As part of the Thursday lectures series, Claudine Raynaud, Emeritus Professor of American Literature at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, will give a lecture entitled "Toni Morrison (1931-2019): beyond fiction". Organised by the University of Guyana's Culture Commission and the MINEA laboratory, the lecture will take place on Thursday 20 October 2022 at 6:30pm in Amphithéâtre A.
T oni Morrison, the first black American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on 5 August 2019. This lecture sets out to compare her eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to Deliverance (2015), with her other contributions, which make her a committed intellectual. As an editor, Morrison has brought many black American authors to the attention of the public, while overseeing the publication of The Black Book (1974), a book-herb on black American history. She has compiled articles in response to the controversies of her time, such as Race-ing Justice, Engender-ing Power (1992), which deals with the appointment of Justice Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. She has written a libretto for the opera Margaret Garner (2005) and two plays, Dreamling Emmett (1985) and Desdemona (2011), a retelling of Othello. Continuing her fight against censorship with Burn this Book (2012), she has co-written children's books with her son Slade. At the time of #Blacklivesmatter, she is refining her reflections on literature and racism with The Origin of Others (2017), prefaced by Ta-Nehisi Coates (A Black Wrath) and a sequel to the masterful Playing in the Dark. Blancheur et imagination littéraire (1992). A posthumous gift from this great committed intellectual, La Source de l'amour propre (2019) is an anthology of writings and meditations that brings together forty contributions.
Emeritus professor of American literature at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, and member of the EMMA research laboratory, Claudine Raynaud taught for several years in the United States (Northwestern, Michigan, Oberlin) and wrote her thesis on the self-writing of black American women writers (Hurston, Brooks, Angelou and Lorde). The author of numerous publications, including Toni Morrison. L'esthétique de la survie (Belin, 1996), Récit de Sojourner Truth. Une esclave du Nord, émancipée de la servitude corporelle en 1828 par l'Etat de New-York, translation, introduction and notes by Claudine Raynaud (Presses Universitaires de l'Université de Rouen, 2016), and the dossier "(Re)lire les féminismes noirs" (co-edited with Tina Harpin in the journal Etudes littéraires africaines, 2021), she has directed the 'Genesis and Autobiography' research team at the ITEM/CNRS laboratory and has supervised numerous theses in the fields of Women's Studies and Afro-American Studies.