This week’s third monologue resulting from the December 2016 Race after the Postracial conference features Maboula Soumahoro, associate professor in the English department at the Université François-Rabelais, Tours, France.

In conversation with Olivia Rutazibwa, Ms Soumahoro recounts her upbringing and her personal journey as a French woman of Ivorian decent, her experiences in school going and her academic career. In the US she studied and taught about black nationalism, arriving at key questions of academic legitimacy and objectivity. Turning her insights back on French society, she reflects on how her own sense of national identity has developed, and how anti-racist discourses and myths existing in public memory have obscured the real everyday racist bias and discrimination that persists.

Click on the link for Maboula Soumahoro’s full monologue. For more on these and other topics, check out @o_rutazibwa ‏and #maboulasoumahoro on Twitter.com.