Fugitive Journeys

A day long program on migrant labour, emancipatory struggles and the lasting impacts of French colonialism. 

The event will begin with a screening of West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979) and is directly followed by a panel discussion on forced displacement and work. The program will close with a screening of Souleymane’s Story (2024).

Directed by Med Hondo, West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979) takes place aboard a giant slave ship in an abandoned Citroën factory. The film traces the history of the West Indies through several centuries of French oppression. The ship becomes a stage for the people to tell stories via song and dance—from their enslavement to their displacement in Metropolitan France.

Set in the present, Souleymane’s Story (2024) follows an undocumented Guinean immigrant, Souleymane (Abou Sangare) through the bustling streets of Paris for over two days as he makes bike courier food deliveries while preparing for his asylum interview. Part of an underground economy of couriers who rent verified accounts, Souleymane works morning to night, piecing together a life between the strict schedule of the homeless shelter he stays at with other immigrants, and fitting in as many deliveries as possible to avoid penalties from the app. Directed by Boris Lojkine.

All Mayworks Festival events are free. Registration required.

Presented with the Caribbean Solidarity Network, UofT’s New College Community Engaged Learning and Caribbean Studies.

Kevin Edmonds
Kevin Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Community Engaged Learning and Caribbean Studies (Teaching Stream) at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Toronto, specializing in Caribbean political economy, community histories of alternative/illicit development, foreign intervention and the region’s radical political tradition. His publications include “Beyond Racial Capitalism: Cooperatives in the African Diaspora” (co-authored with Caroline Shenaz Hosein and Sharon Austin), “Guns, Gangs and Garrison Communities in the Politics of Jamaica at the Turn of the Century”, and “Beyond Good Intentions: The Structural Limitations of NGOs in Haiti“. He also has extensive experience organizing with several grassroots organizations within the Caribbean as well as with Toronto’s Caribbean community.

Chris Ramsaroop
Chris Ramsaroop is working to complete his PhD at OISE/University of Toronto. His area of research examines the role of resistance by migrant farm workers in Canada. Chris is also an organizer with Justicia for Migrant Workers. He is an Assistant Professor at New College-U of T, and also an instructor in the Caribbean Studies Program at the University of Toronto. In addition he is Co-Director of the Migrant Farm Worker Legal Clinic at the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law. Recently he has joined the Advisory Group for the IPES (International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems – Food report on Labour, Migration & Food Systems. Justicia for Migrant Workers is a grassroots activist collective that has been organizing with migrant workers for nearly 20 years. Justicia’s work is based on building long term trust and relationships with migrant workers and includes engaging in direct actions, working with workers to resist at work, launching precedent setting legal cases, and organizing numerous collective actions. He is also on the executive of the Asian Canadian Labour Alliance. He previously served on the Board of the Food Chain Workers Alliance and is former Coordinator of the Community Engaged Learning Program at New College, U of T. Chris has written extensively on the issue of migrant labour. As an undergraduate student Chris was president of the Student Administrative Council UTSU Association of Part time Undergraduate Students (APUS), executive of the Arts and Science Students’ Union and a student governor on the University of Toronto Governing Council. His opinion pieces have been featured in the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, CBC, Briarpatch, Canadian Dimension, Windsor Star, Hamilton Spectator, Stabroek News, and the Jamaica Gleaner., Scroll.In, Labornotes. In 2016, The Globe and Mail named Chris, one of the ’53 Most Influential People in Canadian Food’

Melanie Newton
Melanie J. Newton is Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where she teaches Caribbean and Atlantic World History. Her publications include The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Louisiana State University Press, 2008); “Returns to a Native Land? Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean” (Small Axe, vol. 41, July 2013, pp. 108-122) and “Counterpoints of Conquest: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Lesser Antilles and the Ethnocartography of Genocide,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 2, April 2022, 241-282. At the University of Toronto, she has served in various administrative roles, including Director of the Caribbean Studies Program, Chair of the Faculty of Arts and Science Academic Appeals Board and Associate Chair (Graduate) of the Department of History from 2022-2024. She is currently the Tricampus Graduate Chair for the Department of History (2024-2029). From 1996-98 she served as youth representative on the Barbados Constitution Review Commission, which recommended that Barbados move from its status as a constitutional monarchy to a republic. The government of Barbados took up the commission’s recommendation in 2021. She served as co-chair of the City of Toronto’s Community Advisory Committee on the renaming of Dundas St and Yonge-Dundas Square.

One of Africa’s most acclaimed directors, Abid Mohamed Medonn Hondo (Med Hondo) was born in Mauritania in 1936. At the age of twenty-five, he left his native Mauritania for France where he worked in kitchens, farms, and docks. Confined to menial labor that paid him less than French citizens, Hondo sought another path: acting. During his off hours, Hondo took drama courses. In 1966, he co-founded Griot-Shango theatre company. The group staged plays by Aimé Césaire, Kateb Yacine, and Guy Menga among many other Third World, Caribbean, and African writers, even performing early versions of what eventually became his grandscale epic West Indies (1979). Often labeled a “militant” filmmaker, across his career, Med Hondo developed rich and powerful forms of storytelling, drawn from the West African oral tradition of the griots. These are films that forcibly seek to dismantle what the director has called “the narrative and psychological mechanisms of traditional [Hollywood] dramaturgy,” in hopes of raising consciousness.

Boris Lojkine taught philosophy at the Aix-Marseille Université before he entered filmmaking. Initially he made documentary films inspired by his time in Vietnam. In 2013 he shot his first feature film Hope in Africa, which won the SACD prize during International Critics’ Week in 2014. For Camille he received the Audience Award at the Locarno Film Festival 2019. L’Histoire de Souleymane, Lojkine’s third feature film, had its world premiere at Cannes 2024 in the Un Certain Regard section, where it won the Jury Prize and Abou Sangare was named Best Actor in a Leading Role for his portrayal of Souleymane.