Calls for papers
Afromodernisms 2
What’s really new? Blackness and Atlantic Modernism, 1907–61.
Symposium: University of Liverpool, UK.
Confirmed Keynotes:
Prof Tyler Stovall, University of California, Berkeley.
30 June – 2 July, 2011.
Afromodernisms 2 focuses on the relationship between the Afro-Atlantic and the modernist canon. Specifically, the symposium seeks to address the ways in which current configurations of modernism — the art and literature of the new — may be inflected, expanded, or even called into question by either localized or transnational Africanist interventions into the politics and culture of the first half of the twentieth century.
Call for Papers:
What constitutes a ‘modernist’ response to the experience of the modern? What categories underpin the aesthetic category ‘modernism’? How might emphasis on black diapora subject positions, representations, and artistic and political interventions, inflect current canonical configurations of modernism? To what extent might black feminist positions revise or even reject the totalizing tendencies of the male voice in canonical works of black modernism, for example, Négritude?
The aims of the conference are the following:
* to debate the tenets of modernism (its newness, breaks with tradition, interest in the exotic and the primitive, its sense of fragmentation and displacement, and the way it conceives of the individual subject) in two contexts: first in terms of the work produced by African diaspora artists and writers; second, in relation to the symbolic presence of representations of blackness in the work of Anglo-American, Caribbean and European modernists.
* to consider the degree to which a variety of actors operating from what might be termed “alternative” or “displaced” metropoles interacted to produce, in Jameson’s terms, an “active sense” of the history of modernity, one in which a black presence was of key aesthetic, political and cultural importance.
* to expand Perry Anderson’s claim, directed primarily at European modernist movements, that one of the indispensible co-ordinates for locating modernism is its “proximity to social revolution,” to include a range of Afro-Atlantic revolutionary positions. We therefore welcome papers that consider the range of anti-colonial and/or feminist responses to the experience of modernity operating across the Atlantic in the inter- and postwar years.
*to reconsider the emergence of literary and artistic avant-gardes in the context of black anti-colonial, feminist, and (pan)nationalist movements, the two world wars, and, in the interwar period, against the backdrop of fascism and communism.
Individual papers and proposals for panels, in English, are invited, addressing, but not limited to the following circumatlantic themes:
* Gender
* Black performance/performance of blackness
* blackness and/in visual art
* modernism and primitivism
* modernist landscapes and/or the city
* science, technology and the machine
* narrative, subjectivity, psychoanalysis
* the politics of history
* blackness and genre
* island modernisms (eg Antillean, Irish, Cape Verdian)
* tradition and experimentation
* modernism, politics and the metropole, (Paris, London, Mexico, Dublin, Marseille, Berlin, Hamburg, Moscow, DC, New York)
* modernist soundscapes
* black writers/artists in/and Europe
* modernism and ideology
* modernism and the canon, including the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, and Paris Noir
* formal innovation/ the language of modernism
* informal networks
* the work of “high” and not-so-high modernists (eg): Eliot, Faulkner, McKay, Beckett, Pound, Stevens, Williams, Hughes, Joyce, Hurston
* responses to revolution: Easter 1916, November 1918, Spain 1936
For individual papers, please send a working title, abstract of 250–350 words, and a biographical note to: Fionnghuala Sweeney: fsweeney@liv.ac.uk or Kate Marsh: clmarsh@liv.ac.uk
Proposal for panels should contain a panel title, working titles for individual papers, with individual abstracts of 250 words each, and brief biographical notes on the chair and/or speakers to: Fionnghuala Sweeney: fsweeney@liv.ac.uk or Kate Marsh: clmarsh@liv.ac.uk
Proposals on teaching and curating are also welcomed, as are offers to act as chair or respondant.
Closing date for call: 11 April, 2011.
Fionnghuala Sweeney
Kate Marsh
Afromodernisms2: http://www.liv.ac.uk/soclas/conferences/Afromodernism/index.htm
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Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Postgraduate workshop
6th June 2011, Oxford University
Keynote speakers: Dr Roxanna Nydia Curto (Illinois State), Dr Louise Hardwick (Birmingham), 3rd keynote tbc.
