Corine Labridy’s journey to Penn began on a small Caribbean island.
Along the way, the assistant professor of French and Francophone studies gained a keen appreciation for the written word, especially from her homeland of Guadeloupe. Sharing those writings, and the ideas that spring from them, is now part of her driving force.
In a traditional French literature course, “you’re not going to learn about these incredible philosophers and thinkers who are coming out of Guadeloupe and Martinique,” Labridy says. “Yet they are just as French as those who live in continental France.”
Labridy did not plan to go into academia but instead began her career as a journalist in California, earning an associate’s degree from Sacramento City College and starting out as a music writer. “There was a very gritty local music scene that was super fun to be around,” she says, attributing much of her personality to these formative years.
“That is perhaps an interesting trajectory—to go from a community college to an Ivy—but I actually would not have it any other way,” Labridy says. “I would not have gotten here without the years of community college professors that were so available, so kind, and told me that I could—so I did.”
Born in Guadeloupe, an eastern Caribbean group of islands that are part of France, Labridy later attended the University of California, Berkeley, for her bachelor’s and doctoral degrees. There, she took a Francophone literature course and discovered a new avenue to explore. “It was literature from where I was born, and I totally thought, ‘I’m going to ace this. I know everything, I’ve lived everything,’” she says.
Instead, she realized that much of her education had centered on continental France, with little to no attention to the specific histories and cultures emerging out of the islands. She had a lot of catching up to do. “How do you catch up? You write a doctoral dissertation about it, you dedicate the rest of your life to it, which is pretty much what I’m doing,” she says.
In the classroom at Penn, her emphasis is on Francophone literatures, and her passion is sharing the stories and culture of the region in which she grew up. “I want to be able to provide this experience of knowing and understanding the Caribbean from the Caribbean perspective,” she says.
Many of the graduate students she works with are from France, so Labridy provides a new point of view. “We’re reading things that they had never read,” she says. “They are often shocked that it’s the first they hear about thinkers like Frantz Fanon or Édouard Glissant, figures who are often better taught in American universities than in French ones.”
Helping students hear authentic Caribbean voices is vitally important to Labridy. She has brought visitors to campus, including filmmakers and novelists, so they could tell their own stories and inform students’ work. A recent visitor was novelist and philosopher Patrick Chamoiseau of Martinique, who won the Prix Goncourt, the equivalent in France of the Pulitzer Prize.
“The bottom line for me is for students not to just hear from me how incredible and rich and meaningful French Caribbean culture is but to actually see it for themselves and engage with the people who are collaborating to make the culture.”
Labridy has received special kudos from her colleagues and students for her teaching style and approach. She says there’s nothing special about how she leads learners; she just doesn’t make it about her. “I don’t think of myself as the center of the class,” Labridy says. “I am here to facilitate discussions. I am here to introduce students to things that will absolutely blow them away because the readings are amazing.”
She also works hard to ensure that all students are comfortable being heard. “At the end of the semester, if there’s a student whose voice I haven’t heard, then something went catastrophically wrong.”
And when some students thank her for providing a safe space to learn, she counters, “We tackled insane things. We talked about slavery, we talked about oppression. This was not a safe space because we should all be on our toes a little bit. I don’t want us to be too comfortable.”
Laughter, says Labridy, is also an important part of her classroom experience “if we don’t laugh in class, then there is a problem. Life is too short to not really enjoy it.”
One of her projects, related to laughter, centers on Black and queer comedians and how their performances can counteract the traditional colorblind popular consciousness that exists in France. “They cleverly undo identity. They present it as something that is not monolithic but something that is rich and ever-changing and fluid.”
One theme that persists throughout her teaching is the idea of “the right to opacity,” which stems from Martinican writer Edouard Glissant’s writings and is especially relevant to Guadeloupe and Martinique. “Populations that were formerly colonized don’t owe us transparency,” she says. “You can actually live and love and respect another culture without understanding everything about them and without subjecting them to intense scrutiny.”
Another theme is the concept of “creolization,” or the unpredictable coming-together of multiple cultures. Today, the populations on the Caribbean islands bring together the ancestors of people forcibly removed from Africa, indigenous groups, people brought from India and China after the abolition of slavery, and asylum seekers from Syria and Lebanon.
“Now you have these completely different cultures with different philosophies coming into very close proximity on these tiny islands,” Labridy says. “In the Caribbean, we could never think of ourselves as a singular people. We always think of ourselves as a collection of cultures and influences.”
Her own teachings stem in part from her personal experiences in Guadeloupe, where she returns as often as she can to visit family and friends. The sand, water, food, and music all tug at her heart and reinforce the lessons she shares with her students.
“Nothing is very stable when it comes to identities, and that is not a bad thing,” she says. “What we’re learning from Caribbean philosophy and teaching is that movement and fluidity is a beautiful way of being in the world.”
