AMY DE LA BRETEQUE Pauline (Sorbonne Paris Nord)
Aquatic transitions: sketching diasporic crossings in Michelle Cliff’s short stories
In her collection of short stories, Bodies of Water (1990), Jamaican American writer Michelle Cliff offers a series of vignettes that delve into her diasporic experience in the United States. Transitions, whether spatial, temporal, or aesthetic, are central to the collection. This paper will seek to examine how transitions (but also sometimes the lack of transitions) are used to reflect on migrations across the American continent. To do so, it will draw on diasporic and trans-American theories as well as on Blue Humanities.
First, the short stories feature geographical crossings as they take place between the United States and the Caribbean (and even sometimes Europe) while focusing on migrant figures and characters on the move. As it spans several centuries (from the 19th century to the 1980s), the collection proposes a historical perspective on migration. By connecting periods and geographical places (from the antebellum South and early twentieth-century colonial Jamaica to the conquest of the West, Segregation, the Vietnam War and present-day illegal migration), the collection brings up questions about the periodisation and the location of colonisation. I suggest that Cliff provides a transcontinental vision of colonisation that interlocks Caribbean and US histories.
Moreover, throughout the book, bodies of water, from the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to lakes, streams and rivers, punctuate the narration. While bringing aesthetic coherence to the collection, they also create material continuity between times and places. By suggesting fluidity and mobility, water mirrors that of the migrating characters. However, transitions are not always smooth, and I shall finally show that due to the fragmented and paratactic style of the writing, transitions in the collection are sometimes quite opaque, thus reflecting the diasporic experience of dislocation.
BAKSHI Sandeep (Paris Cité)
Queer worldmaking and narratives of decolonization
Implicated in the national histories of transition demanding the overthrow of colonial empires, queer subjectivity encompasses a dual move of worldmaking whereby anticolonial critique and queerness appear in an entangled association in times of decolonisation, i.e, transitions. Worldmaking in this configuration remains incomplete without substantive and coeval development of queer narratives of decolonisation. Despite sustained consideration of decolonisation and its attendant meanings in contemporary times, there have been remarkably few accounts of critical analyses addressing the intersections of gender, sexuality and transitional period of formal decolonisation and the affirmative links produced by them. Exploring queerness in the period of ‘dying colonialism’ (Fanon) and pressing struggles for transition into newer paradgims, this paper brings into focus such critical sutures in Shyam Selvadurai’s second novel, Cinnamon Gardens (1998) and Jamie O’Neill’s account in At Swim, Two Boys (2001). In so doing, it calls to reorient our investment in narratives of decolonisation that remain obstinately tethered to absences in the realm gender and sexuality cross-connections. Through an explicit engagement with queer worldmaking in literature and its interaction with colonial-to-postcolonial transitional period, I emplace queerhood and decolonisation in a connected parallel assemblage to suggest their inextricability in discourse on movements of social emancipation in this paper.
BALASSONE Martina (Sorbonne Université / Ca’ Foscari)
From Translated Men to Born-Translated Literature: Normalizing Multilingualism in Contemporary Lebanese Diasporic Fiction
In this paper, I will explore how postcolonial literature encourages the transition from an understanding of language as coterminous with national identity to its conception as an unownable estate – an immaterial resource that transcends ownership by individuals or collective entities. I will argue this point through a close reading of two contemporary novels by Canadian authors of Lebanese origin: Carnival (2012) by Rawi Hage and Anima (2012) by Wajdi Mouawad. By selecting one Anglophone and one Francophone work, I aim to highlight Canada’s dual linguistic identity and examine interlinguistic power dynamics from contrasting yet complementary perspectives.
The complementarity of these two novels is further reinforced by their authors’ distinct treatment of multilingualism: while Mouawad often resorts to explicit codeswitching, directly incorporating foreign languages within the text of Anima, Hage essentially relies on implicit codeswitching, thus describing foreign languages as present within the narrative of Carnival, but refraining from including them on the printed page. Despite these differing methods, both novels portray characters who navigate intricate linguistic webs with ease, subverting the notion that native fluency is the sole measure of linguistic competence.
Linguistic ownership thus emerges as a central theme in both works, both at the textual and metatextual levels, as Hage and Mouawad – translingual authors, writing in idioms other than their native Arabic – explore the complexities of language choice. Through their use of wordplay, regional variations, and semantic nuance, both authors assert mastery over their chosen language of artistic expression. In so doing, they challenge and expand the boundaries of linguistic identity, offering a rich framework for understanding language’s transformative potential within postcolonial discourse.