Technology in text and context: between progress and conflict
The third annual SFPS postgraduate workshop will consider technology in its widest applications within the field of Francophone Postcolonial Studies. Defined as the “théorie générale et études spécifiques (outils, machines, procédés…) des techniques” (Petit Robert) and “a discourse or treatise on an art or arts” (OED), technology is strongly connected to processes of writing, reading, and criticism.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries technology has come to denote material and mechanical innovation across diverse fields, including communication, transport, medicine, astronomy, and industry, and the complex knowledge and understanding that accompanies such invention. In material terms, such technology is both enabling and disabling, acting as a catalyst for modernization and “progress” while generating global and local inequalities, conflicts, and anxieties. Discussion of the epistemological and ontological impact of transnational communication networks on writing, reading, and critical theory and practice continues to break new ground. To date, these concerns have been confined primarily to the largely Anglophone field of postcolonial studies, despite important contributions by French-speaking writers to ongoing debates on mondialisation/mondialité/globalisation/planetarity. Meanwhile, individual and institutional use of technologies furthers research and pedagogy at all levels, but also presents practical challenges that seek creative and demanding solutions.
Technology may also provide an entry point to renewed engagement with “the literary” in postcolonial study. Such approaches seek to recalibrate, rather than disband, ideological and .political imperatives in cultural criticism. Questions regarding art and craftmanship raised by the term’s cognates: technique and technê, stimulate this direction of thought : How do new technologies affect writing, reading and critical practices ? What are possible implications of such developments in terms of language, genre and form? How do postcolonial works (de)construct forms of technology within the literary or filmic text?
We welcome papers that address the conference theme through the work of writers/theorists/cultural producers from across the full historical and geographical range of Francophone Postcolonial Studies. With this in mind, the following list of possible topics is far from exhaustive:
- The impact of digital technology on writing, reading and publishing practices
- Blogs, websites, and the global literary marketplace
- The representation of forms of technology in literature and film (e.g. transport, space, industrial, medical, agricultural, bio, information, digital technologies)
- Technology and globalization/mondialisation/mondialité/planetarity
- The ambivalence of “progress” and “development,” especially in light of ecocritical work
- Technology and community
- Technology, technê, technique and “the literary”
- Language and technology
- Postcolonialism and machines
- “Colonial” texts in “postcolonial” contexts
- Technophilia and technophobia in literature and in the academy
- Technology and anxiety
250 word abstracts for 20-minute papers, to be given in English or French, addressing themes and keywords should be sent by e-mail to sfpsworkshop2011@gmail.com by no later than 1st March, 2011.
There will be no registration fee. The day will include an interactive session on “Developing IT Resources in Francophone Postcolonial Studies for Teaching and Research” (run by Dr Louise Hardwick) which will be useful for postgraduates and young researchers at any stage of their academic careers.
Organising committee: Alain Ausoni, Lucy Brisley, Ruth Bush
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The Caribbean: Aesthetics, Ecology, Politics
A conference at the University of Warwick, 23rd-25th September, 2011
Keynote speakers include: Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Oonya Kempadoo, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Janette Bulkan
The twin spectres of economic and ecological crisis today haunt the globe. The capitalist world system has been convulsed by the violent manifestation of its underlying contradictions. The world environment, meanwhile, is under threat from the effects of that system, the logic of capital driving relentlessly towards the degradation of human and extra-human nature. Despite the planetary scope of many ecological problems, the intensity of their impact tends to be felt unevenly across the globe, with the poor, and most especially those in peripheral nation-states, suffering most.
In the Caribbean, natural disasters such as hurricanes and the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti in January 2010 already pose enormous challenges for the region. The intensification of, for example, extreme weather conditions with global warming will only exacerbate these difficulties. Their effects, moreover, cannot be disentangled from the long history of ecological and social exploitation imposed on the region by capitalist imperialism—from the environmental transformations brought about by early colonization to the contemporary problems wrought by tourism and penetration by multinationals.
