Maurice Tetne

Maurice Tetne is a scholar of Francophone literature, cinema, culture, and intellectual history specializing in Francophone Africa and Francophone Louisiana. His research examines how literary and cinematic texts engage questions of race, language, migration, and collective memory, particularly in contexts marked by colonialism, slavery, and struggles for political and cultural emancipation. He is especially interested in the evolution of French across diverse linguistic and cultural environments and in the ways literature and film serve as sites of identity formation, resistance, and social transformation.

His current research investigates two major sites of Francophone intellectual and political engagement. One project examines African literatures of the interwar period, exploring how texts produced within the French colonial empire laid the groundwork for twentieth-century debates on political emancipation, cultural self-determination, and anticolonial thought. Another focuses on nineteenth-century Black Louisiana and the Francophone literary traditions of the gens de couleur libres, analyzing how free writers of color mobilized French-language literature as a form of abolitionist activism and political resistance. Together, these projects illuminate the role of Francophone literary production in articulating intellectual traditions of resistance, citizenship, racial consciousness, and emancipation across diverse historical and geographical contexts.