Research Kathleen Gyssels

Abstract

This multiscript research project addresses the inequities between scripts taking the Armenian writing system as a living proof and a laboratory script. I will create a series of multilingual and multiform resources that will change the under-resourced and disadvantaged status of Armenian script and will integrate it into the contemporary design realm. At the end, this will also benefit a typographic community that thrives on feedback by its members. How to design and use new Armenian typefaces without a rulebook or reference? How to access written and non-written archives? In the absence of relevant terminology, how can discussions about contemporary Armenian typography be made? How can a living rulebook for the community be collaboratively co-created, considering the diversity of conceptions and approaches in the field? How can designers unlearn their Westernised thinking and decolonise their ways of creating? The artistic context of this research is typographic creations and multiscript design publications. The theoretical context is diaspora studies and more specifically decoloniality.The socio-political context is that of design educators working to deconstruct canonised education. The research methodology employs critical, archival, and research-based design approaches, through an intersectional feminist and decolonial lens. My design practice will identify gaps in knowledge, develop tools to address these issues and consequently generate new questions.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen

Research team(s)

• Institute of Jewish Studies

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This research aims to reveal a decolonial critique of fashion museology by sharing genealogies of black women designers between 1939 and 1966. In it I reflect on the absence of black women designers in contemporary fashion history in France and Europe coming from my French/Ivorian designer-researcher background. I want to restore missing narratives by re-editing archival garments and jewellery, potentially reattributing designs to their owners by publishing a research book of portraits and photographs including restored pieces. Creating archives, crafting garments issued from collective fashion memory will help fill the blanks using speculation and fictions based on black women who played a role in fashion between France and Senegal. The artistic context is rewriting history through designing following artist Fabiola Jean-Louis. The theoretical context is decoloniality and Senegalese/French fashion histories. The period (1939-1966) delimits Rabi Diop's photographs arriving in Paris and the "Festival des Arts nègres" initiated by Léopold Sédar Senghor in Dakar. My methodology is based on critical fabulation, using imagination to connect with the past. The goal is to contribute to the decolonization of contemporary fashion history by acknowledging and re-creating a denied black fashion genealogy with contemporary fashion in France to propose new creative routes against eurocentric institutional universalism.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen
• Co-promoter: Arbaiza Diana

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

1. A first monograph will be finished in the form of an intellectual biography of Leon Damas. It will contextualize the poet and politician in the Negritude movement and in the broader field of postcolonial writing by prominent poets from African and the Caribbean. Neglected, Damas will here be rehabilitated as a forerunner of many emancipatory movements. 2. The Second monograph is an essay on the posthumous published collection of poetry by the same Leon Damas, Dernière escale (2012). it forms the second tome of my close reading of his earlier collection Black-Label (1956). Ed. passage(s) will launch the book at the end of 2018 or Spring 2019 (by the end of my sabbatical). 3. Meanwhile, I start a third new project on "dark tourism" in the Caribbean, on heritage tourism and new "memorials" in the Caribbean and the Guianas: given the poor and even misrepresentation of local heroes and other minorities in the West Indies, my book will shed light on important gaps and how some (of the best) metafictional narratives fill in this void (Padura, Dalembert for the Jewish presence in the archipelago, for instance).

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen

Research team(s)

• Institute of Jewish Studies

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This project represents a formal research agreement between UA and on the other hand the Federal Public Service. UA provides the Federal Public Service research results mentioned in the title of the project under the conditions as stipulated in this contract.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen

Research team(s)

• Institute of Jewish Studies

Project website

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This study is concerned with female subjectivity in four postcolonial Afrikaans texts ranging from apartheid (officially introduced in 1948) to the past 18 years of post-apartheid South Africa. Poppie Nongena (1978) by Elsa Joubert, Agaat (2004) by Marlene van Niekerk, 30 nagte in Amsterdam (2008) by Etienne van Heerden and Noudat slapende honde (2008) by Ronelda S. Kamfer are analysed using postcolonial and feminist theory (Bhabha, 1990; Bhabha, 1994; Spivak, 1988; McClintock, 1995). Through textual analyses a number of existing findings by international scholars (McClintock, 1995; Gardner, 1990) are questioned, while the female postcolonial subject are explored in relation to the family, the state and the community.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen

Research team(s)

• Institute of Jewish Studies

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen

Research team(s)

• Institute of Jewish Studies

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The proposed research project aims to examine connections between postcolonial Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction in terms of narrative forms, style and the representation of Caribbean societies. Through a close reading of selected narratives, I will demonstrate striking linguistic, ethnic and cultural links between Caribbean diaspora and migrant literatures which have not received critical attention and comparative analyses yet.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen

Research team(s)