This conference looks to provoke debate on the relationship between Caribbean environments and literature and the arts. We invite papers that consider the intersection of aesthetics, imperialism, and ecologies, and which examine the role of cultural production in mapping and responding to environmental crises and natural catastrophes across the pan-Caribbean. How has fiction or travel writing, for example, registered the transformations in landscapes, seascapes, flora, and fauna occasioned by the plantation regime, or national development projects, or tourism? How has the “open, exploded, irrupted” space of the Caribbean (Glissant) been mediated in artworks? We are also interested in the intersection of social justice with environmental justice, and the role the writer or artist might play in addressing such issues. What is the potential of the artist as activist, and how might the arts offer new approaches and perspectives for thinking about and dealing with these issues?
We welcome papers on any linguistic area of the Caribbean, and on any form of cultural production (literature, drama, art, music, etc). Possible themes might include, but are certainly not limited to:
- Imperialism, ecology, and aesthetics
- The significance of natural disasters and ecological crises to Caribbean aesthetics
- Ecology, creolization, and politics
- Fictions of resource extraction
- The role of the artist as activist in the Caribbean
- The arts and environmental justice
- The arts and social movements
- Visions of environmental Utopia and dystopia in the Caribbean
- The environment as historical memory
- The environment in national, regional, or diasporic imaginaries
Individual papers should be no longer than 20 minutes. Please send a 300 word abstract and a biographical sketch (150 words) to Michael Niblett ateapconference@gmail.com by March 1st, 2011. Proposals for panels (3 speakers) are also welcome: please send a 200 word summary of the rationale for the panel, in addition to individual abstracts. Any enquiries, please contact Michael Niblett at the above email address. The conference is part of a Leverhulme Trust-funded research project currently being undertaken at the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick.
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Continuities and Discontinuities? France Across the Generations
ASMCF Annual Conference, University of Stirling,
1st-3rd September 2011
Closing date for proposals: 1 February 2011.
The year 2011 will mark a number of anniversaries central to the shaping of modern and contemporary France and its citizens: a decade after the events of 9/11; thirty years since the beginning of the Mitterrand era; fifty years on from the massacre of October 1961… As well as their significance in and of themselves, these events and the debates they triggered have served to frame many of the concerns that have preoccupied modern and contemporary France. They do so particularly as they bring to the fore questions of societal change and specifically the impact of intergenerational clashes, tensions and exchanges, within the confines of the Hexagon but also in France’s global relations.
Taking these exchanges, clashes and tensions as our starting point, the conference will be organised around SIX major themes that engage broadly with the notion of continuities and/or discontinuities in the evolution of modern and contemporary France. We list these below with suggested panels for each theme. The suggestions are not meant to imply that alternative ideas for panels or individual papers are not also warmly welcomed.
We would welcome proposals in the following areas:
1. Political Generations
Mitterrand and Mitterrandism
De Gaulle’s Century?
May ‘68 seen by “la génération Sarkozy”
Chirac et la Chiraquie
Feminism and its legacies (40th anniversary of the Manifeste des 343)
Génération Ecologie: Greening France
Besancenot and the New Generation
Young people, elections and political protest
Cyber-politics in France
2. France’s Memory Wars: Devoirs de mémoire, tyrannie de la repentance and beyond
France and slavery: from the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) to the Loi Taubira (2001)
Remembering the Exposition Coloniale: 80 years on
Contemporary perspectives on the Occupation
Memory and amnesia: France, Algeria and the events of October 1961
The children of decolonization: intergenerational memories of immigration
Le “devoir de la mémoire” à l’écran (grand ou petit)
From the Cité de l’Immigration to the Quai Branly: Marking France’s Colonial History?
Literary memory
3. Popular Culture: Legacies and Cultural Markers
Thirty years of Fêtes de la Musique (1981–2011)
Cinematic Generations – from the Nouvelle Vague to le Jeune Cinéma Français and beyond.
