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Current research in French studies at Warwick: Creolization in Haiti (Matthew Allen) and Materiality and Corporeality in 13th-Century Translation (Jane Sinnett-Smith)

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Location: Humanities 4.44

This postgraduate session will include two short papers, followed by a discussion:

Matthew Allen: 'Haiti and the counter-tradition of creole linguistics'

The concept of creolization has proved enormously productive in theorizing the cultural, social and epistemological plurality of the Caribbean, offering the possibility of a non-essentialist ‘poetics of Relation’. Yet as a result of its conceptual origin in the nineteenth-century evolutionary master narrative, creolization theories have often masked an underlying essentialism. Research on creolization has historically focused on the linguistic or physiological ‘markers’ of difference; creole languages have been treated as deviations from the linear model of descent. This presentation will sketch the course that debates on creole took in early twentieth-century Haiti, focusing on the work of the country’s first female anthropologist, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain. Comhaire-Sylvain’s study of Kreyòl dispensed with the linguistic family tree, offering a new ‘universalizing’ basis for the study of creole languages. As such her work represents a unique synthesis of an ongoing debate in Haitian intellectual circles between universalism and particularism, while at the same time suggesting comparison with critical currents in linguistics which arose in other countries.

Jane Sinnett-Smith: 'Translating Faith: textual, material, and bodily translations in the thirteenth-century Vie de seinte Foye'

In this paper I consider the ways in which medieval literature interweaves notions of textual translation with a broader sense of translation as a material, spatial, and bodily process. I take as my focus the medieval cult of Saint Foye, or Faith, and in particular the thirteenth-century version of her life produced by Simon of Walsingham in Anglo-Norman French. Translation in the Middle Ages takes on a specifically sacred significance, describing the movement of saintly relics. The translations undergone by Foye’s corpse after her death are central to both cult and text. I explore how the spatial and corporeal translations of the corpse generate intertwined creative responses in text, but also in architecture and objects. I argue that these artistic productions in turn provoke more sacred activity, and ultimately facilitate mediated forms of access to the saintly body.

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