Introduction : Transmettre (dans) la Caraïbe : Continuités, ruptures, passages et expériences

Nicole Ollier, Professor emeritus at the University Bordeaux-Montaigne, completed her entire career there. She began as a linguist, grew as an Americanist with a Doctorate on Mark Twain, specialized in Greek American studies (Monumental Doctorate in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle), widened her field to Minority Literature, Gender and Cultural Studies, but also Caribbean Literature. Via her practice of Poetry Collaborative Translation, and her creation of « Passages », she explored such Caribbean Voices as Olive Senior (Un Pipiri m’a dit / A Little Bird Told Me, Castor Astral, Bègles, 2014), Lorna Goodison, (La Mangue de la Poésie / The Mango of Poetry, PU Bordeaux, 2018) and a selection of various others, but also Afro-American, Kamau Daaood (Notes d’un Griot de L.A. / Griot Notes from L.A., Castor Astral, 2012), Melba Boyd, and more recently Japanese-American, with Amy Uyematsu. The idea of a conference on Transmission in the Caribbean area was inspired from a magnificent exhibition on that theme created by Professor and plastician Patricia Donatien who gave her a private tour of it in Fort de France, and remained an emblem of this transmission, particularly through generations of women.

Kerry-Jane Wallart is a Full Professor in postcolonial/decolonial literatures and Black Atlantic studies at the University of Orléans–after having lectured at Paris-Dauphine and Sorbonne Université. Her interests are Caribbean genres, performance, and audience response. Her Alma Mater is the Ecole Normale Supérieure Ulm and she has been a Procter Fellow (Princeton University). She is the recipient of the Jacqueline Bardolph PhD Prize (2006). She published over forty book chapters and articles in various journals about contemporary Caribbean, North American and African literatures, with a focus on gender issues. She edited three issues of Commonwealth Essays and Studies (2009; 2012; 2018, with Fiona McCann) ; co-edited an issue of the Revue de Littérature Comparée (2017, with Véronique Gély and Clémentine Lucien) ; a volume on the works of Jamaica Kincaid(Wagadu, 2019, with Corinne Bigot and Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika) ; an issue of Sillages Critiques (“Taking Place”, 2019, with Guillaume Fourcade) ; a journal issue (Women: A Cultural Review 31.2, 2020, “Writing Precariously”) as well as a collected volume (Transnational Jean Rhys. Bloomsbury, 2020, with Juliana Lopoukhine and Frédéric Regard) about Jean Rhys. She is currently finalising a monograph entitled Writers as Performers where she introduces the notion of “instanciation” in order to re-think the opposition between the oral and the written in anglophone Caribbean literature (forthcoming, Brill, 2021). Her research interests are located at the intersection of genre (and its hybridization), performance, the construction of authorship, and diasporic forms of writing.