Publication details
Le roman Civilizations de Laurent Binet ou le colonialisme à l'envers
| Title in English | Laurent Binet's novel Civilizations or colonialism upside down |
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Adopting the form of counterfactual "euchrony" , Laurent Binet's novel offers another vision of history and especially of colonization. Interweaving small history with the big one, the author of novels which mix as much historical fiction as factual narrative, draws a Europe dominated by the Incas which allows him to imagine a possible world where not only the roles of colonized and colonizer are reversed but above all, the role of the writer is here turned upside down because it is no longer a question of a writer from a colonized country who criticizes colonialism, but of a writer from a colonizing country who imagines his country and all of Europe colonized by a people who were actually colonized by Europeans until its total extinction. In this communication, we propose to study on the one hand the consequences of such a reversal of roles and the conditions in which this possible world could have existed and, on the other, the narrative choices that the position of the author - half novelist half historian - in relation to his new role as representative of a colonized country implies. Finally, we will also have to address the question of the reversal of the positions of the center and the periphery, political and cultural, and the consequences that this counterfactual change has had on the imaginary fate of the Old Continent. |
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