Mardi 7 octobre 2025 17h30 salle 126 Site Saint-Charles 1
Lien zoom pour la double séance : https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/97490165906?pwd=iE2DQVzzHhb855L38qMbqgXBBMFrkx.1
Conférence inaugurale de Pauline Amy de la Bretèque, MCF littérature caribéenne, Université de Nîmes, EMMA
"Vers une écocritique décoloniale : repenser les féminités dans les littératures caribéennes contemporaines"
Résumé : Depuis une vingtaine d’années, les effets du changement climatique sont de plus en plus visibles dans l’archipel caribéen (sècheresses, violence des ouragans, montée du niveau des océans, sargasses), mais le bouleversement écologique dans la Caraïbe trouve ses racines dans l’histoire de la colonisation et dans le système plantationnaire. Les œuvres des écrivaines caribéennes établissent ce lien entre colonisation et le changement climatique actuel qui apparaît comme une résurgence de la colonisation.
Dans une perspective écologiste, féministe et décoloniale, nous montrerons que les œuvres des écrivaines caribéennes offrent un point de vue précieux, marginal et alternatif sur l’environnement caribéen. Elles explorent les liens historiques entre domination coloniale, domination écologique et domination de genre, et réimaginent les liens entre féminité et nature, notamment à travers un renouveau des imaginaires environnementaux (et notamment des imaginaires aquatiques et littoraux), mais aussi à travers la revalorisation d’un savoir féminin sur la nature transmis de génération en génération.
À travers les œuvres d’écrivaines contemporaines comme Olive Senior ou Grace Nichols, nous nous intéresserons plus spécifiquement aux représentations des effets du changement climatique et à la manière dont elles participent de la construction des féminités caribéennes. Si ces œuvres révèlent le parallèle entre violence écologique, violence coloniale et violence de genre, elles cherchent également à mettre en lumière des modes de résistance féminine et écologique à la crise climatique.
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Intervention de Nandini Dhar, Associate Professor, Adamas University, Kolkata, India : "Social Death and Mortuary Aesthetics: Constructing a South Asian Mediterranean in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories",
Répondante : Judith Misrahi-Barak
Social Death and Mortuary Aesthetics: Constructing a South Asian Mediterranean in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories
Death is written about frequently in Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection Roman Stories. Most of the deaths narrated in the stories, and the grief which follows them are intensely personal. Indeed, Lahiri’s previous work largely avoided the political and focused instead on a quietist aesthetics of immigrant representation. Yet it is also true that her final novel written in English, The Lowland, represents one of the most discussed political movements in India -- Naxalism. Crucially, then, the short story “Well Lit House”, included in the collection Roman Stories, takes as its point of departure the temporality explored in The Lowland -- the global 1970s -- and concludes in contemporary Rome. Between the publication of The Lowland and Roman Stories, Lahiri shifted to writing in Italian. If her characters in English are distinctly Bengali, Lahiri’s characters in Italian bear few marks of race, ethnicity or even geography, other than the city they currently inhabit. Yet from the material markers made available in the story, the immigrant characters in the story are distinctly Bangladeshi, whose life-narratives often begin from the violent deaths of the Liberation War of 1971, an event unnamed but hinted at in Lahiri’s story. This paper argues that Roman Stories in general, and the story “Well-Lit House” in particular, serves as an important literary conduit to conceptualize a South Asian Mediterranean social reality. While Lahiri’s stories underplay physical deaths, they magnify and dramatize moments of social death to create a mortuary aesthetics which not only represents an important divergence from her own earlier quietism, but turns that quietism onto its head to transform the personal deaths in the migrants’ lives as inextricable elements of the precarious global geographies.
Nandini Dhar is Associate Professor of Literature, Gender Studies and Creative Writing in the Department of English Language and Literature at Adamas University, Kolkata, India. Focusing on legacies of forced migrations of slavery and indenture, Nandini’s work focuses on contemporary historical novels which re-constitute such histories, paying attention to the intersections between literary forms, neoliberal memory complexes and national histories. Her essays have been published in ariel: A Review of International English Literature, The Comparatist, a/b:Auto/Biography Studies, Gender, Place & Culture and other edited volumes. She is the editor of Contemporary Gender Formations in India: In Between Conformity, Dissent and Affect (Routledge, 2024). Nandini Dhar is also a bi-lingual poet who writes in English and her native tongue Bengali, and between these two languages, has authored nine volumes of poems.