Kathleen Gyssels – författare

Troisième homme de la négritude, Léon Damas s’alignait sur la Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay) et Richard Wright, sur des surréalistes comme Apollinaire et G. Luca pour transmettre son message d’urgence : ‘a ti pa’, la France opère sa mue décoloniale. Damas est « l’antillectuel transfuge » qui, traversant les Lignes de couleur, de classe, de genre, annonce la « Cité de demain » où les différences de tout genre sont tolérées et respectées.Third man of négritude, Léon Damas aligned himself with the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay), and Richard Wright, as well as with the surrealists like Apollinaire and G. Luca to transmit his urgent message: “a ti pa”, France is little by little undergoing its decolonial transformation. Damas is the “antillectuel transfuge” who crosses boundaries of color, “race”, class and gender. Hereby he announces the “City of tomorrow” where differences of all kind are tolerated and respected.

Écrivaine inclassable, Hélène Cixous offre une écriture dont les grands thèmes – le père mort, le pays perdu et la mère étrangère –, aux fortes résonances autobiographiques, s’affirment continuellement tout en multipliant les échos poétiques et philosophiques. La question de l’origine, à la fois singulière et plurielle, donne lieu à une écriture-pensée d’une subjectivité qui montre ses enracinements, revisite les lieux et les liens, mais (se) défait aussi des mythes de l’origine.Ce volume se propose d’étudier les marqueurs de la féminité, de l’« algériance » et de la judéité comme les principaux lieux d’interrogation de l’origine, auxquels s’ajoutent la filiation allemande mise en lumière dans les textes les plus récents, Gare d’Osnabrück à Jérusalem et Une autobiographie allemande. Le volume ouvre par un inédit d’Hélène Cixous, « Un legs empoisonné ».Hélène Cixous offers us an unclassifiable oeuvre, the main themes of which - the dead father, the lost country and the foreign mother -, all autobiographically inspired, assert themselves as such while offering the reader continuously new poetical and philosophical insights. The question of origin, either singular or multiple, gives rise to an écriture-pensée of a subjectivity which shows its roots, revisits places and relationships, but also breaks down myths of origin. This collection of essays proposes to study the markers of femininity, “algériance”, Jewishness and, as expressed in Cixous’ latest works of fiction, the German filiation, as the main places of questioning origin. “Un legs empoisonné”, an unpublished text by Hélène Cixous, opens the collection.

How does one imagine plurality? How does one find new strategies for writing diversity and polyphony? How does one read the most challenging creative and critical works of the present time?This bi-lingual volume of twelve English and eight French papers proposes to breach linguistic critical frontiers by placing careful analysis of texts from different language traditions in a multi-lingual and multi-cultural dialogue. In this collection of theoretically and politically aware close readings of contemporary cultural production, the focus of analysis rests on the multiple and complex global convergences and interferences of cultural influences. The collection foregrounds the work of innovative writers who seek to express the ungraspable presence of cultural “newness” at the same time as situating themselves in the richness of detail of local lives. This volume, most particularly, finds a balance of critical approach between the everyday attempts at negotiation and survival, and the insight brought to the reader by postcolonial, syncretic and feminist theoretical analysis.