The field of Black Atlantic Studies faces a structural conundrum originating in the combination of a deliberate absence of archives, erasure of memory, and obfuscating of History-writing, for descendants of the enslaved, with the awareness that Western modernity was actually largely instituted with, and constituted by, the era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Artists and thinkers of the African diaspora have thus been read by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic as inscribed in a « counterculture of modernity », which I trace in this talk to the mediated and oblique strategies deployed by two major Caribbean writers around practices of life writing. In Another Life, Derek Walcott evokes his formative years in verse; the text can be said to be performative as it convokes his calling as a writer, but such a performance also stages the deviations of time as it introduces his failed calling as a painter, and the doomed destiny of his mentor, who thought he could not live an artistic life on the small island of Saint-Lucia. A similar displacement is operated in Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of my Mother, which, according to the dedication, was written « for Derek Walcott. » The stability of autobiography in this second text is upturned by a titular absurdity, projecting the readerly experience into porous agencies. Throughout both texts, both the lyrical I and the first-person narrator reconfigure orality, physicality, and a conscience of their own complex positionality – thereby interrogating what remains indeed a complicated access to European, and Eurocentric, definitions of Time.
Pour rappel, voici le programme des séances suivantes :
- 21 mars 2024 (17h30, salle D224): Manon Boukhroufa-Trijaud (Sorbonne Université), « How do post-90 Bombay poets carry on and reinvent the legacy of the Bombay poetic scene? »;
- 2 mai 2024 (17h30, salle D224): Claire Omhovère ( Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), « Tant qu’il y aura des arbres : reprises de la pastorale coloniale dans Greenwood de Michael Christie (2019) »;
- 6 juin 2024 (17h30, salle 001): Juliana Lopoukhine (Sorbonne Université)
