Responsables de l’atelier
Alexandra POULAIN (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Elsa LORPHELIN (Sorbonne Université & VALE)
| Neela CATHELAIN ● Sorbonne Université Deferred Hope and the Affects of Emancipation in Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad |
Résumé
(W)hile there are moments in these concerts and poetry readings and lectures and plays when (…) you might feel a kind of flowering in the chest at this sight of your community’s resistance embalmed in art, some beauty created out of despair, all of this means that in the end you, or at least the middle classes, are less likely to fight the fight because despair has been relieved, momentarily, and perhaps our Hamlet would be just another version of this narcotic and what, if anything, could we do about that? (Enter Ghost, 150)
Can theater be a site of emancipation? Enter Ghost is a 2024 novel by Isabella Hammad that follows the journey of 38-year-old actress Sonia, based in London, who visits her sister and Haifa and finds herself taking part in a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. In Enter Ghost, the ambivalence of emancipation and the complex nature of coloniality derive from the layered identities, statuses, and experiences of the Palestinian characters, whether they’ve been born and raised in Israel, in the West Bank, or abroad. Hammad’s novel experiments with the form of the play, with ekphrasis, and with unreliable narration, in order to explore the performative nature of hope and its relation to other affects – anxiety, frustration, anger, pessimism, paranoia, among others. Indeed, the characters navigate a deferred hope that needs to be endlessly reconfigured in the face of disillusionment, strained mobility and colonial bureaucracy, but also takes different forms depending on the identity and politicization of the characters.
How does Enter Ghost address the complex affective states that structure the Palestinian struggle for emancipation? How is hope construed as a positive affect, but also a form of haunting? This paper argues that deferred hope functions as the paradoxical and multifaceted affective figure of emancipation. As the novel acknowledges, decolonial adaptations of Shakespeare (especially in former British colonies) have become almost cliché and demand renewed interpretations of what emancipation entails. Enter Ghost uses this trope in order to highlight the complexity of the socio-political dynamics between “48’ers” and West Bank Palestinians, between individual and collective resistance, between hope as political action (made literal by the importance of performance in the novel) and pessimistic lucidity as survival. The novel, as a narrative discussion about political art, thus addresses the relation between emancipation, tied to Israeli power, to the weight of political legacies and generational struggles, and liberation as the result of unrealized Palestinian self-determination.
Bibliographie
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Bewes, Timothy. Cynicism and Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1997.
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Büyükaşık, Danyel. « Transfiguring spatial debilities in Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost. » European Journal of English Studies, 2025, 1–18.
Chabrat-Kajdan, Astrid. « Vivants de Palestine, Histoires sous occupation (2001) : les défis du théâtre palestinien entre sumud et intifada. ». Études théâtrales, 2024, 74(1), 99-107.
Fuchs, Ido. « The future of the ghost: absence, haunting, and returning in contemporary Palestinian cultural production ». Interventions, 2025, 1–19.
Kanafani, Ghassan. Palestine’s Children Returning to Haifa and other stories. United States of America: Lynne Rienner, 2000.
Hammad, Isabella. Enter Ghost. London: Jonathan Cape, 2024.
–. Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. New York: Grove Atlantic, Black Cat, 2024.
Nakhé-Cerruti, Najla. La Palestine sur scène. Une expérience théâtrale palestinienne (2006-2016), Presses Universitaires de Rennes, « Interférences », 2022.
| Atreyee CHAKRABORTY ● Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3 The Subaltern Cooks Back: Politics of Shame and Culinary Resistance in Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada and They Eat Meat |
Résumé
In India, food has operated as a historical tool of caste oppression. While upper-caste Brahmanical hegemony has upheld a regime of ritual purity through strictly vegetarian dietary practices, the subaltern Indigenous/Adivasi and Dalit communities have survived on leftovers and rotting animal carcasses. Centuries of social humiliation have woven shame into the epistemic fabric of Indian subaltern cuisine. This paper examines Dalit author Shahu Patole’s memoir/cookbook Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada (2024)and Adivasi author Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s short story “They Eat Meat” (2017) as subaltern counter-narratives that imagine cultural emancipation through culinary resistance.
