Fall 2009 Events
"Eating the Tropics: Lafcadio Hearn's Martinique"
Date: Monday, October 5, 2009
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: 315 PH
Presenter: Valérie Loichot
This lecture examines Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn’s Martinican writings (1887-1889). Focusing on questions of race, consumption, and eroticism, Valérie Loichot shows that clear-cut boundaries between the eater and the consumed, the voyeur and the seen, the “white” and the “colored” are much more fluid than what they appear to be. She also argues that Hearn’s “positive amalgamation” theory of race, privileging the “mixed” over the “pure,” already highlights the characteristics of Créolité a century before the publication of Bernabé, Confiant, and Chamoiseau’s Creole manifesto. Professor Loichot is the author of Orphan narratives: the Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (University of Virginia Press, 2007).