The Legacy of Jack Lang
France and reality tv culture: a decade since the launch of Loft Story
Icônes disparus: Gainsbourg (1928–1991); Georges Brassens (1921–1981); Jim Morrison (1943–1971)
The Tour de France, Roland Garros, Longchamp: Key Events in the French Sporting Calendar
From “les Bleus” to “les Blues”: Key moments in France’s footballing history
Les Journées du Patrimoine: France’s Architectural Heritage
4. Kinship and Families
Family structures in the post-PaCS era
Filiation: Policies, Structures, Strategies
Onscreen Families
Intergenerational Solidarity
The Philosophy of Ageing
The Place of Children in French Society
Le Regroupement familial
5. The New Generation: Les Enfants de Sarkozy?
« La racaille » and the 2005 riots
« La Génération Zidane » ?
Generational shifts: France and the pension crisis
« Moi, mon papa, il est Président » : Jean Sarkozy
Paris-Plages : Contemporary Evolutions of the Cityscape
6. From Commemoration to Celebration
« Responsables mais pas coupables » : The aftermath of the « affaire du sang contaminé »
No smoking, we’re French: the 1991 Loi Evin
Transatlantic relations in the aftermath of the First Gulf War (1991)
1981’s « Six heures pour les Ciné-Clubs »: the legacy of Ciné-Clubs and cinephilia in France
The abolition of the death penalty in 1981
Constructions of Europe: Franco-EU relations since the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1951)
Sixty years since the death of Pétain: the place of Vichy in recent debates on immigration in France
Relationships between France and North Africa: sixty years of Libyan independence
France and Indochina: seventy years since Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh began the First Indochina War
Rural/urban relations in France, marking eighty years since France’s urban population exceeded its rural population
In line with the ASMCF’s interdisciplinary approach, this three-day conference welcomes papers from a wide variety of disciplines including international relations, history, geography, politics, economics, sociology and religious, gender, literary, cultural, film and media studies. We invite both proposals for individual papers (300 words max.) and for panels, which should consist of three presenters and a named chairperson. Papers may be delivered in English or French. The total time for one paper is 20 minutes both for presentations in panels as well as for individual presentations. Postgraduate students are strongly encouraged to present papers.
Postgraduate Poster Session: postgraduates in the early stage of their research are invited to present their work at the conference Poster Session. The Poster Session aims to enable postgraduate students to participate in the conference programme, receive feedback from specialists in an informal and friendly setting and to prepare them for presenting papers at future conferences. If you require further information about presenting a poster at the ASMCF annual conference, please contact the ASMCF postgraduate representative, Joanna Warson: joanna.warson@port.ac.uk.
Proposals for papers and panels (with contact details) should be sent to Fiona Barclay (fiona.barclay@stir.ac.uk) and Cristina Johnston (cristina.johnston@stir.ac.uk) by 1 February 2011.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the service culturel de l’Ambassade de France au Royaume-Uni, Taylor and Francis, and the University of Stirling.
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‘Minorités en vue’
A one day colloquium organised by the
Department of European Languages and Cultures, Lancaster University
Keynote speaker: Pap Ndiaye (EHESS), author of La condition noire: Essai sur une minorité française (Calmann-Lévy, 2008).
Friday 6 May 2011
Lancaster University Conference Centre
Coinciding with the recent debate around French national identity is the salience of certain ethnic or religious minorities, such as Roma or Muslim, in public discourse. Yet the ‘discovery’ of such groups has the potential to conceal the enduring presence they may have maintained in French society over decades, or, indeed, centuries. This colloquium will reflect on the conditions that bring certain minorities into, and out of, focus. It will ask how France’s minorities negotiate their intermittent (in)visibility through literary and cinematic representations and consider how the latter are linked to relations of power.
How are minorities constructed in different discursive fields and forms of representation? When and under what conditions do minoritised subjects become visible or invisible, and how is this process mediated by aesthetic strategies? Can a group’s successful ‘assimilation’ into the dominant culture be consistent with minority status and what role does memory play in maintaining that status? What, then, is a French majority, and how does it define its cultural hegemony as a counterpoint to minority groups?
