Tangled Genealogies of a Cultural Identity, Or, What Was Madame Bovary Doing In Haiti?

In-person and live streamed: Jean Price-Mars summed up 10 years of Indigéniste poetics when, in the preface to Thus Spake the Uncle (1928), a pivotal text of Caribbean post-colonial thought, he accused his fellow Haitian writers of “bovarysme,” of fantasizing that they were something that they were not. The passage is familiar—at least to Haitians—but the allusions it builds on are less so. The presenter will track those references backwards to Flaubert and Jules de Gaultier, and forward to Victor Segalen and Édouard Glissant, in hopes of diagnosing one malaise of cultural identity.

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