Tuesday, 17th October 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Aditi Gupta (Exeter College, Oxford): 'Networks & Roots of Early French Indology: A Catalogue of Indian Manuscripts in 18th-century Paris'

Knowledge-power structures have been extensively studied for nineteenth-century British-colonised India. Lesser known is the fact that a century earlier France too was a contender in the race to colonise the people. This paper will shed light on the process of knowledge production on India in eighteenth-century France. Early French Indology developed under Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), a scholar and linguist celebrated for the first translation of Zend-Avesta, a Zoroastrian scripture. I will analyse a catalogue of Indian manuscripts sent to Anquetil-Duperron by Jean-Baptiste Gentil (1726-1799), a Frenchman who came to India in 1752 as a junior officer in the French East India company, and later served as a military advisor to Indian princes.

In the list that he drew up, Gentil provides titles and brief notes on the manuscripts he had sent to the scholar at his residence in Marly, a Parisian suburb. On the same pages, Anquetil-Duperron thematised the titles and scribbled notes along the margins. This catalogue stands witness to the knowledge exchange between two Frenchmen sharing a common interest: understanding India.

Rebecca Boyd (St Hugh's College, Oxford): 'Monsters out of the closet? Nightmarish lesbian identity in fin-de-siècle France'

‘Lesbos se trouve à chaque coin de rue…’ Written in 1884, these words of Henry Fouquier summon the vision of a fin-de-siècle France engulfed by legions upon legions of women-loving women. Such a claim may not have reflected the historical reality of the streets of Paris, but it does give an idea of the cultural landscape at the time. Lesbians were indeed to be found everywhere, whether in the poetry of Baudelaire and Verlaine, the sculptures of Rodin, the novels of Balzac and Zola, or the paintings of Courbet and Klimt – not to mention swathes of pornographic productions. Yet almost without fail, women who love other women were represented by these men as monstrous, vampiric creatures, belonging to the shadows. Towards the turn of the century, however, a new tendency emerged. Self-professed lesbians such as Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien began actively to embrace this discourse, styling themselves as nocturnal femmes fatales and using nightmarish imagery to signal their queerness to others like them, in their writing as well as in real life. How did they go about reclaiming the fin-de-siècle nightmarescape for themselves? How did this endeavour contribute to the broader development of lesbian identity as we understand it today? And what can it tell us about the perks and perils of accepting a notion of queerness founded on monstrosity and fear?