Some potential topics for discussion might include the following:
– Race and/or nation as indices of identification among minorities
– Literary/cinematic subjectivities: the transition from objects to subjects of representation
– Issues of class, religion, gender and sexuality among minority groups
– The phenomena of apatridie and/or diaspora
– The transition from the discursive construction of ‘immigrant’ to that of ‘minority’
– Triggers of cultural memory: 50 years of independence in Africa, the expulsion of Roma from France, 80 years since the Exposition Coloniale…
– ‘New’ (for example, Algerian, Senegalese, Turkish) and ‘old’ (for example, Armenian, Roma, Catalan) minorities
Please e mail a 250 word abstract and 100 word bio to Charlotte Baker c.baker@lancaster.ac.uk and Greg Kerr g.kerr@lancaster.ac.uk by Monday 28 February 2011, clearly marked ‘DELC Colloquium’. Presenters will be invited to speak for 20 minutes and papers may be presented in French or in English.
‘Minorités en vue’ is supported by the Yves-Hervouet Fund for Anglo-French Relations
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Minority Identities: Rights and Representation
A One-Day Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference
‘Who has the right to a particular literary terrain,
the right to define the terms of representation?’
Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land
Saturday 7th May 2011
Old Whiteknights House, University of Reading
This conference aims to explore the interface between creative/critical forms of representation (such as literature, film, performance, art, history and philosophy, but not limited to these) and the claim to material/ontological human and animal rights. It will examine the concepts ‘minority’, ‘identity’, ‘rights’ and ‘representation’ and their possible intersections. It will also interrogate categories and politics of identity, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, age, and disability, as well as the critical disciplines that invest in these, such as feminism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies.
We invite proposals from postgraduate students and early career researchers working in all areas of creative and/or critical representation, for presentations that might engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics:
In what ways can academic pursuits deliver or work towards justice, equality, and social inclusion?
What are the ethics implicated in any representation of the minority other?
If James Clifford declares that ‘We are all Caribbean now […] in our urban archipelagos,’ and Bernard Malamud says that ‘Every man is a Jew,’ in what ways does valorising the minority as a prototype of the postmodern experience obscure the real-world traumas of those who involuntarily remain in such minorities?
How do global power structures produce and maintain minority status, obscuring it as socially constructed, and how might cultural representations contest this?
How do the publishing and arts industries brand minority artists, and how is this affected by gender?
What are the effects of English speakers being ‘translated’ (subtitled, dubbed, or annotated) for reasons such as disability or accent? What other acts of translation need to be considered?
In what ways might more naturalist or realist forms such as verbatim, testimony, and documentary limit the kinds of rights it is possible to achieve? As a critic, what is at stake when discussing more experimental forms of representation?
Presentations should last twenty minutes and may take the form of traditional papers, or short practice as research demonstrations with accompanying commentary. Abstracts of 300-350 words should be submitted to Amorella Lamount, Clare Reed, and Nicola Abram at minorities@student.reading.ac.uk, by 4th February 2011. These should include your institutional affiliation, a 50-word biography, and any technical requirements. Postgraduate students and early career scholars who wish to attend but not present a paper should register by email as space is limited.
Calls for Contributions
RELIEF, Revue électronique de littérature française 2011, 1
African women writers: Authors, texts, audiences
Despite the growing interest in the West for the writings of Francophone African women writers, many areas still remain underinvestigated. The entanglement of literary criticism with feminist issues, especially, has contributed to a somewhat unifocal appreciation of African female literary production. The local reception of female-authored African literature, on the other hand, has not been extensively studied. Yet a closer look at the interaction between writer, text and audience can shed light not only on a writer’s engagement, but also on the relevance of certain works for contemporary African women. In what way can this literature be considered to be of social significance? What are the multiple strategies African women writers use to reach their public? What is the – local or global – audience these texts are (purportedly) written for?
