Public lecture by Odile Ferly: ‘Discursive Mangroves in the Contemporary Caribbean Imaginary’

Odile Ferly is Associate Professor of Francophone Studies at Clark University in Massachusetts. She is the author of A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium (2012), which focuses on the francophone and hispanophone regions. Her current research examines cultural politics in the French Caribbean.

Abstract: “As the breeding ground of numerous fish, birds, crabs and other indigenous fauna and flora, the mangrove is synonymous with life in the Caribbean. Standing out far above ground, its rhizomic trees pick up the brackish water and use it for their growth after exuding the salt. The mangrove therefore symbolizes fertility, growth, and purification. At the same time, the mangrove is what Bhabha would call a Third Space, marine and terrestrial, at once both and neither. An extension of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s regenerating rhizome and of Edouard Glissant’s Relation, the mangrove has inspired many Caribbean intellectuals, shaping their conception of identity. It is also a metaphor for the female discourse in the Caribbean, which represents a reinvigorating force in the regional canon. The mangrove thus figures as the common creative matrix from which the aesthetic projects of many Caribbean writers, especially women, have emerged.”

See for more information her personal page.

Convenors: Birgit M. Kaiser (Dept of Comparative Literature), and Christine Quinan (Graduate Gender Programme)