Tuesday 29 January
5.15-6.30pm, Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Charlotte Mackay (University of Melbourne) – ‘Aquatic Africas: An ecocritical reading of water symbolism in Léonora Miano’s Les aubes écarlates’

Ecocriticism, broadly defined as “the relationship between literature and the physical environment”, emerged in the Anglo-American milieu in the 1980s and has only recently been applied to the texts of authors originating from formerly colonised territories across the developing world. From the intersection of ecocritical and postcolonial studies was born ecocritical postcolonial studies. This field considers the relationship between the natural environment in all its forms and colonial pasts - memories, traumas and vestiges that have profoundly marked both physically and psychically postcolonial spaces and imaginaries. Ecocritical postcolonial work in Sub-Saharan Africa has tended to focus on the texts of Anglophone white authors neglecting those of black authors all while recognising the need to expand the critical scope to include the region’s abundant Francophone literature. In this paper, I propose to consider the work of a young Cameroonian author, Léonora Miano, through an ecocritical reading of her 2009 novel Les aubes écarlates [Scarlet dawns]. In this novel, Miano integrates the natural elements of her Equatorial African home space as witnesses to the “ignored wounds of the African soul” scarred by the aftereffects of slavery and colonisation whose traumas continue to resonate in the postcolonial era. The author is particularly attentive to water in its numerous manifestations that she erects across her text as a lieu de mémoire for painful pasts and namely that of the Middle Passage. If water is invariably associated in this text with dislocation and death, Miano also invests it with regenerating and federating qualities which enable her to reunite around a common history and memory Africa and her dispersed diasporas on the other side of the Atlantic.

Demystifying the DPhil and Beyond: A Graduate & ECR Roundtable

French Graduate Seminar

Hilary 2019

5.15pm-6.30pm, The Hovenden Room, All Soul’s College

Week 3 (Tuesday 29^th January)

Charlotte Mackay (University of Melbourne) – Aquatic Africas: An ecocritical reading of water symbolism in Léonora Miano’s Les aubes écarlates

Demystifying the DPhil and Beyond: A Graduate and ECR Q&A

Week 5 (Tuesday 12^th February)

Marie Daouda (Oriel) – Baudelaire's desperate prayer: hoping against Hugo?

Jessica Rushton (Oriel) – An exploration of olfaction in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud

Week 7 (Tuesday 26^th February)

Nupur Patel (Lincoln) – Deconstructing Modesty: The Dames des Roches and the Notion of pudeur in Sixteenth-Century France

Rachel Benoit (Oriel) – Stillborn: the misconceived child in Gustave Flaubert and William Faulkner