En Californie, les Français écrivent leur ruée vers l’or - Conférence – Discussion

Conference and discussion in French, moderated by the author herself, Nirina Ralantoaritsimba, with some supporting materials in English for non fluent participants.

Conférence et discussion animées par l’autrice, chercheuse et artiste-pédagogue, Nirina Ralantoaritsimba.

Light refreshments and snacks will be provided.

Free event. Limited space. RSVP before Friday, February 2nd.

About the author:
Nirina Ralantoaritsimba is an author, researcher, and artist-educator with French and Madagascan roots. In research, she explores travel literature, women’s writing, and postcolonial writings. In art, she experiments with literature, painting, and cinema in transdisciplinary works.

Her recent essay “En Californie, les Français écrivent leur ruée vers l’or” (published by Honoré Champion) offers a literary panorama of travel accounts by little-known writer-travelers: men and women from the Old Continent who left for the Far West to reinvent their lives.

Her artistic work celebrates interculturality, in an attempt to reconcile and balance our shares of shadow, light, and all the shades in between. This is how she came to write a novel entitled “Nous sommes les ancêtres de ceux qui ne sont pas encore nés” (We are the Ancestors of those not yet born).

By studying these travel diaries of the 19th and 20th centuries, Nirina analyzes the origins of great American myths. She also highlighted the birth of what she explains as the French-style “literary western”, which was already rehabilitating the figure of the Indigenous people people at that time.

This conference will enable you to discover the careers of little-known Frenchmen, and to immerse yourself in a Franco-Californian past that still retains its mysteries, and which we inherit through the construction of its myths, clichés and stereotypes.

Encountering these intercultural perspectives and diverse representations of California’s otherness from its beginnings in 1848 will enable you to put our 21st-century California into perspective. We’ll be able to open a dialogue about our current presence and influence in this still-inspiring land.