The poetics of nationalism in Dany Bébel-Gisler's Leonora

Resumen

This paper looks at Leonora: The Buried Story of Guadeloupe as a textual enactment of the recuperation of an entire people's history, in which one woman represents their collective prise de conscience. By recounting one woman's personal life story, Dany Bébel-Gisler also uncovers a collective history of Guadeloupeans, thereby revealing a potential path for the creation of a national identity. This paper analyzes some of the techniques and topics common to nationalist discourse that Bébel-Gisler adopted in the development of her poetics—the ideal of the "noble peasant," the important role played by proto-elites, the notion of cultural purity and authenticity, and language planning. The broad theoretical frameworks of nationalism and language are played out within the narrative, both at the textual level foregrounding Leonora's life as representative of her people, and at the metatextual level focusing on the poetics of nationalism.