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Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 08:03:32 -0600
From: eileen mcnamara <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Talk on Haiti 4/2/04


Friday April 2nd, 4:00 pm

La Maison Française
Christopher Miller

Forget Haiti: Baron Roger and the New Africa

How could France forget the trauma of the Haitian Revolution and
repair the damage to its lucrative Atlantic trade? Jacques-François
Roger, an arriviste baron of the Bourbon Restoration, had an answer:
abandon the triangular trade that had brought Africans across the
ocean to cultivate the West Indies for the profit of France; forget
Haiti, and abolish slavery. Instead, Roger proposed and enacted a
scheme for a new bilateral relation between France and Africa. Free
(indentured) Africans could grow at home the colonial products of the
old, outmoded slave islands. His novel Kelédor: histoire africaine
(1828) is a manifesto for this plan. But it is also a singular
document in the history of Franco-African narrative, an as-told-to
story that anticipates the forms and themes of African literature. It
is a unique marker of the transition from the old colonialism of
islands and slavery to the new colonialism (which Roger will not live
to see) of the African interior.

About the speaker: Christopher Miller is Professor of French and
African-American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of
numerous influential works on Africanism and French and Francophone
literature and culture, including Blank Darkness: Africanist
Discourse in French, Nationalists and Nomads, and Theories of
Africans. He recently co-edited an issue of Yale French Studies,
French and Francophone, and is currently on a Guggenheim fellowship
completing a book from which this talk is excerpted.
--
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Anita H. Makuluni * Madison WI * [log in to unmask]

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