CESTO Gina (Paris Nanterre)
Art in Transit – The Windrush’s Tempestuous Sea Journey in the Writings of George Lamming and the Paintings of Michael Elliott
Whilst the 1948 arrival of the Windrush generation in Britain has marked a considerable turn in British history, the relationship between Caribbean people and the ‘mother country’ dates back to long before the 1948 British Nationality Act was enacted. The Middle Passage has muted and mutated African men and women into parcels and cattle delivered to Britain. As Stuart Hall states in Familiar Stranger (2018), the many boats leaving the Caribbean to Britain since 1948 “were ‘completing’ that shattering Middle Passage, bringing it all back ‘home’ where it belonged”. Hall’s observation underlines the vacillating position which imprisons the Caribbean diaspora in-between two islands – the motherland, and the ‘mother country’. The boat, both used as a crime scene and a transport, figures as an unsettling locus in Caribbean arts and literature. The ship, as Gilroy explains in The Black Atlantic (1992), “provides a chance to explore the articulations between the discontinuous histories of England’s ports, its interfaces with the wider world”, a discontinuity that is widely explored in George Lamming’s works The Emigrants (1954) and The Pleasures of Exile (1960). Born in Barbados in 1927, Lamming’s writings bring to the fore the experience of Black migrants in England. In the two works cited above, Lamming delves into the meaning of exile as a transitory mode of survival for Caribbean people. He narrates the sea journey of the Windrush generation which he associates with Caliban and Prospero’s encounter. Lamming’s works enter in dialogue with the recent art works of Jamaican artist Michael Elliott whose paintings reflect the internal wreckage of the Windrush’s journey in the light of the 2018 ‘Windrush Scandal’ in his ‘Windrush Series’ paintings such as ‘Storm In a Teacup’ (2018), ‘Deportea’ (2019), and ‘Baggage Claim’ (2020). I propose to examine both Lamming and Elliott’s works as a continuum opening a dialogue between the first generation of migrants represented by Lamming, and Eliott’s art which features as the gaze of an artist born and bred in Jamaica in the 1980s and preoccupied by the destiny of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain.
CHARVALIA Myrto (Paris Nanterre)
Multilingual and Archival Fermentations in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Poetry
Throughout her writing career, Philip’s interest in language remains unabated: often calling English her “father tongue,” the message of the forceful nature of language acquisition and the rejection of the mother tongue in slavery and colonial times resonates in her poetry. “What is my mother/ tongue/my mammy tongue/ […] my ma tongue?” the speaker wonders in “Discourse on the Logic of Language” (She Tries 30). Seeking to explore the “forced marriage” (89) of African languages and English, as well as the birth of new possibilities with the Caribbean Demotic, in her poetry Philip delves into the Caribbean subject’s formation through their relationship with a past of uprooting and their “stepmother tongue” (John Skinner qtd in Francois 4). This fundamentally oppositional relationship is recounted in She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1988) through poems about loss and the forced separation between mother and daughter, the latter being a mechanism later revisited extensively in Zong! (2008). In her latest collection, the exploration of the peculiar nature of language as a Derridean arkhe/arkheion (both in the sense of the very beginning, or origin, and as the ultimate authority) is effectuated through the use of the archive. By cutting and often mutilating the words of the Douglas public summary of the Zong case, Philip accomplishes a double goal: on the one hand, she proposes a hybrid text that vacillates significantly toward multilingual poetry (offering a reading about the power of polyglossia and the monolithic nature of monolingualism); on the other hand, with Zong! Philip critically ‘motions to’ the recent trend in creative media, known as the archival turn. In this paper, I wish to explore hybridity and text mutilation as a re-imagining or a transition process of English as well as the possibilities that Philip’s work proposes in regards to the growing interest in archives and what Andreas Huyssen calls the “hyperthophy” of memory (3).
DODEMAN André (Grenoble Alpes)
Garrisoned Nations: Revisiting John Richardson’s Wacousta
John Richardson’s Wacousta; Or, The Prophecy, A Tale of the Canadas (1832) is still considered by many critics today as the first Canadian novel as it was written by an author born in British North America in the late 18th century. Whether the novel is read as a historical and gothic romance or as a mere “example of colonial discourse” (Ivison, 164), its popularity and its place in the Canadian literary canon has definitely shaped how settler Canadians have perceived the North American landscape and the Indigenous Other. The novel’s clear-cut, binary oppositions between civilization and wilderness, center and periphery, the familiar and the uncanny, only to name a few, have sustained a Eurocentric representation of Canada based on the exoticization of the colony’s landscapes and people, an exoticization that was largely supported by late eighteenth-century paintings of the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham by Benjamin West and Louis Joseph Watteau. Like Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, John Richardson sets his story in a past that enables him to identify a foundational moment which would later shape the Canadian national narrative. From a postcolonial perspective, such narratives and myths have imposed their own values to the detriment of Indigenous cultures and epistemologies deemed unworthy of the Western narratives of empire and nation. In the current context of reconciliation between settler Canada and Canada’s Indigenous communities, I wish to interrogate the transition from a national narrative that, as Jean Bastien recently explained, still heavily relies on the power structures of the “modern world-system,” to a narrative that is fully receptive to Indigenous texts. To illustrate my argument, this study of Richardson’s Wacousta will involve incursions into contemporary fiction by Indigenous writers who have spurred the transition away from the monolithic myths and narratives of settler Canada.
