at the Mellon Humanities Summer Institute at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultures.

She serves as an historian-consultant on various large-scale projects, such as the Gorée Memorial (Senegal) as well as the rehabilitation of the Public Archives in Freetown, Sierra Leone and digitization of some of the archives, a project which received a Prince Claus Whiting Grant in 2022. She was instrumental in securing the UNESCO “Slave Routes” label for this project and a membership in the International Coalition for the Sites of Conscience for the Sierra Leone Public Archives.

Some of her cross-disciplinary essays include "Africa and the European Renaissance” in the Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (2004), an analysis of the cast system in Ahmadou Kourouma’s work (in Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World. The Idea of“the Middle Ages” outside Europe. John Hopkins U. Press, 2009), commentaries on Édouard Glissant’ and Marie NDiaye’s writings (Siècle 21, NRF), as well as in-depth film reviews (cf. “Look Homeward, Angel: Maroons & Mulattoes in Haile Gerima’s Sankofa” and “‘Ach, wäre ich doch Pygmäe!’ Die Figur des Babinga-Trägers in Le silence de la forêt von Bassek ba Kobhio”), other essays in historiography (“Uchronies africaines. Relire “Le Voltaïque” et La quête infinie de l’autre rive” in Écrire l’Histoire, 2013) or in contextualized literary criticism, such as “Chaka et l’arbre du Bokoné” in Atelier du roman, or “Contourner l’Afrique, Djibouti et le reste” in Europe (both published in 2019).