“Pour saluer Léon Damas”: His Heirs and Legacy Revisited Thirty Years
After His Death
International and Interdisciplinary Conference Organised by the
Postcolonial Research Group, University of Antwerp, http://www.ua.ac.be/postcolonial
, 4-6 December 2008.
Léon Damas has been one of the pioneers of the Négritude movement,
giving an international resonance to Afro-Antillean francophony and
postcolonial thought. At the same time, however, with Aimé Cesaire’s
recent death it has once more proved that Damas has always been
overshadowed by Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) and Aimé Césaire.
Through this international homage and forum, we would like to gather
Damas’ friends and colleagues (Lilian Pestre de Almeida, Femi Ojo-Ade,
Valentin Y. Mudimbe), and scholars appreciating both the man and his
oeuvre at their own merits. Although Damas’ work has been considered
“less sophisticated” (Senghor) and close to Prévert’s
poetry” (Corzani), he ultimately remains “the ultimate multicultural
intellectual” (Ojo-Ade). After the heyday of Créolité, the remarkable
dissonance between the three pivotal voices of Négritude invites us to
reflect upon three generations of intellectuals and authors who have
distinctively marked the Caribbean in particular and the “tout-monde”
in general.
Bois gravé de Frans Masereel, frontispice[1] to Pigments
Possible topics include:
• Damas as the anti-Eurocentric ethnographer (Veillées noires and
Retour de Guyane)
• Damas as a post-négritude poet (surréaliste, queer (Black-Label)
and go-between (Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke, …)
• Damas as a polemic politician and the acclaimed lecturer of Black
Literature at Howard University (Washington, D.C.)
• Elements contributing to processes of canonisation or
marginalisation of Caribbean authors and critics
• Connections and disconnections within the pan-Caribbean world:
island/continent, new nationalist ideologies (Porto Rico, Guadeloupe…)
• Why has Guyanan literature (anglo-, franco-, néerlandophone)
remained so far underexamined within Caribbean scholarship in
particular and in postcolonial literary studies in general?
• What future movements can be expected: post-créolité ?
• Damas and Africa; Damas and Brazil
• Damas in translation and education: how to translate and teach Damas?
Keynote speakers :
Lilian Pestre de Almeida (Universidade de Lisboa)
Femi Ojo-Ade (St Mary ‘s College of Maryland)
Valentin Y. Mudimbe (Duke University)
Please send your proposal, including a 300 word abstract in English,
French, Spanish or Dutch and a 150 word biographical note by August
31, 2008 to:
Kathleen Gyssels: [log in to unmask] (French)
Angela Brunning: [log in to unmask] (English)
Sarah De Mul: [log in to unmask] (Dutch)
Janeth O’Casas : [log in to unmask] (Spanish)
[1]source: http://images.google.be/images?hl=nl&q=Damas%2C+Pigments&btnG=Afbeeldingen+zoeken&gbv=2
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