From Lausanne to Africa via Australia…
In the early 1980s, Jean-Marie Volet from the canton of Vaud, then a primary school teacher in St-Cergue, moved with his family to Australia. He decided to further his education by enrolling in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Western Australia in Perth. It was there, somewhat by chance, that he discovered French-speaking African literature, a subject taught by Prof. Beverley Ormerod. Beverley Ormerod.
This was the start of an exciting research interest that would accompany Jean-Marie Volet right up to his retirement. Thanks to various grants and research projects, he began a vast survey and study of French-speaking African women novelists.
These were the crucial years when the Internet was beginning to spread, but it was still very difficult to get in touch with the authors, or even to purchase their works, which were sometimes published by small local publishing houses. And yet this rich, buzzing, multifaceted universe deserves to be brought to the attention of a wider public.
What could be better than to share this research and make these authors known through the possibilities offered by the web? Jean- Marie Volet has accumulated books, contacts and meetings.
The results of his work have appeared in numerous publications, as well as on two websites launched in 1996: Lire les femmes écrivains et les littératures africaines and the journal Mots pluriels. By the end of his career, Jean-Marie Volet will have amassed a collection of some 3,500 volumes and a dozen archive boxes (mainly concerning work on African women novelists: correspondence, reading notes, documentation).
… and back
After a long journey from Perth to Lausanne, Volet’s documents are now available for consultation by our readers on the Riponne site and, as for the archives, at theUnithèque on the Dorigny campus.
To mark the arrival of this rich collection, Professors Christine Le Quellec Cottier and Valérie Cossy, in collaboration with the BCUL, have organized the exhibition Africana. Women’s figures and forms of power which offers a thematic itinerary on women’s empowerment through African literature.
Chiara, Unithèque website
