If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman
The following list combines published and unpublished work. Some of my work cannot be offered here with a creative commons license because of the copyright exigencies of former collaborations. Whenever this is the case, it will be marked at the end of the text. Note that not all content here has been peer-reviewed, and I publish it at my discretion.
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La Représentation en profondeur d’Et les chiens se taisaient d’Aimé Césaire : Pour une édition génétique en ligne
This piece produced for issue 33 of the Paris journal Genesis, serves as an introduction to my editorial project for the French critique génétique audience. It was written before I made advances in my understanding of textual blocks and may prove a bit dated by the time I make the edition public. I argue in here that an edition must do the best that technology allows to combine analysis with readability. In order to do so, I advocate for a different set of views: reading texts, birds-eye abstractions and virtual versions.
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Découverte de l’Ur-texte de Et les chiens se taisaient (2009)
This brief piece tells the story of my discovery of the Saint-Dié Typescript of Et les chiens se taisaient. The text also provides a preliminary description of the typescript, a summary of the plot of the historical drama, as well as a brief comparison with the published version of 1946.
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Bridging the Middle Passage: The textual (r)evolution of Césaire’s “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (2010)
[This essay appeared for the first time in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. 38.1 (March 2011): 40-56]
The paper represents the most up-to-date, comprehensive and accurate account of the history of The Cahier d’ un retour au pays natal in English today. I use the early productions and reproductions of the poem to argue that Césaire’s early work is meant for an American (in the broad sense of the word) audience. Using textual evidence and archival research I demonstrate that the Brentano’s edition of the poem is not an anomaly to be read as a different poem as has been argued before, but a central constituent in the development of Césaire’s poetics in the early 40s. The paper also provides a few more details than previously available about the production of the Lydia Cabrera translation of the poem.
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The Great Black Hole: Reading for the Ghost in Césaire’s “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” 1929 (2011)
[This text has not been submitted for publication. Therefore, it has not been peer-reviewed. If you are interested in publishing a version of it in your venue, don't hesitate to contact me.]
This piece is experimental in many ways. It brings play to the most serious of subjects, but not unwarranted, I hope. It is my first openly interpretive offering of some length and rigor. The thrust of the argument depends on a distortion of reading I call reading for the ghost. Jumping back and forth between contradictory statements and formal kinships I aim to paint a tableau, a figure in the carpet if you will, of the poem’s return to and from the gaps in colonial historiography.