DOUET Nina (Sorbonne Université)
Being queer in Nigeria: traditional religions and transgender identities
“I am the brothersister who remained. I am a village full of faces and a compound full of bones, translucent thousands. Why should I be afraid? I am the source of the spring. All freshwater comes out of my mouth.”[1]
In the Nigerian-Igbo traditional religion, an ọgbanje is an evil spirit whose aim is to torture its parents by dying and rebirthing in an endless loop, through the flesh ship of children a couple tries to have. Some transgender Nigerian people break out from Euro and American-centered notions of transgender and queer identity (such as non-binarity, or the more “binary” identities of transgender men or women) and use the religious myth of the ọgbanje in order to built their own identity. But how can an evil spirit have something to do with queer perceptions of identity?
Through this presentation, I aim to show the new decentralized approach of transgender and queer people in Nigeria founded in precolonial beliefs with a view to rehabilitate precolonial culture and knowledge that were put aside with the imposition of the British colony. We will see through the lens of the traditional Igbo religion and through the ọgbanje entity how Akwaeke Emezi seizes back the Nigerian religious culture in order to redefine transidentity, that is sometimes too focused on North-centered views of identity within the LGBTQIA+ movement. As an ọgbanje writer, we will also discuss how Emezi (re)appropriates the literary medium (that was mostly introduced in Nigeria during colonization) by redefining the “traditional” diegetic points of view, conveyed in their debut and best-seller novel, Freshwater.
FELIX-NAIX Sonia (Angers)
Transitioning in the first works of Patricia Grace: bridging cultures and identities
A perfect illustration of postcolonial literature(s), as defined by Bill Ashcroft as emerging “out of the experience of colonization and [asserting] themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre”, the works of Patricia Grace aim at naming the unsaid, revealing the untold, and at providing the reader with a vision of New Zealand from the colonized perspective.
“There are two sides” to the story of colonization, wrote Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism in 1994, and in the proposed contribution I shall endeavor to show how Grace, a major writer of the Maori renaissance literature movement, writing from the side of the “imperialized” (Said), wonders about the place and definition of the Maori identity in twentieth century New Zealand. Grace also unveils how the young people of New Zealand struggle to reconcile their Pakeha (white) and Maori cultures, trying to bridge their two cultures at an age when they are also transitioning from adolescence to adulthood.
Novels written by indigenous authors like Patricia Grace raise the issue of the colonial legacy in former colonies from the South Pacific area: the present contribution will therefore draw a parallel with the works of other postcolonial female writers, such as French Polynesian author Chantal Spitz.
Transitioning will be this contribution’s central idea and will be assessed as an act – moving from one state to another, from one person to another, from one culture to another. The works under study will include Grace’s first novel Mutuwhenua (1978) and her short stories published in the collection of Maori writings Into the World of Light (1982).
HILLION Marianne (Strasbourg)
Unfinished Landscapes: Rana Dasgupta’s and Amit Chaudhuri’s Counter Narratives of India’s Neoliberal Transition in the 1990s
The 1990s are generally considered as an era of transition for India: the 1991 liberalization reforms heralded the definite shift from a state-controlled economy to deregulation, resulting in tremendous political, social and cultural changes. The national and global media have built a narrative of India’s “awakening”, “emergence”, or “arrival” around this transition (Kaur and Hansen 2016), a triumphant story of progress that a number of Indian nonfiction writers have replicated (Giridharadas 2011, Kapur 2012).
However, among the numerous documentary narratives published in the 2010s that examine this historical moment of in-betweenness, some expose the fault lines of the neoliberal “emergence” narrative, and they do so through the lens of urban metamorphosis. The fast-paced transformations of Indian mega-cities in the wake of liberalization seem to concentrate the processes affecting Indian society as a whole.
