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 to the (conflictual) interaction between French and Dutch (or Flemish) communities. This binary view, however, systematically marginalized the plurality of a diglossic national territory fragmented into Flemish, Walloon, and German variants, where only a minority elite spoke French. The exchanges, travels and translations between the different minority cultures within this asymmetrical configuration reveal a much more complex dynamics than the mere confrontation between a dominant and a dominated language. Focusing on Emma Lambotte’s (1876-1963) trips between Antwerp and Liège—as a Walloon painter, writer, translator, chronicler, salonnière and activist—this article aims to open the black box of Belgian intercultural historiography by introducing a unique Walloon minority perspective.