Listening for the Sonic Father

Listening for the Sonic Father: Language, Loss, and Inheritance

Proof of registration, via a QR code on your phone or on paper, will be required to enter Reid Hall. Entry will be refused to those who are not registered.

This presentation introduces Tongues: A Tale of Disfluency, an autofictional novel that moves through the landscapes of rural Jamaica, tracing a boy’s passage through muteness and the search for language. It explores how memory lodges itself in the body and how silence, especially in the wake of abandonment, becomes a kind of speech. Through scenes of bushland wandering, imagined classrooms, and language as performance, the novel asks what it means to grow up where voice is shaped by both absence and vernacular improvisation. Jason Allen-Paisant will reflect on the work’s interweaving of interior life and external constraint, and on how the boy’s embrace of French—his “other tongue”—becomes a form of survival, and of self-making.

Jason Allen-Paisant is a poet, scholar, and writer whose honors include the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is full professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He has received fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the University of East Anglia. His books include the philosophical treatise Engagements with Aimé Césaire and the literary nonfiction work The Possibility of Tenderness. He is an associate editor of the literary journal Callaloo.

The Rendez-Vous de l’Institut Series is generously supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.