This paper focuses on two of these urban narratives, Amit Chaudhuri’s Calcutta: Two Years in a City (2013) and Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (2014). Both written by novelists, these essays emphasise the unfinished aspect of these two cities in the throes of frantic development. They closely depict the dust-covered destroyed and nascent buildings and infrastructure of Delhi and Kolkata, evoking a perpetual transitory state.
In line with postcolonial studies’ revision of Eurocentric historiography, both authors dismiss the view that these cities’ unstable landscapes embody India’s “belatedness” (Chakrabarty 2000). Yet, their urban aesthetics, their narrative scale, and their interpretation of unfinishedness are profoundly divergent. While Delhi’s perpetual rise and fall is emblematic of global capitalist uneven development in Dasgupta’s epic narrative, Kolkata’s slow and forever incomplete transformation is at odds with India’s embrace of capitalism in Chaudhuri’s eyes.
Investigating the aesthetic and analytical contrasts of these counter-“emergence” narratives will enable us to grasp the specific ways in which postcolonial literature, and documentary narratives in particular, think about history and its narrativization. I hope this study will also provide leads for transcultural comparisons, especially with contemporary South African nonfiction, also intent on exploring the flaws of post-Apartheid “transition” (de Cock 2016).
LEROUGE Valentine (Sorbonne Université)
Reimagining the Diasporic Novel: Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
Building on the etymology of “transition” as an act of crossing over, this paper will examine how such transitions, present in Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows (2017), allow for a reimagining of the diasporic novel.
A closer reading of the novel reveals two key modes of transitionality. Firstly, Jaswal employs the fluidity of the novel form to move seamlessly between genres – romance, detective fiction, and the Bildungsroman – while simultaneously incorporating the tropes of Indian diasporic fiction. By combining a conventional questioning of identity, belonging, and rootlessness with diverse narrative genres, Jaswal reflects on the experience of displacement and the inherent flexibility of the novel form. This apparent hybridity prevents the novel from being strictly categorized – a structural instability which closely mirrors the in-betweenness of diasporic identity.
Secondly, transitionality operates not only structurally but also thematically, particularly within the spatial dynamics of the narrative. Jaswal’s use of movement – such as the intrusion of the widows’ transgressive stories into the sacred space of the gurdwara, or through physical journeys across different parts of London – questions the functioning of community space. These spatial crossings challenge established boundaries and provoke a critical reflection on who holds authority in defining communal norms.
Ultimately, this paper will argue that Jaswal’s use of transitions as both a structural and thematic motif offers critical insight into the diasporic novel. By breaking down conventional genre boundaries, the author navigates and reflects upon interstitial spaces – those liminal zones where identity and narrative tropes are continuously negotiated. This approach positions Jaswal’s novel as a work that not only straddles genres but also redefines the possibilities of diasporic storytelling.
MARK Sean (Université Catholique de Lille)
Transitions in Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Seamus Heaney’s ‘Station Island’
From the classical tradition onwards, the tropes of katabasis and nekyia—descent to the underworld and the seeking of counsel amongst its souls—have been poetically fecund devices, granting the poetic personae, the pilgrim or hero access to what Rilke called ‘the deep uncanny mine of souls’. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas must break the golden bough before descending to Hades, while in Dante’s Comedy, the pilgrim is lost in and then delivered from the selva oscura. In his long poem ‘Station Island’ (1984), Seamus Heaney embarks on a similar pilgrimage, visiting the station at Lough Derg, County Donegal, home of St Patrick’s Purgatory, a cave that purportedly grants access to hell. In Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), the narrator visits ‘hell in paradise’ by descending into a volcano on the island of Saint Lucia, while Achille, another character, embarks on a katabatic journey into a precolonial past, encountering
his father in an oneiric descent into the depths of history. Self-consciously carrying over these classical tropes, these two late twentieth-century long poems repeatedly map out the ‘interchange / of life with death’ (in Geoffrey Hill’s phrase), the mechanics of this crossing of the threshold. What, this paper asks, are the political stakes of these transitions—across the borders between nations, languages and, figuratively, the life and death of classical convention?
To answer this question, my paper will attend to the political significance of poetry as site of transition, arguing that figurations of the border, in these two poems, are host to a threefold, interrelated negotiation. The first concerns genre—the form itself of the long poem or verse epic, as imbued in a (colonial) history of conquest and exploitation, the celebration of a bellicose and expansionist ideal of Western civilisation. With their apparently anachronistic choice of form, these long poems, as ‘territories of discourse’, interrogate the canon and these poets’ constitutive ‘coming after’. As well as pregnant sites to thematise anxieties inherent to this belatedness—with regard to both modernism and classicism—these border crossings may stage the poetic transgression of (literary) history.
