Haitian Literature: Urgency(ies) of Writing, Dream(s) of Inhabiting. Inaugural Lecture delivered at the Collège de France on Thursday 21 March 2019

« To speak of Haiti and its literature differently one needs to ask oneself, through the words of its writers, what light the Haitian experience can shed on the French-speaking world, and perhaps on the world at large, in this day and age: how a civilisation - and one of which literature would be a major element - was founded on the grounds of an almost unthinkable historical event, namely a victorious revolution carried out in the late eighteenth century by men and women taken from Africa to America and enslaved; how, in the impasse that followed this revolution, these dispossessed, displaced, linguistically destabilised men and women ceaselessly spoke and wrote of a dream of inhabiting, thus demonstrating that literature often begins where speech becomes impossible.
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