Moving beyond the primarily feminist or womanist perspective of scholarship in the 1990s, a reception-centered approach may also help to account for the diasporic success of writers such as Fatou Diome and Chimananda Ngozie-Adichie. African writers have always demonstrated that Africa is not a fixed “elsewhere,” frozen in its traditions. How does this theme play out in the present era of globalization and transculturality? What is the role of la francophonie and the larger audience this notion implies in defining a new literary field? And how do these categories inform the relation between Anglophone and Francophone texts? Is the term national literature still useful? It is to this variety of questions raised by a reception-centered approach that the next issue of RELIEF (2011) will be dedicated.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
– The diverse reception(s) of African female writing
– The local and global engagement of female writers
– The audiences of writers in the diaspora
– The relevance of la francophonie in defining new audiences for women’s texts
– The relation between Francophone and non-Francophone women’s texts
Please send a 300-word article proposal, accompanied by a short bio-biographical statement listing your institutional affiliation, before January 15, 2011 to the editors:
J.M.M.Houppermans@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Authors of accepted proposals will be invited to submit a complete article (maximum 6000 words) before March 31, 2011.
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‘PoCoPages’
Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
Borrowing Derek Walcott’s title for his autobiographical poem Another Life, this volume of the new series ‘PoCoPages’ will focus on the former lives of writers before they came to writing, or the parallel professions they have carried on exercising while at the same time getting their novels, short stories, poems or plays published. Many writers have not always been writers, but worked first in professions as diversified as medecine for some, to customs officer, anthropologist, stage manager, engineer, or land surveyor for others. What alchemy took place for such a swing to be brought forth and what does this exactly imply? Did the author gradually drift into writing, or was the shift more radical a life change ? The question of whether such transition is — with a certain amount of hindsight — perceptible in the writing itself, and if it is, whether our knowledge of it, helps, hinders, or is of no matter whatsoever to our reading, also needs to be addressed. Does the former professional life of these authors shape their writing, or would it be more accurate to define it in terms of ‘haunting’ their work ? Is the new life to be seen as contained within the former life, or should we look at it the other way round ?
The themes of haunting and gestation, and those of genealogy and formation thus open possible vistas of exploration and interrogation. In the same way, the relationship between ‘the new territory’ and ‘the old territory’ may be examined, almost as though it were a diasporic bond calling upon us to ponder what the links are with the former being. Which is the territory that lends form and meaning to the other one? Can the metaphors of the home country and the host country be applied? In what shapes and forms do mourning and haunting appear in these works ? How is self-(re-)creation set up and represented in the writing process?
Among the postcolonial writers who will be chosen by the contributors, it might be interesting to examine if there is anything specifically postcolonial in the way territories have shifted, almost as if a new diaspora of the self had been created.
‘PoCoPages’ is a new peer-reviewed series within the new collection Horizons anglophones published by the Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée (Pulm). It is a transformation of ‘Les Carnets du Cerpac’, which it will replace. Though the term Poco may stir up in the reader’s mind images of some American country rock band, or again various possession rituals associated with Africa or the Caribbean, the reference here however is to the abbreviation of postcolonial. The term in its diversity is meant to reflect the interest of ‘PoCoPages’ for postcolonial, diasporic cultures and literatures, steeped in métissage and crossed borders.
General Editor : Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak.
This volume will be the second volume in the series (to be published in 2012). The first one, India and the Diasporic Imagination is forthcoming (Spring 2011). It will be the result of a collaboration between “EMMA” (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone) at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, and “Centre Interlangues TIL” (Texte, Image, Langage) at Université de Bourgogne.
Please submit a 500-word abstract with a short bio by January 31, 2011 to Dr Mélanie Joseph-Vilain <melanie.joseph-vilain@u-bourgogne.fr> and to Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak <judith.misrahi-barak@univ-montp3.fr>. If the preliminary proposal is accepted, final essays (5,000 words) will be due by March 31, 2011.
New titles
New from Liverpool University Press – Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon
HAITI UNBOUND: A SPIRALIST CHALLENGE TO THE POSTCOLONIAL CANON
Kaiama L. Glover
Touching on the role and destiny of Haiti in the Americas, Haiti Unbound engages with long-standing issues of imperialism and resistance culture in the transatlantic world. Glover’s timely project emphatically articulates Haiti’s regional and global centrality, combining vital ‘big picture’ reflections on the field of postcolonial studies with elegant close-reading-based analyses of the philosophical perspective and creative practice of a distinctively Haitian literary phenomenon. Providing insightful and sophisticated blueprints for the reading and teaching of the Spiralists’ prose fiction, it will serve as a point of reference for the works of these authors and for the singular socio-political space out of and within which they write.
