Romain Pasquer Brochard

Biography

Romain Pasquer Brochard works on Francophone Caribbean literature and the history of slavery. His research draws on psychoanalysis, postcolonial thought, and literary theory to study how literary texts construct inheritance. It analyzes how literary language relates to a past that resists recollection and reconciliation, and the figures through which that resistance becomes legible.

His current book project, Traumatic Arrivals, examines the relation between the traumatic history of slavery and the "postcolonial" Francophone space. It begins with descendants caught in a history they never chose and which haunts them without becoming legible. Literature is usually given a reparative role in this situation: it is asked to restore the voices the archive silenced and to complete in writing the emancipation that history left unfinished, so that the present can be freed from the return of trauma.

Through their writings, Glissant, Agnant, Césaire, and Kanor displace this demand for clarity and closure. They reinvent what it means to relate to a past that remains, in Glissant's term, opaque. In their work, this opacity is not an obstacle to a relation between past and present but its condition, since it is what has allowed the past to survive to this day. To inherit, on this account, is to let the present be changed by the arrival of records and inscriptions that confront us on their own terms. The history of slavery can then no longer be understood as a legacy passed down from the dead to the living. It is an inheritance that must be enacted each time, as an exposure to a past that resists intelligibility and yet imposes itself on the present.