The Casa de las Americas’ Center for Caribbean Studies and the University of Havana are hosting a seminar-debate featuring prestigious scholar and professor of linguistics, Jean Bernabé.  Bernabé, who co-authored Éloge de la Créolité (1989) with Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, will meet with foremost Cuban researchers and educators to discuss and debate, from multiple perspectives, important literary and linguistic concerns in the contemporary Caribbean.

Born in Martinique, Jean Bernabé was the founder and director of the Creole and Francophone studies research program (GEREC- Groupe d’Études et de Recherches en Espace Créolophone et Francophone) at the University of the Antilles and Guyane-Schoelcher Campus where he served as Dean of the School of Letters and Human Sciences for many years and where he teaches courses on Caribbean literatures, languages, and civilizations. His works include novels-Le bailleur d’étincelle  (2002), Le partage des ancêtres (2004), La malgeste des mornes (2006), and Litanie pour le Nègre fondamental (2008) -and other books including Fondal-Natal (1976), La fable créole (2001), and Précis de syntaxe créole (2003), among others. He has also written numerous articles on Caribbean cultures and languages with an emphasis on the emergence and structures of Creole.

 The seminar-debate led by Bernabé, Lenguas y literaturas en el Caribe: problemáticas actuales [Languages and literatures in the Caribbean: current problems], is part of an ongoing program of study called Texturas Caribeñas [Caribbean Textures] that is taking place through 2009. It centers on discussions of the first editions of three seminal texts for Caribbean cultural dialogue: Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d´un retour au pays natal (1939), de; Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949); and the aforementioned Éloge de la Créolité (1989), by Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant. The seminar will take place on Friday, March 20, at 10:00 A.M. at Cátedra Latinoamericana, in the School of Arts and Letters of the University of Havana, Cuba.

For more information on the “Texturas Caribeñas” cycle of events (in Spanish), see http://laventana.casa.cult.cu/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4610

For more on Jean Bernabé and his work (in French), see www.potomitan.info/bernabe/malgeste.php