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.

Highlights

  • The languages of Europe designate the phenomenon of statelessness according to two broad trends: while a cluster often sharing the Latin root patria evoke a break with a strongly

  • In the case of internally displaced peoples, statelessness may even equate to being constrained to stay in one place and, as Judith Butler observes, it poses a challenge to dominant categories of understanding that remain attached to an experience of migration

  • The displaced person who becomes the object of such procedures is in turn obliged repeatedly to self-justify, pressured to offer an account of themselves. While it connotes estrangement from a homeland and from political society, statelessness speaks to a fundamental ontological anxiety pervading the self, its place and its linguistic productions

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Summary

Introduction

The languages of Europe designate the phenomenon of statelessness according to two broad trends: while a cluster often sharing the Latin root patria evoke a break with a strongly. In addition to pointing out the specificity of a de facto legal situation, ‘statelessness’ offers a compelling metaphorical framework both to consider the work of a range of poets whose trajectories are marked by migration, translinguality and diasporic forms of identity, and to explore the anxious positioning of poetry in the margins of discursive systems.

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