La boîte noire de l’historiographie interculturelle belge: Les allers-retours d’Emma Lambotte entre Liège et Anvers (1895-1950)

Traditional historiography has tended to reduce the complexity of the Belgian nation as the (conflictual) interaction between French and Dutch (or Flemish) communities. This binary view, however, has systematically marginalized the plurality of a diglossic national territory, fragmented in Flemish, Walloon and German variants, where only a minority elite spoke French. In this asymmetric configuration, exchanges, displacements and translations between the different minority cultures disclose dynamics much more complex than the mere confrontation between a dominant and a dominated language. Focusing on Emma Lambotte’s (1876-1963) round trips between Antwerp and in Liège – as a Walloon painter, writer, translator, chronicler, salonnière and activist – this article wants to open the black box of Belgian intercultural historiography with the inedited introduction of a Walloon minority perspective.