Subha XavierAssociate ProfessorFrench
Education
Ph.D. in French Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Biography
Subha Xavier is Associate Professor of French and African Studies and Associate faculty in Film and Media Studies. She is author of the Migrant Text : Making and Marketing a Global French Literature (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2016). She teaches courses on African and Asian literatures and cinemas, as well as migrant works from the French-speaking world. Her research has appeared in journals such as Transnational Screens, Research in African Literature, Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, French Cultural Studies, Quebec Studies as well as several edited volumes. Her second monograph Transcultural Fantasies, currently in revision, looks at a century of cultural exchange (literature, cinema and fine arts) between China and France.
She is at work on two new projects, Becoming Griotte, a biography of Franco-Ivoirian writer-painter Véronique Tadjo under contract with Routledge’s “Biography Beyond Empire Series,” and Wretched of the Sea, a monograph on international narratives of boat migration.
In 2017-2018, Prof. Xavier was faculty in residence in our EDUCO Study Abroad Program in Paris. She co-leads the biennial “Dakar: Arts, Literature and Social Movements” Summer Program in Senegal with Prof. Bamba Ndiaye from Oxford College.
Recent Publications
2025 “Alain Gomis’ Félicité: An Ode to Woman in Kinshasa,” in Renaissance-Renewal-Rebirth in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eds. Charles Tshimanga and Didier Gondola, Leuven University Press. Forthcoming March.
2024 “Le colonialisme d’occupation et la poésie innue au Québec,” Fabula, March.
2023 Je soussigné cardiaque, trans. Subha Xavier and Ninon Vessier, Francophone African Theatre: Nine Representative Plays, ed. Judith Graves Miller. In Press at University of Ohio Press.
2022 “African Boat Narratives, Disposable Bodies, and the New Native Survivor” in Cambridge Companion to Slavery in Global Literatures, ed. Laura T. Murphy: 235-250.
2022 “Reading Congolese Literature for Human Rights,” Research in African Literatures 52.4: 1-19.
2021 “Embodying the Tamil diaspora: Audiard, Shobasakthi and the transnational languages of Dheepan,” Transnational Screens, 1-18 (Spring 2021). Co-authored with Charlie Michael
2020 “Wretched of the Sea: Boat People and Narratives of Displacement,” Contemporary Fiction in French, ed. Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams, Cambridge University Press, 2020: 184-98.
2020 “À la lisière de la langue: l’Art pictural de Shan Sa,” in Penser le roman francophone contemporain, ed. Lise Gauvin, Romuald Fonkua and Florian Alix, Presses Universitaires de Montréal : 68-76.
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