About

Frieda Ekotto is a professor affiliated with the U-M LSA Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, as well as Comparative Literature and Francophone Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and French Literature from the University of Minnesota. Her work as an intellectual historian and philosopher focuses on 20th and 21st-century Anglophone and Francophone literature, along with the cinema of West Africa and its diaspora. Her primary research explores contemporary issues of law, race, and LGBTQIA2S+ topics, with a particular emphasis on how law functions to repress and conceal the suffering of disenfranchised subjects. Her aim is to trace what cannot be said, to address and expose suffering through various cultural intersections, and to reassess the agency of the dispossessed.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Computer Science
• Epistemology
• Art
• Literature
• History
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Law

Selected publications

• Reading Négritude Thinkers with Black Lives Matter

  Channel View Publications eBooks · 2025-08-08

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• 9 Reading Négritude Thinkers with Black Lives Matter

  Multilingual Matters eBooks · 2025-08-14

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• The Eternal Departure

  Cultural Critique · 2025-09-01

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  Abstract: This essay offers a lyrical meditation on death, memory, and historical trauma, weaving personal grief—especially the loss of her father—into the broader context of African diasporic experiences. Africa becomes a symbol of ongoing loss and spectral presence, where the dead live on through memory, language, and silence. Through philosophical inquiry, autobiographical fragments, and literary references, she explores the impossibility of fully articulating death, the emotional weight of mourning, and the power of writing as both a form of testimony and survival.

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• James Baldwin’s Reflection on Masculinity in America: Poetics of the Color Line

  James Baldwin Review · 2024-09-23

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• Francophone Writing

  2023-03-20

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  Due to its connections with colonialism, francophone writing, or literature written in French, has a complex genealogy and relationship to language. It is important to note here that French-led colonization preceded the colonization of Africa, in the French Caribbean/French Antilles. After the Berlin conference in 1885, in which European nations divided the continent of Africa among themselves without one single African present, France colonized many countries around the world, while Belgium colonized the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa. This colonial history is why global French literature exists. Places of origin include: Canada; Europe (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Monaco, and Switzerland); Sub-Saharan Africa (Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, the Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, the Seychelles, and Togo); North Africa (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia); Asia (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam); and the Caribbean (Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Saint Barthélemy, French Guiana, and Reunion). In addition, there are the Seychelles and Vanuatu, the territory of Puducherry, and Lebanon. Due to these vast geographic and cultural differences, a myriad of complex issues and ramifications must be taken in consideration when addressing francophone literature. From the colonial period onward, writing by French Europeans has been classified as “French writing,” while “francophone writing” has been used to denote everyone else. This enforces the clear division of us and them, colonizers and colonized. Before the term “francophone” was coined, writing produced by colonized nations was labeled as “colonial writing in the French language.” It was never included within or identified as French literature. With the advent of postcolonial studies, however, “francophone” has come to be assigned more specifically to writers from the former colonized nations of the French and Belgium empires who continue to write in the French language.

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• <i>Geometry and Jean Genet: Shaping the Subject</i> . By Joanne Brueton <i>Geometry and Jean Genet: Shaping the Subject</i> . By BruetonJoanne. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 61.) Legenda: Cambridge, 2022. 194 pp.

  French Studies · 2023

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  • Sociology
  • Philosophy
  • Sociology

  Journal Article Geometry and Jean Genet: Shaping the Subject. By Joanne Brueton Get access Geometry and Jean Genet: Shaping the Subject. By Joanne Brueton. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 61.) Legenda: Cambridge, 2022. 194 pp. Frieda Ekotto Frieda Ekotto University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States ekotto@umich.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume 77, Issue 3, July 2023, Pages 499–500, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knad070 Published: 26 April 2023

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• A Reflection on Gender and Sexuality as Transnational Archive of African Modernity

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 11 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Sociology

  Sexual diversity on the African continent can no longer be ignored. This chapter discusses how to both recognize and theorize lived experiences of sexual and gender diversity on the African continent and its diaspora. It argues that we cannot reckon with the colonial past and its continuing traces in Africa and its diaspora until we reclaim sexual and gender diversity as part of the continent and its diaspora’s present. The chapter focuses upon how different kinds of silences surround the subject of women loving women in literary and cinematic representations. It also discusses another popular notion about same-sex sexuality in Africa: that it is a bad habit imported from the West. The chapter offers some insights into how to think about silence and gender by drawing on the short story “Rock” by Lindiwe Nkutha, published in Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction, highlighting a reconsideration of gender fluidity as an emerging theme in African literature.

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• Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter

  Springer eBooks · 2020 · 5 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies
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• Absinthe: World Literature in Translation

  2020-01-01

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• Aimé Césaire in the Era of Black Lives Matter

  A Companion to World Literature · 2019-12-19

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  Abstract This chapter reads Aimé Césaire's work as a continuation of the struggle for the dignity of black people around the world. As a Francophone philosopher and poet, Césaire is a member of an important global lineage of black intellectuals. Together with James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Claudia Rankine, Césaire's work offers the historical background needed to understand black lives in the second decade of the twentieth century, and particularly the Black Lives Matter movement. These thinkers first articulated enduring questions about the black condition in the world and established why there will not be peace as long as black lives continue to be crushed and their dignity ignored.

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Frequent coauthors

• Alexandra Galitzine‐Loumpet

  Campus Condorcet

  3 shared

• Martine Delvaux

  2 shared

• Bénédicte Boisseron

  2 shared

• Valérie Legrand

  2 shared

• Elisabeth de Pablo

  Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales

  2 shared

• Kenneth W. Harrow

  2 shared

• Dimitri Galitzine

  2 shared

• Gabeba Baderoon

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Nicolàs Guillèn Prize for Philosophical Literature (2014)
• Benezet Award for excellence in her field (2015)
• John H. D’Arms Faculty for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring…
• Honorary Degree at Colorado College (2018)