INQUIRY | SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK | REVIEW 2025 13 (CONTINUED ON PAGE 14) Thiaroye massacre in Senegal. The massacre remains a painful but under-acknowledged episode. West African soldiers, known as tirailleurs sénégalais, were killed by the French military after peacefully demanding back pay for their service in World War II. French authorities labeled them mutineers. But what the archives suppress, cinema and literature revive. Ousmane Sembène’s Camp de Thiaroye, for example, exposes the racialized betrayal at the heart of the incident, while a recent graphic novel adaptation translates this complex history into a visual language accessible to new generations. This editorial project runs parallel to a broader, long-term book endeavor on which Berrada is working. Tentatively titled French Colonial Massacres in Contemporary Works, it investigates how historical atrocities in Algeria, Senegal, Central Africa, and Madagascar are revisited in postcolonial cultural production. “How do we talk about something when we don’t have witnesses who are alive and who could tell their story? There is that fictive part, but that fictive part is very important to understand what actually happened because of censorship inflicted by the French. That silence that lasted for decades. This is what literature can do, what fiction, what film can do to make us understand certain events that are porous and that have a lot of missing documents, and of course, also a lot of censorship.” Berrada’s book centers Africa, while the special issue spans the Pacific and Caribbean. Both ask: what happens when history forgets but art remembers? Colonial massacres persist in silence and bureaucracy, yet fiction, film, and visual culture transform remembrance into testimony—acts of memory and resistance across continents. Biology How One Bacterium Is Changing Disease Control Dylan Shropshire didn’t set out to become a microbiologist. As an undergraduate student studying insect behavior in Tennessee, he worked with flesh-feeding flies—critters he raised on rotting beef liver, no less. But while studying the flies, he began thinking about how the microbes in that complex environment might influence the lifestyle of the fly. When it came time to consider graduate school, Shropshire was drawn to microbiomes and aimed to join a lab focused on this area. That curiosity led him to a doctoral program at Vanderbilt University, where he was introduced to Wolbachia, a type of bacteria that lives inside the cells of its insect hosts. Wolbachia does some incredible things, says Shropshire, assistant professor of biological sciences. The bacterium defies easy classification. It’s neither strictly a parasite nor a mutualist. Instead, it inhabits a fascinating biological gray area, with the ability to manipulate its host’s reproduction, suppress pathogens, provide nutrients, and influence entire populations—all while being maternally transmitted from one generation to the next. A demonstration during the Algerian War for Independence in 1961. Dylan Shropshire (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11) Dominique Berretty / Getty Images, Christine Kreschollek
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