About

Professor Fabienne Viala completed her PhD in Comparative Literature in 2004 at the University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, where she taught Latin American, Caribbean and Francophone Literatures and Cultures until 2008. In 2009, she joined the University of Cambridge as a Mellon Fellow in Postcolonial, Latin American and Caribbean Literatures. Fabienne has also taught Spanish, Latin American and Comparative Literatures at King's College London.

Research interests

Prof Viala has published comparative studies on the Latin American and francophone historical novel, national memory and crime fiction in Cuban, Spanish and French literatures.

Fabienne's last monograph is entitled The Post-Columbus Syndrome: Identities, Cultural Nationalism and Commemorations in the Caribbean (Palgrave Macmillan, New Caribbean Series, 2014). It examines the representation of Christopher Columbus in Hispanic, English and French Caribbean Cultural production, with a focus on literature, music and performance. It analyses the relationship between memory, historical commemoration and cultural nationalism in the Caribbean Islands since the 1990s and develops a transcultural and multilinguistic approach to the region.

Current projects

Fabienne researches the question of the Reparations for slavery in the Caribbean at the regional level. She considers the different, multiple and mutable strategies for collective remembrance in the Hispanic, Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, and the ways in which catharsis, historical memory and cultural performance are in resonance when it comes to represent the trauma of slavery in the civil society and in the public space.

Fabienne's research looks at how colonialism and neocolonialism generated an extractivist ideology of dominance that has created the racial discriminations and climatic damages we are facing today all over the world. She explores Caribbean artistic responses to those issues where race and climate intersect in critical terms.

Administrative roles

• Head of Hispanic Studies
• Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies

Selected publications

• The Post-Columbus Syndrome: Commemorations, Identity and Cultural Nationalisms in the Caribbean since 1992 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
• Marguerite Yourcenar, Alejo Carpentier. Ecritures de l’histoire (Peter Lang Ed., Bruxelles, Belgium, 2008)
• Le roman noir au paradis perdu : le néo-polar cubain de Leonardo Padura (L’Harmattan Ed., Paris, France, 2007)
• Le roman noir à l’encre de l’histoire: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán et Didier Daeninckx (L’Harmattan Ed., Paris, France, 2006)
• Alejo Carpentier, Pintando la Historia : Narrativa histórica, narrativa icnográfica (Tizona Ed., Barcelona, Spain, 2006)

Qualifications

• PhD (University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle)
• Agrégation de Lettres Modernes (ENS Fontenay Saint Cloud)