‘Kaiama Glover’s stunning elucidation of Haitian Spiralist literature is a tour-de-force… If Spiralism itself constitutes the most magnificent cultural artifice of Haitian dystopia, Glover’s groundbreaking study is essential reading for those interested in exploring the limits of Caribbean expression achieved by these superb writers, and the volcanic intensity of the literary movement that has perhaps most fully expressed the ‘schizophonic’ beauty and horror of Haitian reality.’ Professor Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 15
262pp., 234 x 156 mm, hardback
Published December 2010
ISBN 9781846314995
Hardback, £65.00
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HAITI RISING: HAITIAN HISTORY, CULTURE AND THE EARTHQUAKE OF 2010
Martin Munro
The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 thrust the nation into the public consciousness as never before. That terrible event piqued interest in a remarkable country with a rich history as both the first black republic in the world and the first country to break free of European imperialism in Latin America.
Haiti Rising brings together more than 20 of the most prominent authorities on Haiti in to provide both a historical and cultural introduction to Haiti and a chance for earthquake survivors to testify to their experiences. Ranging widely across politics, society, history, art and culture, contributors such as Maryse Condé, Yanick Lahens, Evelyne Trouillot, J. Michael Dash and Laurent Dubois illuminate this most extraordinary of countries and the tragedy that befell it in 2010.
Haiti Rising stands as a written document of this cataclysmic event in Haitian history and as a monument to the experiences of those who were in Haiti at the time of the earthquake. It is vital reading for anyone who wants to find out more about Haiti, and the prospects for its future.
All royalties from the book will be donated to the Haitian Art Relief Fund.
Published in the USA, Canada and the Caribbean by University of the West Indies Press
224pp., 234 x 156mm, paperback
Published October 2010
ISBN 9781846314988
Paperback, £16.95
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TRANSNATIONAL FRENCH STUDIES: POSTCOLONIALISM AND LITTÉRATURE-MONDE
Edited by Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick and David Murphy
The controversial 2007 manifesto in favour of a Littérature-monde en français has generated new debates in both Francophone and postcolonial studies. Praised by some for breaking down the hierarchical division between French and Francophone literatures, the manifesto has been criticized by others for recreating that division through an exoticizing vision that continues to privilege the publishing industry of the former colonial métropole.
This collection of outstanding international scholarship questions the significance and vision of this manifesto and assesses the wider issue of the evolving status of French Studies as a transnational field of study.
Alec G. Hargreaves is Ada Belle Winthrop-King Professor of French and Director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University.
Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool.
David Murphy is Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Stirling and President of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies.
Published on behalf of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies
256pp, 234 x 156mm, cased
Published 29 November 2010
ISBN 9781846314834
Hardback, £65.00
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FRENCH GLOBAL A NEW APPROACH TO LITERARY HISTORY
Edited by Christine McDonald & Susan Rubin Suleiman
Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France’s national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture.
The relationship between France’s national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of “Francophonie.” Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with “others.” Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century.
Christie McDonald is Smith Professor of French Language and Literature and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. Her books include The Extravagant Shepherd: A Study of the Pastoral Vision in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, Dispositions on Music and Text, The Dialogue of Writing: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Literature, and The Proustian Fabric.
Susan Rubin Suleiman is C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. Her books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, and Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde.