MONTASSINE Pauline (Reims Champagne Ardennes)
Outsider Insights: the Absurdity of Humanity Through Non-Human Perspectives in Margaret Atwood’s Old Babes in the Wood (2023)
Margaret Atwood’s latest body of work explores transitory stages of existence as well as the limits of human experience. In Old Babes in the Wood, her last short stories collection published in 2023, two short-stories invoke non-human narrators to reflect upon the absurdity of the human condition. “Impatient Griselda” features an alien life-force whose duty is to distract humanity during a plague outbreak, while “Metempsychosis: Or, the Journey of the Soul” tells the story of a snail whose soul is prematurely reincarnated in the body of a woman. In both short stories, alien narrative dynamics allow for observational comedy, in which the outsider narrators become uncanny mirrors of human behavior. Atwood’s use of non-human perspectives offers a deep reflection on the limits of our reality. By shifting boundaries and by highlighting the inherent absurdity of human life, she metaphorically challenges our understanding of existence. This analysis examines how Atwood crafts narratives centered on existential transitions, where symbolic oppositions transcend the uncanny experience of being human. In that sense, Atwood creates an interpretative interplay between the reader and the narrators, whose external insights translate human experiences that resist self-explanation. Through the use of a detached and observational eye, Atwood gives the narrative voice the distance needed to shed light on the incongruous nature of our experience, which appears far from natural. In that sense, the humour embedded in these stories relies on a paradox: only external insights have the power to reveal humanity’s innermost workings.
PERRIN Marion (ENS Lyon)
“Being dragged through concrete in circles”: redefining transition(s) through fluidity in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020)
Akwaeke Emezi’s novel The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) tells the story of Nnemdi Oji, born Vivek, a transgender teenager living in Nigeria. The main character is an ethereal being, defying conventional categorisation. Whether they are a reincarnated version of their grandmother, or an ọgbanje – an in-between figure – they live at the crossroads between the human and the spirit sphere, endlessly evolving between a human and a non-human state, as well as between the living and the dead. Their death, which the reader learns about at the very beginning of this non-linear novel, interestingly coincides with a succession of riots also highlighting the transitional state of social and political affairs in Nigeria.
This paper aims to show how Akwaeke Emezi interweaves themes of gender and national transition within their diegesis, thus highlighting how such transitions resonate both on an individual and a communal level. Furthermore, this presentation will explore the narrative devices Emezi deploys to redefine the conventional understanding of “transition” itself in our Western perspective, as a linear progression towards a usually more advanced – or better – state. Through their non-linear narrative, the author foregrounds the notion that transitions are not necessarily linear, they can also be seen as fluid, back-and-forth processes. This paper will also study the fluidity inherent to the novel itself. Indeed, LGBTQIA+ coming-out narratives are traditionally framed within the Bildungsroman genre, focusing on the character’s journey towards self-acceptance and self-realisation. However, Emezi disturbs this structure by crafting a disruptive detective novel, enriched with Bildungsroman elements, thus challenging the Eurocentric frameworks typically associated with the genre (Hoagland, Ericka A.). This presentation will therefore examine how the author attempts to modify our Western apprehension of transitions, by intertwining them with spiritual figures and beliefs. They offer their readership a deeply compelling non-Western narrative of coming-out.
POULAIN Alexandra (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Manufacturing and contesting memory in the transition era: William Kentridge’s Monument (1990)
This paper offers a reading of South African artist William Kentridge’s short animated film Monument (1990), the second film in the series Drawings for Projection (1989-2011) which chronicles the life of the fictitious mining magnate Soho Eckstein in Johannesburg during the transition from apartheid to democracy. Monument, which was inspired by Beckett’s Catastrophe (1982), a short play dedicated to Vaclav Havel which Kentridge directed in 1984 and in 2017, reflects on the politics of monumentalizing and memorializing in public space, and on individual and collective modalities of resistance to the imposition of hegemonic narratives that write out relations of domination and oppression inherent in coloniality. As the apartheid regime finally comes to an end, Kentridge’s film brilliantly anticipates #RhodesMustFall and the global call to remove statues honoring racist figures which it inspired, although it does not refer to the anti-apartheid struggle explicitly. Rather, Monument focuses on Eckstein’s effort to control collective memory and whitewash systemic oppression out of the national narrative, and stages the irruption of an uncanny force of resistance which challenges this narrative and opens up a space for alternative futurities.
[1]EMEZI, Akwaeke. Freshwater, London: Faber & Faber, 2019, p.226.