• Institute of Jewish Studies

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Virtually neglected in the media and almost invisible in local and international political debates, the clandestine migration of Haitians to other Caribbean islands and to the mainland (Florida) is getting more dreadful and dramatic every day. However, very few studies exist on the representation in literature of this phenomenon, which transcends geographical and national boundaries (Cf. the Maghreb immigration wave to Europe). This doctoral project aims at examining the literary representation of violence in the context of the Haitian so-called boat people, victims of widespread oppression and discrimination. It is the first in its genre in dealing with the perception of the Haitian outlaw and migrant in fiction by both Haitian authors (Edwidge Danticat, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, and Emile Ollivier), and 'auteurs d'adoption' (African-Caribbeans, such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Maryse Condé, and Americans, such as Russell Banks), two categories that have never been compared before. In addition, this study approaches the problems and exclusions faced by the Haitian migrant through the examination of different genres (children's literature, poetry, novels and short stories) and literary traditions (French and English). Furthermore, this research describes in a detailed and exhaustive way the 'écriture de la violence': a writing style that is aesthetically and ethically acceptable for both author (narrator) and audience (narratee). As a result, the victims of the human tragedy marking modern Haiti retrieve their voices and are granted a commemorative place in History (in the double meaning of collective memory and historiography). Theoretically, narratology, trauma literature and criticism, and intertextuality will be combined with insights from postcolonialism and francophone studies in order to break with the ongoing "balkanisation" (Glissant) of literary studies with regard to literature from and on the Caribbean archipelago.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen
• Fellow: Cooreman Gaëlle

Research team(s)

• Institute of Jewish Studies

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen

Research team(s)

• Institute of Jewish Studies

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Virtually neglected in the media and almost invisible in local and international political debates, the clandestine migration of Haitians to other Caribbean islands and to the mainland (Florida) is getting more dreadful and dramatic every day. However, very few studies exist on the representation in literature of this phenomenon, which transcends geographical and national boundaries (Cf. the Maghreb immigration wave to Europe). This doctoral project aims at examining the literary representation of violence in the context of the Haitian so-called boat people, victims of widespread oppression and discrimination. It is the first in its genre in dealing with the perception of the Haitian outlaw and migrant in fiction by both Haitian authors (Edwidge Danticat, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, and Emile Ollivier), and 'auteurs d'adoption' (African-Caribbeans, such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Maryse Condé, and Americans, such as Russell Banks), two categories that have never been compared before. In addition, this study approaches the problems and exclusions faced by the Haitian migrant through the examination of different genres (children's literature, poetry, novels and short stories) and literary traditions (French and English). Furthermore, this research describes in a detailed and exhaustive way the 'écriture de la violence': a writing style that is aesthetically and ethically acceptable for both author (narrator) and audience (narratee). As a result, the victims of the human tragedy marking modern Haiti retrieve their voices and are granted a commemorative place in History (in the double meaning of collective memory and historiography). Theoretically, narratology, trauma literature and criticism, and intertextuality will be combined with insights from postcolonialism and francophone studies in order to break with the ongoing "balkanisation" (Glissant) of literary studies with regard to literature from and on the Caribbean archipelago.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen
• Fellow: Cooreman Gaëlle

Research team(s)

• Institute of Jewish Studies

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The project will examine current discourses on the Balkans in Austrian culture from the 18th to the 20th century: which images of the self and the other have been created, esp. what Bosnia-Hercegovina is concerned which used to be an annexed part of Austria-Hungary from 1878 to 1918. Can you compare these images to similar ones described in colonial literatures.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Duhamel Roland
• Co-promoter: Gyssels Kathleen

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

In my resarch I try to make a twofold breakthrough in the field of francophone postcolonial literatures. On the one hand I intend to bring francophone and non-francophone writers and their texts in relation with each other. This translinguistic perspective will be applied to 10 authors from the African diaspora who share typological affinites ("gender", "historiographic metafiction", "travel writing", "la Créole blanche", "la Médée noire"). On the other hand, notions of canon formation and literary history will be reconsidered in order to overcome the "balkanisation" of both Caribbean literature and criticism.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen
• Fellow: Gyssels Kathleen

Research team(s)

• Institute of Jewish Studies

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This essay finds itself at the crossroad of Francophone Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Through a close reading of five novels, produced both in and out Haïti, we will show how the female writers are still marginalized, invisible in the 'literary histories' and absent in the canon. We will show the conventional concepts (such as 'francophone', 'postmodern', 'postcolonial', ...) reveal problematic. Literary criticism has to be retaught and reconsidered for Haitian, female writings which ask for a interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and comparative approach.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Gyssels Kathleen
• Co-promoter: Rasson Luc

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

In this project I trace a literary Middle Passage, confronting the 'historical' novels of Maryse Condé, André and Simone Schwarz-Bart with those of Afro-Caribbean Paule Marshall and African-American Toni Morrison (Nobel Price 1993). My research opens up new horizons in literary criticism where, in respect of postcolonial literature, the francophone and anglophone world still stand apart from each other. Dislocation and fragmentation, the search for wholeness, the heritage of slavery and colonisation are fundamental topics in the novels of these authors who all remember 'the disremembered and unaccounted for' (Morrison). A comparative perspective illustrates the continuity in style, form and topics between the novels under scrutiny.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Pelckmans Paul
• Co-promoter: Gyssels Kathleen

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

• Research Project