Suzie Telep

I am a French linguistic and cultural anthropologist, jazz singer-songwriter, and Afro feminist scholar-performer working at the intersection of language, race, and artistic production in the African diaspora in postcolonial France. My primary research explores how race and the Black body are constructed and negotiated through language and fashion among the Cameroonian diaspora in Paris. I center Black women’s cultural productions and the aesthetics of resistance they carry through African fashion, hairstyling, and Black beauty discourses and practices on digital media.

My current book project, entitled "Speaking like a White person", focuses on the practice of "whitisation" (whitening) among Cameroonian immigrants in Paris, who imitate the language and body styles of French White people to construct a cosmopolitan Blackness and signal their membership to the global business elites. In 2021, I was honored to receive the international prize "Richard Mille - La Francophonie en Débat" (Francophonie in Debate) awarded by the city of Quebec and the Swiss Center for Quebec and Francophone Studies at the University of Fribourg.

I am developing a new practice-based research project on music, language, race, and identity across Afro-diasporic and African communities in Paris, Duala (Cameroon), and Chicago, thus bridging academic research and artistic practice through collaborative work and performance. The first years of this research project (2021-2023) were funded by the European Commission's Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship. Finally, I am involved in two collaborative projects: “Decolonizing images”, with Josh Babcock (Brown University); “Black women's self-fashioning and beauty practices in digital media”, with Johanna Montlouis-Gabriel (Emory University).

I welcome collaborations with other faculty, artists, activists, scholars-performers, and new PhD students who work on language and race, Blackness, fashion, music, performance, arts-based research, and multilingual storytelling in Afro-diasporic communities and beyond.