Patole explores the genre of the cookbook as an “active responsive form” (Forster 242) where he challenges upper-caste domination of the Indian gastronomic landscape through a reclamation of pride in the long-occluded and stigmatised culinary practices of the Mahar and Mang communities of Maharashtra. His recipes function as “an embedded discourse” with a “narrative strategy” (Leonardi 340) that encourages a wide urban readership to reproduce historically marginalised Dalit dishes in upper-caste/upper-class kitchens. In doing so, he performs the ontologically subversive act of engaging the reader as an active participant in the emancipatory act of culinary reclamation.
On the other hand, Hansda’s short story traces the Adivasi Soren family’s surreptitious continuation of a non-vegetarian diet despite the strict taboo against meat consumption in the upper-caste Hindu-majoritarian state of Gujarat. Sporting a façade of compliance, the Sorens regularly resist the assimilatory pressures of dominant castes and risk social ostracization only to preserve their culinary identity. Their petty acts of insubordination, although anonymous and individual, can be read as strategic instances of emancipatory infra-politics that James Scott identifies as “everyday resistance” (34). Reading these texts in juxtaposition, this paper explores how seemingly mundane practices of cooking and eating become expressions of cultural agency against the politics of shame naturalised around Indian subaltern cuisine.
Bibliographie
Forster, Laurel. “The Cookbook as a Responsive Form”. Food and Foodways, vol. 31, no. 3, 2023, pp. 242-250. Routledge.
Leonardi, Susan J. “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à La Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie.” PMLA, vol. 104, no. 3, 1989, pp. 340–47.
Patole, Shahu. Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada. Translated by Bhushan Korgaonkar. Harper Collins India, 2024.
Scott, James C. “Everyday Forms of Resistance.” Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 1989, pp. 33–62.
Shekhar, Hansda Sowvendra. “They Eat Meat.” The Adivasi Will Not Dance, New Delhi, Speaking Tiger Books LLP, 2017, pp. 1-27.
| Marie GUEGUEN ● ENS Lyon I have a story to tell you”: from silenced memories to emancipated voices in Jing-Jing Lee’s Cardboard Auntie and How We Disappeared |
Résumé
During the second world war, the Japanese Empire established a system of “comfort stations” across its occupied territories where euphemistically called “comfort women” lived under conditions of sexual slavery. While most of these women were trafficked from Korea or Indonesia, rape and the abduction of local women for enslavement in comfort stations also occurred in Singapore. However, no Singaporean woman came forward to testify and seek reparation after the war. In the 40s and 50s, social stigma surrounding sexual violence, combined with the political disinterest of the ruling People’s Action Party, led to what Kevin Blackburn called a “politics of memory suppression.” Consequently, many victims were denied justice, compensation, and political acknowledgement, disappearing from national history like “silent forgotten ghosts.”
It is in this context of lack of historical testimony that Jing-Jing Lee wrote her novella Cardboard Auntie (2013) and later her novel How We Disappeared (2019), to bear witness to the victims of trauma and to prevent their history from being erased. In these works, she plays on the double meaning of “story”: both as a description of events that actually happened and as a constructed narrative.
Drawing on Hayden White’s work on historiography and Kevin Blackburn’s research on the forgotten and marginalised history of comfort women in Singapore, this paper will argue that Jing-Jing Lee’s contemporary historical fiction can help reclaim these women’s erased narratives of resilience. By giving them a fictive voice, her writing offers individual and communal reappropriation, allowing these women to emancipate themselves from the political and patriarchal frameworks that induced memory suppression.
Using trauma theory and witness literature, this paper will study how this uneasy process of emancipation appears in the protagonist Wang Di’s story. Her marginality, expressed through her trauma-induced hoarding disorder, gradually transforms as she finds a community thanks to her newly discovered grandson. This emancipation process culminates in her testimony to the National Archives, which allows her to reclaim her selfhood through storytelling.
