William Calin  (University of Florida)
Postcolonialism and the French Regions: Expanding into New Spaces?

This paper is an outgrowth from my book _Minority Literatures and Modernism: Scots, Breton, and Occitan, 1920-1990._ It questions the validity of postcolonial theory and rpactice for the French regions, and more specifically Brittany and the Occcitan lands. On the one hand, leaders in the modernist movement -- Roparz Hemon in Brittany and Robert Lafont in the South -- argued that their "nations" were subject to a Parisian inner imperialism and colonization. One aspect of such imperialism would be efforsts to extirpate the regional languages. On the other hand, the activists created their own nationalist mythologies -- historically inaccurate -- concerning the conscious cultural identification of the regions and their conscious hostility to "France" over the centuries. I address the limits of a certain cliche-ridden postcolonail rhetoric which deforms history and literature, whether from the Caribbean or Catalogne, from Black Africa or Brittany; and current efforts to define the regionsl literatures in a larger context (writing in Brittany in Breton and in French, writing in the South in French, Latin, Occitan, and Basque).