DescriptionVers/Mouvementsis a cross-cultural exploration of movement in contemporary French-language poetry and theater from the 1970-1982. The study focuses on poets Anne-Marie Albiach (France) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), and playwrights Werewere Liking (Cameroon/Ivory Coast) and Ariane Mnouchkine and her ThéâtreduSoleil(France).
Major texts produced in the second half of the 20thcentury are often characterized as ambiguous, apathetic and open to suspicion. Yet if we turn toward what French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “minor literature” –works that use language as a “heterogeneous, variable reality” where “authors are foreigners in their own tongue” –we discover affirmations of specificity, vitality and intensity, conveyed in each instance by a new emphasis on movement that involves dance, ritual and performance. Through their sensational movements, and in a surprising turn from “cultural vacuity” and “intellectual nihilism,” the primary works of the dissertation not only gesture toward, but also put into motion andpracticeperformances of difference. Such diverse and dynamic performances, while remaining particular to the work from which they emerge, are spurred through a movement or movements –encounters –that manifest in, through and even beyond the literarytext. These encounters are remarkable for several reasons: they are sensory/corporeal; they span the French-speaking globe; and they occur cross-genres and even shatter the notion of literary genre. Further, from these encounters, ethics emerge. These embodied and cosmopolitan ethics are unlike conventional ethics, for they do not correspond to a set of rules or obligations. They “move” by way of active practices, and transform how wemove, know, become and live in the world.
It is in these ways and through minor tones, therefore, that the texts in Vers/Mouvementsmove as practices. In turn, the practices that emerge from the texts actively and affectively carve out ways for a new, intense and life-affirming future àvenir.