| Assya HAMDANI ● Sorbonne Nouvelle Who’s veiled anyway?: Opacity as an emancipatory practice in Shahzia Sikander’s Extraordinary Realities |
Résumé
Long wielded as a tool of oppression in colonial and Western imaginaries, the veil has served to justify “civilizing” interventions, making the unveiling of Muslim women appear as an emancipatory act. In 1997, Pakistani-American visual artist Shahzia Sikander participated to the Whitney Museum Biennial with a miniature titled Who’s Veiled Anyway? The provocative title enabled her to confront a Western audience shaped by the Euro-American canon with its own visual regime, drawing attention not to the veil itself, but to the anxiety and the fantasies it provokes in the Western imagination. This paper builds on my doctoral research on veiling in Salman Rushdie’s early novels and in Shahzia Sikander’s Extraordinary Realities, drawing on selected works such as A Slight and Pleasing Location (1993), Who’s Veiled Anyway? (1997), Cholee Kay Peechay Kiya? Chunree Kay Neechay Kiya? (1997), and Parallax (2013).
Drawing on Edouard Glissant’s “right to opacity1”, I suggest that Sikander’s miniatures and animations reframe emancipation as a situated practice grounded in fugitivity and concealment, thus frustrating a visual regime built on transparency and legibility. By reappropriating and destabilising Mughal and Western iconographic traditions and the motif of the veil, Sikander stages a discourse that departs from universalist paradigms of emancipation of racialised bodies in a postcolonial context. Veiling is pictured as a feminist and visual strategy that exposes the inherent violence that lies in the desire to see the veiled woman. Her hybrid figures, layered silhouettes, and recurring motifs of concealment —achieved through saturation and the transgression of miniature norms —resist the demand for legibility and transparency imposed by coloniality. Ultimately, her work frames emancipation as a shared and situated cultural lineage as well as a gendered experience, while affirming the right to remain unknowable.
Bibliographie
Abbas, Sadia. At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament. Fordham Univ Press, 2014.
Abbas, Sadia, and Jan Howard, editors. Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities. Hirmer Publishers and the RISD Museum, 2021.
Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich. New edition, vol. 21, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Brandon, Claire (éd.). Shahzia Sikander: Apparatus of Power. Hong Kong: Asia Society Hong Kong Center, 2016.
Dinkar, Niharika. Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India. Manchester University Press, 2019.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Gunkel, Henriette, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck, editors. Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2, Vol. 12, No. 3, On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism, Spring-Autumn, 1984, p. 333-358.
| Claude LE FUSTEC ● Université de Rennes 2 La résilience spirituelle : un concept opératoire pour penser l’émancipation féminine dans la fiction africaine-américaine d’après les droits civiques ? |
Résumé
Dans Soul Talk : the New Spirituality of African American Women (2001), Akasha T. Hull soutient que les années 80 ont connu une Renaissance spirituelle chez les femmes africaines américaines dont un trait est la forte productivité fictionnelle chez des auteures comme Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Gayle Jones, Maya Angelou ou Gloria Naylor.
Dans cette perspective, cette contribution voudrait interroger cette production littéraire en termes de résilience spirituelle. L’exploration de La Couleur Pourpre (Alice Walker, 1984), des Mangeurs de Sel (Toni Cade Bambara, 1981) et de Paradis (Toni Morrison, 1997) permettra d’illustrer la récurrence tout autant que les variations de cette logique narrative. Il s’agira alors non seulement d’évaluer les formes narratives prises par ce type spécifique de résilience, mais aussi d’en théoriser la spécificité et la pertinence lors qu’elle s’applique à la question de l’émancipation des femmes africaines américaines.
On s’interrogera notamment sur le lien narratif spécifique au spirituel qu’entretiennent ces romancières, dans la droite lignée de Zora Neale Hurston dès les années 30, à qui l’on reprocha une absence d’engagement politique au nom de son apparent refus d’accorder la priorité à la question raciale. Sans doute fut-elle une des premières à mettre l’accent sur la vie intérieure de ses protagonistes. On peut toutefois s’interroger sur l’opposition établie entre narration de l’intériorité et valeur politique. C’est ainsi de la définition du spirituel comme concept opératoire dans l’analyse littéraire dont il sera question, tout particulièrement dans le cadre d’imaginaires du trauma entrecroisant identité raciale et question du genre.
| Faezeh Barghi OLIAEE ● Université Catholique de Lille Unsteady Emancipations in Sea of Poppies |
Résumé
This paper argues that in Sea of Poppies emancipation never appears as a straightforward move from bondage to freedom; instead, it takes the form of an ongoing, unstable process, as the stories of Deeti and Neel reveal. Deeti is not truly freed; she moves from one form of dependence to another, from a familiar, localized violence in her village to a more uncertain and distant regime of power aboard the Ibis and within the system of indenture. Neel’s downfall is not only a loss of status and freedom; it also becomes a painful revelation, allowing him to recognize how deeply his family has been complicit in the colonial system that guarantees their wealth.
