Performing Identities, Displacing Homelands: Transnational Poetics in the Theatre of Paol Keineg

While Breton literature has often been viewed as either nationalist or nostalgic, Paol Keineg offers alternative expressions of Breton consciousness. From his first published work, Le Poème du pays qui a faim (1967), inspired by Aimé Césaire, Keineg inscribes Breton literature in transnational paradigms while resisting essentialist and nationalist discourses through literary strategies of displacement. This article compares two protagonists in Keineg's theatre. First, I describe the decolonial context of Keineg's first play Le Printemps des bonnets rouges (1972), written with Jean-Marie Serreau and modelled on Césaire's theatre of négritude, before analysing the poetic displacements of the play's Breton hero Sebastian Ar Balp. I then explore how Keineg's depiction of Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement in Terre lointaine (2004) highlights his contradictions and ambiguities, and deploys ghosts, or spectres in the Derridean sense, which allow for multiple histories, geographies, and identities to overlap, further inscribing them in transnational paradigms.