NOVEMBER 2, 2010
576 pages
978-0-231-14740-8 cloth $60.00 / £41.50
Literary Studies / French Studies
Columbia University Press
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PASSES ET IMPASSES DANS LE COMPARATISME POSTCOLONIAL CARIBEEN
Cinq traverses
Kathleen Gyssels
La Caraïbe et sa diaspora clament un imaginaire commun, des préoccupations esthétiques et éthiques qui se font écho, au-delà des ondes linguistiques qui diffractent “la communauté imaginée” caribéenne. Or, ces littératures sont rarement comparées, le comparatisme demeure trop souvent une impasse. À partir de cinq “traverses”, dix auteurs franco- et anglophones sont ici comparés. Ju xtaposant dans chacun des chapitres une voix anglophone et une voix francophone de cette Caraïbe étendue, de frappantes concordances, au-delà de la balkanisation, apparaissent. Ressemblances dans l’usage de la slave narrative chez Morrison et Condé, dans le tabou du gender chez Baldwin et Damas, dans la popularité du travelogue en Amérique du Nord et dans l’int érêt que lui portent Laferrière et Danticat ; ou encore l’absence de la Créole dans les fictions sur la Révolution haïtienne (Fignolé et Smartt-Bell). Enfin, les débuts respectifs de Harris et de Glissant esquissent déjà, de manière parallèle, la créolisation (esthétique, stylistique, thématique).
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PRÉSENCE AFRICAINE EN EUROPE ET AU-DELÀ
AFRICAN PRESENCE IN EUROPE AND BEYOND
Sous la direction de / Edited by Kathleen Gyssels & Bénédicte Ledent
Dans ce collectif bilingue, les représentations de l’Afrique et des
Africains dans différentes expressions artistiques sont étudiées
(géographiques et linguistiques) différents. La diaspora africaine
en particulier reçoit une attention renouvelée, axée sur des
manifestations tant actuelles que plus anciennes, tant critiques
que créatives.
African presence in Europe and beyond
In this bilingual volume, researchers from different geographical
and linguistic backgrounds study the representations of Africa
and Africans in various artistic media. The volume pays special
attention to the African diaspora and focuses on its older and
newer expressions, whether critical or creative.
Kathleen Gyssels enseigne à l’Université d’Anvers (Belgique). Son principal domaine de
recherché est la littérature des Caraïbes francophones.
Bénédicte Ledent teaches at the University of Liège (Belgium). Her main research interest is
Anglophone Caribbean literature.
site internet : http://www.editions-harmattan.fr
email : presse.harmattan5@wanadoo.fr
30 euros
318 pages
ISBN : 978-2-296-12803-3
CONTENTS
Présence africaine en Europe et au-delà / African Presence in Europe and beyond
Gyssels Kathleen, “Introduction” (version française)
Ledent Bénédicte, “Introduction” (English version)
I.Présence africaine en Belgique / African Presence in Belgium
Unigwe, Chika. “Anonymous”
Rahier, Jean-Muteba. “The Microphysics of Colonial Power: Violence, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Belgian Colonial Literature”
Demeulenaere, Alex. “Heart of Darkness et le récit de voyage colonial belge (Picard, Simenon)”
II. Présence africaine en Europe / African Presence in Europe
Walvin, James. “The Black Presence: Towards a History of Black Britons”
Phillips, Caryl. “David Oluwale (1930-1969)”
Adeaga, Tomi. “African Diaspora and the Afro-Germans”
Berndt, Katrin. “Squinting at the European ‘Other’: Ironic Distance as Postcolonial Resistance Strategy in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy”
Diagana, M’bouh Séta. “La langue française vue par les écrivains mauritaniens”
Yebou, Raphaël. “ Langue et lexique dans le roman béninois : les emprunts aux langues nationales”
Husti, Carmen. “L’anti/intellectuel: l’individu postmoderne africain”
Yinda, André Marie. “Arts de s’intégrer : prolégomènes afropolitains”
III. Présence africaine dans le Nouveau Monde / African Presence in the New World
Cooreman, Gaëlle. “Migration clandestine dans l’Autre face de la mer de Louis-Philippe Dalembert”
O’Casas, Janeth. “L’Afrique de Patrick Chamoiseau: une analyse diachronique dans trois romans‘créoles’”
Labidi, Abid. “Remembering African Ancestry in Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts”
Najar, Imen. “Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Phillips’s Nash in Crossing the River: A Discursive Approach”
Bada, Valérie. “‘What is Africa to me?’ The Mnemopoetics of Africa in African American Drama”
Tunca, Daria. “Of French Fries and Cookies: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Diasporic Short Fiction”
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