Focusing on these two trajectories, the paper shows how the novel unsettles emancipatory narratives that treat freedom as a stable legal or moral condition, instead foregrounding the lived, ongoing negotiation of dependence and agency. Apparent turning points—Deeti’s escape from widowhood and caste constraints, Neel’s fall from zamindar to convict—do not inaugurate a secure state of “being free.” Rather, they expose the characters to new forms of economic, legal and maritime control. Emancipation is experienced less as a final achievement than as a movement from visible, intimate violence to more abstract and transoceanic structures of domination.
Drawing on the notion of “coloniality of power,” I read Sea of Poppies as a narrative that locates its characters’ fragile hopes for freedom within enduring imperial and capitalist frameworks, rather than outside them. At the same time, the evolving relationship between Deeti and Neel and the emergent community on the Ibis suggest more modest, situated forms of agency: small acts of solidarity, ethical awakening and reconfigured attachments that do not abolish dependence but complicate it. In this way, the novel invites us to think of emancipation as a risky, partial and often painful process negotiated within coloniality rather than beyond it.
| Anne-Elise PINZARU ● ENS Lyon ‘Babylon was chant down and freedom was proclaim’: Care, Conflict and the Conditions of Emancipation in Moses McKenzie’s Fast by the Horns (2024) |
Résumé
Set against the backdrop of the 1980 St Pauls uprising in Bristol, Moses McKenzie’s Fast by the Horns portrays a Caribbean diasporic community caught in a neocolonial condition, effectively living as a state within the state. Police brutality, institutional erasure, as well as restricted access to employment, education and healthcare all structure daily life, producing a collective struggle for emancipation in a highly polarised environment.
Within this shared struggle, however, the novel stages two competing visions of liberation. On one side stands the Rastafari worldview embraced by Jabari, the fourteen-year-old protagonist, and promoted by his father Ras Levi: a politics of rupture grounded in African spiritual return, drumming practices, and an ideology of separation as the only route to freedom. Opposing this stance is the feminist collective Mother Earth, who broke away from Ras Levi’s patriarchal leadership. Their approach insists on the need for internal transformation within gender relations, within the Caribbean community itself, and within the broader British society, if emancipation is to be sustained beyond moments of revolt.
This paper argues that Fast by the Horns uses these tensions to question what a genuinely emancipatory practice might look like. Drawing on Alexandre Gefen’s work on a “literature of care” as a mode of remedying suffering, I suggest that McKenzie reframes emancipation not as separation or retribution, but as a labour of relational care that attends to vulnerability, gendered violence, and the complexity of Black/White encounters in Bristol. As a Bildungsroman, the novel charts Jabari’s initiation not into Rastafari, but into ethics of care: an unlearning of inherited militant paradigms and a recognition of the limitations of both patriarchal and separatist frameworks. Ultimately, I argue that McKenzie’s novel positions care, not rupture, as the most viable ground for long-term diasporic emancipation.
Bibliographie
Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music. Edited by Paul Bradshaw. London: British Library, 2024.
BRATHWAITE, Kamau. ‘Jazz and the West Indian Novel 1967/1968.’ In Roots, edited by Ann Arbor Paperback, 55-110. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993.
GEFEN, Alexandre. ‘Literature as a Form of Care?: From Therapeutic Narratives to the Literature of Care.’ In Literature and Medicine, edited by AM Elsner and M Pietrzak-Franger. Cambridge Critical Concepts, 345-356. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
GILLIGAN, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1993.
hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge, 2004.
