Vous trouverez ci-dessous le descriptif de la prochaine séance du séminaire général de VALE qui sera animée par l’axe Transculturalismes, toujours autour de notre thème cette année: Small things. Le format sera le même (des interventions de dix minutes) que lors de la séance précédente animée par Poetry Beyond.

La séance se tiendra à 17h30 le jeudi 19 février à la bibliothèque de l’UFR.

Small things and the Postcolonial

This plurivocal presentation aims to highlight the central positionality of “small things” in the field of Postcolonial studies. As evidenced by the title of Arundhati Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things (1997), references to objects often seen as trivial abound in postcolonial works, which do not refrain from looking at events occurring in kitchens or in other minor(itised) places. The phrase “small things” can also point to the more or less micro-aggressions which characters faced with colonisation or ongoing coloniality experience, alongside major traumatic events, as well as to the seemingly down-to-earth practices which enable oppressed figures to resist, sometimes to merely exist. The presentation will look at a selection of texts and genres, from the “ghazal” in Indian poetry to Rushdie’s “baggy monster of a book”, Midnight’s Children (1981), from Hawaiian fiction to Arab writing in English, in order to examine how embodied practices of resistance may exist in and beyond literature.

1. Valentine Lerouge: « A Politics of Small Things: The Example of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children »
2. Martina Balassone: « Homemaking as Resistance: The Micro-Politics of the Refugee Camp »
3. Neela Cathelain: « Decolonizing Women’s Bodies: Objects, Sensations, Abjection »
4. Manon Boukhroufa-Trijaud:  « The Ghazal: the small poetic spark that kindled great fires »
5. Jaine Chemmachery: « From Postcolonial Small Things to Revolutionary Transformation(s) »