Suzie Laetitia Telep

I am a 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. An alumna of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (ENS Ulm) and a former Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, I got my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Paris - Paris Cité. I was also an Instructor of French at Stanford University, and a Lecturer in Applied French Linguistics at the University of Angers (France). I am currently an editorial board member of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. In 2021, my PhD dissertation entitled "Whitiser, c'est parler comme un Blanc" was awarded the international prize "Richard Mille - La Francophonie en Débat" (The French-speaking World in Debate) by the city of Québec and the Swiss Center for Quebec and Francophone Studies at the University of Fribourg.

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. I examine how language and the body are co-constructed as ambivalent sites of contestation against anti-black racism, classism, and sexism in a European country known to be legally race-blind. 

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 Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship during my postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. 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.