Retraverser le gouffre sur la terre
La fluidité salvatrice dans L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12879127 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hadley Galbraith (University of Iowa, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 313-320 |
| Publication date | 2021-05-27 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1740-9292 • E-ISSN: 1740-9306 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17409292.2021.1918491 |
| OpenAlex | W3200397320 |
| Language | FR |
| References cited | 2 |
This article argues that in Chamoiseau’s novel L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997), the author translates Glissant’s concept of the « gouffre » into a liquid, earthly rhizome. The forest in the novel is the site of a race which reveals the transformation of chaotic subjectivity into an elderly enslaved man’s adaptive prowess, a ferocious animal’s empathy for his former prey, and a plantation master’s recognition of his mistaken rigidity. The intertwining of these experiences is a re-creation of the process of entanglement, in a setting which demands an openness to the unknown within one’s environment, oneself, and the Other. At the end of their race, exchanges of “waters” of the body—saliva and tears—are analyzed as the beginnings of a rhizome of “Relation.” L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse foregrounds a multilateral healing of slavery’s destruction, through the acceptance of fluid selves, by descendants of those it opposed
Art · Epistemology · Ethnology · Humanities · Sociology · Subjectivity · African Studies and Ethnography · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · North African History and Literature · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
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