MCKENZIE, Moses. Fast by the Horns. Dublin: Wildfire, 2024.
| Caroline SARRE ● Université d’Orléans Narrative Emancipation and Reimagining Literary traditions in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Hag-Seed, and Oryx and Crake |
Résumé
This paper will explore how Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Hag-Seed, and Oryx and Crake engage in a profound reconfiguration of literary traditions and genre conventions to enact a form of narrative emancipation. By employing complex metafictional structures and layered storytelling, The Blind Assassin destabilizes conventional notions of authorship and narrative authority, reflecting Gérard Genette’s theories of transtextuality. This narrative strategy invites readers to question the boundaries of textual authority and opens space for alternative modes of interpretation.
In Hag-Seed, Atwood rewrites Shakespeare’s The Tempest through Linda Hutcheon’s framework of adaptation as a dialogic and transformative process. Set within a contemporary prison theatre project, the novel subverts Eurocentric literary canons and amplifies marginalized perspectives, illustrating how adaptation can serve as an act of cultural and artistic liberation.
Oryx and Crake extends this emancipatory project by transcending traditional genre boundaries and blending speculative fiction with a critique of Foucauldian biopower – which focuses on the regulatory control of bodies and populations. The novel’s focus on bioengineering and surveillance challenges dominant bio-political narratives while envisioning spaces for resistance.
Together, these works reveal Atwood’s sustained commitment to liberating narrative from restrictive literary and ideological frameworks. This paper argues that Atwood’s novels transform storytelling into an act of resistance and renewal, emphasizing literature’s potential as a dynamic space for artistic innovation and socio-political critique.
Bibliographie
Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Vintage Books, 1990.
Nayar, Pramod K. Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms. Macmillan, 2008.
| Kanwaljot SINGH ● Sorbonne Nouvelle Translating Indian Multilingualism: Poetics, Politics, and Colonial Legacies in the English Translations of Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas |
Résumé
My paper examines the incorporation of multilingual passages in the two English translations of the Partition-related Hindi novel Tamas (1972) by Bhisham Sahni (1915-2003). Both English translations—one of them a self-translation—tend to flatten the linguistic diversity of the Hindi text by rendering its varied voices in uniform English and by effacing the presence of multiple languages (Punjabi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and even English, spoken by British characters). Given that languages were highly politicized and polarized across religious communities during the Partition of India, I argue that such translation simplifications significantly reconfigure the novel’s poetics by divesting characters of their essential sociohistorical markers. I further contend that these translational practices perpetuate colonial attitudes toward vernacular languages in India, as seen in the marginalization of Punjabi in the translations, which reflects its sidelining under British rule. While acknowledging sidelined vernaculars can itself be understood as a form of emancipation, translation practices in Indian literature also require emancipation from what I call the hegemony of Western monolingual expectations, since conforming to such expectations often entails the loss of a central thematic concern of Indian novels: multilingualism.
Bibliographie
Texts studied (in chronological order of publication)
Sahni, Bhisham. Tamas (Hindi). New Delhi, Patna: Rajkamal Prakashan [Rajkamal Publications], 1972.
Sahni, Bhisham (self-transl.). Tamas (English). New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001.
Rockwell, Daisy (transl.). Tamas (English). Gurugram (India): Penguin Books, 2016.
Secondary sources
Chandran, Mini, and Suchitra Mathur, ed. Textual Travels: Theory and Practice of Translation in India. New Delhi, Abingdon (UK): Routledge, 2015.
Grewal, Reeta, and Sheena Pall, eds. Precolonial and Colonial Punjab: Society, Economy, Politics and Culture. New Delhi: Manohar,2005.
Kothari, Rita, ed. A Multilingual Nation: Translation and Language Dynamic in India. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2018.
Kothari Rita. Translating India. Revised Edition. Delhi: Foundation Books, 2006.
Mahn, Churnjeet, and Anne Murphy, eds. Partition and the Practice of Memory. Cham (Switzerland): Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Malhotra, Anshu, and Anne Murphy, eds. Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture, and Practice. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2012.
Mir, Farina. The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 2010.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, nationalism and history in India. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Pollock, Sheldon. “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” The Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (1998): 6–37.
Rahman, Tariq. Language and Politics in Pakistan. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2011.