Articles Available Online

Many thanks to those who have allowed me to speak; now I’ll do so   I’m actually not talking here under my own name You should perceive and conceive of Antoine Volodine as a collective author, a name that includes the writings, voices, and poems of many other authors You should think of my physical presence, in front of this microphone, as that of a delegate whose mandate is to represent the others, my colleagues unable to appear in front of you because they’re mentally distant, because they’re imprisoned, or because they’re dead You should accept my presence here as a spokesperson As a spokesperson of post-exoticism, which is to say an imaginary literature from elsewhere and headed elsewhere, a literature that insists upon its status as strange and estranged, that insists upon its singularity and refuses all affiliations to any specific and clearly identifiable national literature I’ll explain all this   First, I’d like to list some of the authors who I’ll be speaking for tonight Some have appeared inside texts under the name of Antoine Volodine; some have been characters therein, they have spoken as novelistic characters in their own name or in others’, under their colleagues’ names, or as bare and anonymous voices, as voices stripped of all non-collective identity Several of these men and women I’ll mention (since, among us, women are numerous and at the forefront), several of them also have a tangible existence as book authors They’ve authored and continue to author books published the usual way, or contributed to magazines that actually exist in the literary world that you know All these texts and all these male and female authors are tied to post-exoticism We constitute a writing community Here, tonight, when I say ‘I,’ that means ‘we,’ regardless of the words uttered So I’d like to list some of these essential authors: Ingrid Vogel, Yasar Tarchalski, Lutz Bassmann, Elli Kronauer, Vassilissa Lukaszczyk, Iakoub Khadjbakiro, Jean Vlassenko, Maria Samarkande, Manuela Draeger, Sonia Velasquez, Maria Schnittke, and Maria Schrag The list could be different and it could be much, much longer When I say ‘I’ in front