A lecture with Professor Maya Boutaghou. Maya Boutaghou is an Associate Professor of French at the University of Virginia. Adopting a unique transcolonial perspective, her research offers a new approach to the fields of comparative literature and postcolonial studies with poetical and textual perspectives on postcolonial literature and cultural identity construction in the 19th  and 20th centuries. Her first book, Occidentalismes, Romans historiques postcoloniaux et identités nationales au dix-neuvième siècle (Honoré Champion, 2016), compares different renaissances and cultural identities in construction within the literary genre of the historical novel. Her new book, White Tongue, Brown Skin: The Colonized Woman and Language (University of Virginia Press, 2024), treats colonialism as analogous to a disease, manifesting itself in symptoms of multilingualism and cultural pluralism. The book shows how violently imposed multilingualism engenders in the mind of the colonized subject a state of permanent self-translation between two or more languages with unequal political and emotional power.