Lewis Seifert’s upcoming online lecture on November 19, 5 p.m. (CET) is titled (Post-) Colonial Folklore Collections as Transcultural Texts: Examples from the Francophone World.
The link to the Zoom Meeting will be published soon!
Abstract
As by-products of colonialism, the many collections of indigenous folklore translated into European languages are problematic for (at least) two reasons: first, because they purport to represent in writing texts performed orally, which also involves translation across languages and cultures; and second, because their editors often extract the oral performances from their local contexts and substitute themselves for the original performers. Still, these collections and the texts they present are significant records of traditions that in many instances have waned or disappeared, often as a consequence of colonialism. Building on Donald Haase’s suggestion that such collections be understood as “transcultural texts” and focusing on a selection of folklore collections and adaptations from countries formerly colonized by France, I will explore some of the questions they raise as well as strategies for reading them.
Short biography
Lewis Seifert is professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University (Providence, RI, USA). He has published extensively on early modern French literature, including contes de fées, and Francophone adaptations of oral traditions. Among his current projects is a study of tricksters in literary and cinematic versions of folk narratives in the Atlantic Francophone world.
