Les 05 et 06 mars 2004 se tiendra à La Maison Française à New-York ( Etats-Unis ), organisé par Denis Hollier, un colloque sur Leiris intitulé Miroir des Antilles, Autobiographie, Anthropologie, Surréalisme

The first session will focus on Leiris’s life-long literary endeavor, La Règle du jeu, the autobiographical essay whose four installments (1948-1976) have just been collected in the inaugural volume of the Pléiade edition of his works. The critic Philippe Lejeune sees this work as the inauguration of what he terms « new autobiography », the equivalent (and the precursor) for first-person narratives, i.e. for the most significant new medium in the literary landscape of the twentieth-century, of what the new novel would become for fictional narration.

Leiris’s fieldwork as an ethnographer includes continental Africa (before World War II) and (after the war) the French and French-speaking Antilles. Thus, the second session will address and contextualize his work as an anthropologist, starting with his participation in the Dakar-Djibouti African expedition of the early 1930s which resulted in Leiris’s now classic L’Afrique fantôme (1934), a book that melds autobiography and ethnography. Halfway between Joseph Conrad and Claude Lévi-Strauss, it is a defining text for the invention of that hybrid figure of the scientist and adventurer, namely, the Western anthropologist.
After World War II, Leiris also became one of the leading French critics of the regressive search for the primitive or the archaic, against which he emphasized the need to take into account the colonial context within which both parts of the anthropological encounter were doomed to meet during most of his professional activity. Very early on, he advocated the epistemological emancipation of the ethnographic subject, working to promote local archives and to encourage local researchers to take charge of their past and to repossess their history and their culture in a quasi-autobiographical anamnesis.

The third session will address the Caribbean cultural renaissance that occured under the sign of a tropical revival of surrealism. Leiris, who visited the French Antilles twice (1948, 1952), Haiti once (1948), and Cuba twice (1967, 1968) and who, moreover, had close personal ties with Aimé

Césaire and Wifredo Lam, is (with André Breton and Pierre Mabille among others) one of the most significant French voices that intervened in the literary, linguistic, and political debates associated with the search for Caribbean self-definition. His Contacts de civilisations in Martinique and Guadeloupe (1953) remains the canonical study of intercultural and interracial tensions and interactions in the French Antilles.

The conference, organized by the Center for French Civilization with the collaboration of the Africana Studies Program, will be held at the Maison Française at NYU on Friday March 5 and Saturday March 6.

Papers will be presented in French and in English.

Michel Leiris ou l’Homme sans honneur the film devoted to Leiris by Christophe Barreyre and J

Friday March 5 : Autobiography

Seán Hand (Oxford Brookes University). « From Cubism to Cuba : figures of freedom in Michel Leiris ».
Philippe Met (University of Pennsylvania). « Leiris et Mallarmé : “ une poésie qui serait absolument poésie ” ? »
Richard Sieburth (NYU). « Leiris/Nerval : a few index cards ».

Saturday March 6 : Anthropology

Vincent Debeane (Université de Paris-I). « Michel Leiris : writer and ethnographer ».
James Clifford (University of California at Santa Cruz). « Impossible Realism ».
Jean Jamin (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris). « Leiris : un ethnographe chez les ethnologues ».

Saturday March 6 : Antilles

Moderator : Michael Dash
Kate Ramsey (University of Pennsylvania), « Michel Leiris, Alfred Métraux, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Haitian Ethnology ».
Carlo Arviel Célius (Université Laval), « Le Surréalisme et l’avènement de l’art naïf en Haïti ».
Michael Richardson (Waseda University, Tokyo), « Is it possible to speak of a Carribean Surrealism ? »
Celia Britton (University College London), « Tropiques, Surrealism and Leiris ».

Speakers

Celia Britton is Professor of French at University College London. Her publications include Claude Simon : Writing the visible (Cambridge, 1987) ; Nouveau Roman : Fiction, Theory, Politics (Macmillan 1992) ; Edouard Glissant and postcolonial theory : strategies of language and resistance (University of Virginia, 1999) ; Race and the unconscious : Freudianism in French Caribbean thought (Legenda, Oxford, 2002).

Carlo Arviel Célius, postdoctoral fellow at the Université Laval in Québec, currently working on a book on Haitian « art naïf », has published in L’Homme, on créolisation, the Dominican Republic. James Clifford teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, his books include The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard,1988) ; Routes : travel and translation in the late twentieth-century (Harvard, 1997).

J. Michael Dash, is the Chairman of the program of Africana Studies and a Professor in the French Department at NYU. His publications include Edouard Glissant ( Cambridge, 1995 ) ; The other America : Caribbean literature in a New World context (University of Virginia Press, 1998). Culture and customs of Haiti (Greenwood Press, 2001). He is one of the editor of James Arnold’s monumental A history of literature in the Caribbean (1994).

Seán Hand is Professor of French and Associate Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford. He is the author of Michel Leiris. Writing the Self (Cambridge University Press, 2002), the first book length study devoted to Leiris’work in English. He also edited The Levinas Reader (Blackwell, 1989). He published extensively on Leiris, on Levinas, and on Derrida.

Vincent Debaene, who teaches French literature at Paris-IV-Sorbonne, has published Nadja d’André Breton (Hatier, 2002), and a series of articles devoted to literature and anthropology in France : « L’Adieu au voyage. A propos de Tristes tropiques », Gradhiva, nº 32, décembre 2002 and the Cahier de l’Herne devoted to Lévi-Strauss.

Denis Hollier

Jean Jamin teaches anthropology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He is the author of Les Lois du silence. Essai sur la fonction sociale du secret (Maspero, 1977). He also edited a series of Leiris’s posthumous volumes among which his Journal (1922-1989) and a collection of his work on Africa in a volume entitled Miroir de l’Afrique (Gallimard, 1996). He is also the editor of Gradhiva and L’Homme.

Philippe Met, who teaches in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Formules de la poésie. Etudes sur Ponge, Leiris, Char et Du Bouchet (PUF, 1999). He also is one of the editors of the Pléiade edition of the works of Francis Ponge.

Kate Ramsey is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Humanities Forum, teaching in the Anthropology Department. In 2002-2003, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Religion and American Life. She has published articles in Radical History Review and several anthologies, and is currently working on a book studying the politics of religion and law in Haiti.

Michael Richardson is visiting professor at Waseda University in Tokyo from 2004. He is the author of The Experience of Culture ( Sage Publications, 2001 ). He has also written many articles on various aspects of surrealism and has edited several collections of surrealist writings, including The Dedalus Book of Surrealism (Dedalus, 1993-4), The Absence of myth. Writings on Surrealism (Verso, 1994), Refusal of the Shadow : Surrealism and the Caribbean (Verso, 1996) and, with Krzysztof Fijakowski, Surrealism Against the Current (Pluto, 2001).

Richard Sieburth teaches at NYU in the Departments of French and Comparative Literature. Organized the first Leiris conference at N.Y.U. His translation of Gérard de Nerval won the PEN award for translation. He also translated Leiris Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour Nights as day, days as night (Eridanos Press, 1987). His edition of Ezra Pound’s works for the Library of America just came out.