Global Brittany: Breton Literature and the Francophone World

My dissertation examines a corpus of Breton Literature written in French from the late 1960s through the early 2000s. The authors I study sought to challenge and re-envision Breton regional identity by engaging with, mobilizing, and, at times, appropriating postcolonial literature and discourse. Focusing on the literature of a generation of Breton authors born at the end of World War II, I argue that this rising generation of Breton cultural activists reshaped their region's identity, literature and political status by seeking literary and intellectual models from other areas of the Francophone World, specifically the French Caribbean and Quebec. By comparing the works of Breton authors, Paol Keineg, Kristian Keginer, Jose Le Moigne and Michel Le Bris with the works of Francophone authors Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Gaston Miron and Edouard Glissant, my dissertation challenges the center-periphery paradigm, while investigating regional Francophone literature's recent shift toward the transnational and the global.;My first chapter, "Celtic Brittany: Between History and Imagination," examines the literary construction of Brittany's "Celtic" past, which nineteenth-century Breton and French authors alike sought to inscribe in the present. Authors such as Balzac, Michelet, and Renan constructed the Romantic notion of Breton Celticism which imagined Brittany as a primitive, barbaric land and a portal to ancient, Celtic civilizations. Paradoxically, however, this Celticist discourse was intertwined with French identity. In the nineteenth century, Brittany was both othered, as savage and primitive, and, at the same time, assimilated into Frenchness.;Chapter 2, "Breton Negritude: Aime Cesaire and the Poetry of Paol Keineg," examines the reorientation of the Breton literary gaze from this ancient, "Celtic" past to its politicized, and, arguably, postcolonial present. With a close comparative study of the poetry of Paol Keineg and Aime Cesaire, I examine how Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal was foundational to the earliest articulations of postwar Breton literature and identity, struggling to express its own Breton form of Negritude. Where Cesaire and Keineg diverge, however, is also where Breton and Quebecois poetry converge---at the uneasy questioning of the legitimacy, or even possibility, of a collective Breton voice.;Chapter 3, "Performing Identities: History and Myth in the Theater of Aime Cesaire and Paol Keineg," draws on Pierre Nora's notion of the Lieux de memoire to analyze how the contemporary rewriting of Breton history simultaneously celebrated and transformed Brittany's past into myth. Focusing primarily on Paol Keineg's highly acclaimed lyrical drama, Le Printemps des Bonnets Rouges (1972), I argue that the hero of Keineg's play, Sebastien Ar Balp, the historic leader of the Bonnets Rouges rebellions, embodies the traits of the Cesairean male hero of Negritude, particularly the character of the Rebel in Cesaire's first lyrical drama, Et les chiens se taisaient (1956). In doing so, the Breton playwright, like Aime Cesaire, recasts history through performance and transforms that history into identity-forging myth.;My forth and final chapter, "Brittany-World: Michel Le Bris, Jose Le Moigne and World Literature in French," focuses on autobiographical fiction in Breton literature of the twenty-first century which inscribes Brittany within the World Literature in French movement. I examine the work of Michel Le Bris, one of the principle authors of the "Pour une Litterature-monde en francais" manifesto of 2007, alongside the autobiographical fiction of Martiniquais-Breton author Jose Le Moigne. Both Le Bris and Le Moigne redefine what it means to be a Breton today by de-territorializing the notion of Breton identity and emphasizing the evasiveness and the mobility of identity itself. Le Moigne, nevertheless, takes this process a step further by actively situating his work at the intersection of Brittany and the French Caribbean, rethinking Brittany's role in the slave trade, and redefining what it means to be a multicultural and multilingual Breton Francophone in today's global world.