Biography
Romain Pasquer Brochard works on Francophone Caribbean literature and its relationship to the history of slavery, using psychoanalysis, postcolonial thought, and literary theory to explore how inheritance is constructed in literary texts rather than simply given. His research analyzes how literary language relates to a traumatic past that resists recollection or reconciliation, and the figures through which that resistance becomes legible.
His current book project, Traumatic Arrivals, questions the relation between the traumatic history of slavery and the “postcolonial” Francophone space. This project begins with the descendants who find themselves caught in a traumatic history they never chose and to which they do not know how to relate. In this predicament, literature is usually assigned a reparative role: to restore the voices the archive silenced, to preserve the memory of the catastrophe, to complete in writing the emancipation history left unfinished.
In short, literature is asked to stabilize the relation between the present and its past: to heal the traumatic wounds, and thereby to free the present from the return of trauma. Yet the project suggests that writers such as Glissant, Agnant, Césaire, and Kanor neither heal the past nor free the present. Instead, they reinvent what it means to relate to a past that remains, in Glissant's terms, opaque. What they show is that this opacity is not an obstacle to relation but its condition, as it is precisely what has allowed the traumatic past to survive and reach us.
To inherit, then, is not to answer the present's demand to stabilize the past, to make it history, but to let the present be reinvented by the arrival of records and inscriptions, which confront us on their own terms, and not on ours.
The traumatic history of slavery itself, in this light, can no longer be understood as a legacy passed down from the dead to the living, but as an inheritance that is never simply given and must instead be enacted, again and again, in a refusal of any kind of closure.
