Thursday 7 April 2026, 5pm - 6.30pm
Seminar Room 00.063, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
Tickets are free, but please register via Eventbrite
Please join us for the third and final lecture in the 2026 TORCH / Princeton University Press Lectures:
3. The Museum against Racism, New Perspectives on French Heritage
The lecture series will be delivered by Professor Anne Lafont, and will be based on three case studies. It explores the extent to which objects, art, museums, and heritage-making processes in general are shaped by issues of racism—and, even more so, of anti-racism. The aim is to understand how the Black Lives Matter movement, which reached its international peak in the spring of 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, intersected with, and impacted, in France, civil society’s calls regarding the political responsibility of heritage institutions. And even so, over a longer period (1983–2025), what were the French experiences regarding heritage and anti-racism? This history deserves specific attention, capable of explaining how, in this country in particular, the republican and universal ambition of museums and the effective engagement of the art and heritage worlds in the anti-racist struggle are articulated.
The third and final lecture in the series, on the more indirect regarding issues of racism, will provide an opportunity to understand how the lexical and canonical appropriation in and of Black Art – at large – contributes to a remarkably complex history of art that is, both, intermedial and inclusive.
Tickets are free, but please register to attend via Eventbrite.
Speaker:
Professor Anne Lafont, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris is the 2026 Guest Lecturer for the TORCH/ Princeton University Press Lecture Series.
Princeton University Press Lecture Series
