Andrew Asibong
Thursday 20 October 2011, 7 – 8.30pm
Institut Français, 17 Queensberry Place, South Kensington, London SW7

Andrew Asibong, Senior Lecturer in French Studies, Co-Director of Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community (BRAKC), Birkbeck, University of London

‘Les Soeurs’ is the strange parable of two ‘mixed-race’ sisters with two very different ways of making sense of the identity that has been thrust upon them. Acclaimed French writer Marie NDiaye dissects the hallucinatory dimension of both sisters’ strategies, revealing the pair as a latter-day Justine and Juliette, their odyssey of psychological self-annihilation shaped and inflected by ‘race’ rather than sex.