Neo-Avant-Garde Politics and Poetics from a Transnational Perspective: The Conversation between the Beats and Labris
Résumé
This article seeks to redefine literary transnationalism in order to examine under what conditions the Beat movement can be described as transnational. In our comparison of the politics of the Beats and the Belgian journal *Labris*, as well as Jef Bierkens' rereading of Jack Kerouac (Jef Bierken is a Belgian novelist and Labris founder), we put forward the idea of a literary transnationalism that seeks to be critical of national literary constructions, but doesn’t negate local literary specificities. The politics of the Beats are then reassessed to show the contradictions of this overtly political literary movement.