It’s Eileen’s Time: Traces of Life with Kalidou Sy

Focusing on the cinematic articulations between time and reality, this article summons cinema, literature, biography, and history to study time as a ductile and intimate form of engagement with the past. Combining analytical investigation of Teju Cole’s Open City and Jo Ramaka’s It’s My Man with methodological provocation, the paper uncovers at every level of Eileen Julien’s work the texture and depth of lived experience: as a literary critic, as an activist academic and community builder, and as the life companion and legacy keeper of Senegalese artist Kalidou Sy.