Between Borders: French-Language Poetry and the Poetics of Statelessness

Abstract

This special collection explores poetic engagements with statelessness in a selection of poetry in the French language in the period since 1900. Evoking a position abstracted from established categories of being, place and political selfhood, statelessness speaks to the dramas of exile and migration as well as to the anxious positioning of poetry itself on the margins of prevailing discursive systems. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, events such as the Armenian genocide, the Russian Revolution, or the rise of fascism and political anti-Semitism in European countries precipitated stateless persons onto the international stage. France was the primary host country for stateless refugees in those years (OFPRA), one factor which accounts for the high concentration in this special collection of French-language writing; of translingual writing in French, and of translingual writing produced in France. Indeed, a number of the poets featured here (Guillaume Apollinaire, Chahan Chahnour/Armen Lubin, and Gherasim Luca) were themselves stateless, or claimed to be so, and as some of the contributions go to show, this suggests an underexploited frame of reference for understanding the evolution of avant-gardist poetry of the early twentieth-century. While some articles draw on this context, others are marked by more contemporary configurations of questions of belonging, migration and translinguality. Though the present selection makes no claim to be fully comprehensive, the featured contributions range widely across national boundaries, notably moving between Armenian, French, German and Romanian literary traditions. Together they offer a compelling picture of the development of poetic practice in the modern and contemporary period.