Tuesday 2nd February 2021, 5:15-6:30pm
Online
Justine Feyereisen (Wolfson) - Afrotopia: Léonora Miano's Utopian Poetics of Repair for a Postcolonial Politics of the Living
Over the past few years, utopian proposals have increasingly emerged from the Sub-Saharan Francophone literature to challenge the current dominant social relations in a resolutely pragmatic approach. With the power of the imagination, "afrotopias" operate a shift in cultural, historical, media and political representations for an inclusive society. What counter-narratives do these emancipatory utopias oppose to the logics of exclusion? What would a relational, post-imperialist and post-racist political project for a non-colonial society consist of in literature? This presentation will explore the ways in which the Cameroonian writer, Léonora Miano, delivers an afrotopia in Rouge impératrice (2019) and Afropea (2020) through a poetics of repair focused on a postcolonial politics of the living. Promoting a cosmopolitan condition opposed to nationalist ideologies and protectionist policies, the Afrotopian perspective aims to rebuild an imaginary mobilising an "atopos", -- a place that does not yet exist --, which not only rehabilitates Africa to its inhabitants and its diasporas, but which reimagines and common home for all forms of life.
Clara Baudet (Worcester) - Culture, Nature and Unity: an Ecocritical reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau dissected the layers of human nature in his Second Discourse and embraced the beauty of the natural world in the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. This presentation seeks to ascertain how Rousseau's corpus reveals a nascent ecocritical intuition, and conversely, how the multifaceted aspects of Ecocriticism (Deep Ecology, Ecopoetics...) can shed light on his writings.
Throughout his corpus, Rousseau addressed the fact that the civilised individual is not "unproblematically embedded in physical nature". To map out the philosopher's pervading influence on the critical field of literary ecocriticism; this paper connects an analysis of his philosophical and literary works, while referring to both French and English articles. Rousseau's major ideas on the State of Nature, modern alienation, and the critique of progress fuel debate on human nature, land ethics and animal rights. Together, these ideas rephrase the epistemological framework of Ecocriticism. On the other hand, applying the ecocritical lens on Rousseau's Reveries reveals the originality of his approaches to botany, to a forever-lost wilderness, and to the tension between an eco-centred and a subject-centred narrative voice.
