'And Just Like That / I Find Myself in Port-au-Prince' Imaginative Mobilities in Laferrière’s Novels

In his fiction, Haitian-québécois writer Dany Laferrière moves between different categories while continually destabilizing them. In my talk, I will analyze such mobilities in two of his texts – the 1996 novel Pays sans chapeau and the 2009 novel L’Énigme du retour. 

L’Énigme du retour crosses several borders and boundaries and is in a perpetual process of mobility between them: the book is partly written in prose and partly in verse; it is partly a novel and partly a work of autobiography; and it not only crosses the space between Canada and Haiti, but embeds the two places, as well as the United States, in one another. Drawing on Lily Cho’s concept of a “turn to diaspora” - through which diaspora, and diasporicity, become legible as fluid processes rather than set categories – I will explore how Laferrière’s texts can be said to turn toward diaspora both through switching between forms and through the protagonist switching between Montréal, Port-au-Prince, and New York. In Pays sans chapeau, meanwhile, the categories that are moved between are the land of the living and the land of the dead. What emerges here is an understanding of the Americas, of text, and even of death, that is archipelagic, as fragments shift, move, and resist any attempt to subsume them.

All welcome. Registration not required.

This event has been organised by the Centre for French and Francophone Research. The centre provides a showcase for the diversity of French and Francophone studies in a global context across many disciplines at UCL, including literary studies, history, philosophy, art history, anthropology, global health, and the physical sciences. The goal is to create a space for researchers and students from across the university broadly interested in the French-speaking world to share their work and to promote interdisciplinary collaboration.