CFP:
1.1 Les Revues littéraires dans l’archipel des Caraïbes. Paris.
1.2 Reconfiguring Urban Spaces: Cultural Exchange through the City. ICRH Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference. Belfast.
1.3 The politics of colonial comparison. Oxford.
1.4 Connected histories of decolonisation workshop. London.
1.5 Conflict and Commemoration in the Postcolonial Francophone World. SFPS Annual Conference. London.
Calls for contributions:
2.1 Sites of Desire: Medicine, Race, Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India and sub-Saharan Africa
New titles:
3.1 Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas
3.2 MAÏOTTE Roman Martiniquais inédit
Events:
4.1 Representing and Remembering Slavery in the Americas. York.
Calls for papers
1.1 Les Revues littéraires dans l’archipel des Caraïbes
10 octobre 2014, salle des actes de Paris-Sorbonne
Journée d’études organisée par Renée-Clémentine Lucien et Kerry-Jane Wallart, dans le cadre du programme « La valeur littéraire à l’épreuve de l’archipel: les écritures des Caraïbes et les études postcoloniales », du Labex « Observatoire de la vie littéraire » de Paris-Sorbonne/ Sorbonne Universités.
La revue littéraire, pourtant le fer-de-lance que l’on sait de bien des avant-gardes des deux ou trois siècles écoulés, semble aller à l’encontre de la pratique artistique à plus d’un égard. Collective, elle nie l’autorité comme aussi l’organicité de la structure. Ephémère, elle n’a pas vocation à transcender la contingence temporelle ou l’accident de l’événement. Moins coûteuse que son autre, le livre, elle s’inscrit dans un modèle économique allant tout à l’encontre de ce qu’Adorno qualifie, dans le sillage de Benjamin, de fétichisation esthétique, et régionalement circonscrite, elle ne prétend nullement à l’universalité à laquelle on voue souvent l’Art. C’est peut-être justement cette irrévérence, cette insouciance aussi, qui firent de la revue littéraire le berceau de la littérature de la Caraïbe, toutes aires linguistiques confondues.
Comme dans la sphère politique, c’est Haïti, première République noire, qui donne le coup d’envoi de ces revues, avec “Jeune Haïti” (1895 à 1898), puis “La Ronde” jusqu’en 1902. C’est surtout à compter des années 1930 que ces revues apparaissent et essaiment de bout en bout de l’archipel, au fil des interruptions et des reprises, au gré des rencontres, des parcours personnels et des possibilités matérielles d’existence ; toujours est-il que leurs destins cartographient très bien un paysage intellectuel foisonnant. On citera en vrac Focus en Jamaïque, sous la direction de la sculptrice Edna Manley ; Forum Quaterly et Bim à la Barbade, fondée sous la houlette de l’intellectuel Frank Collymore ; Kyk-Over-Al en Guyane britannique ; The Quarterly Magazine, Trinidad, revue dirigée par Alfred Mendes et C. L. R. James, The Beacon, Youth, Picong et Callaloo à Trinidad ; St George’s Literary League à la Grenade ; The Outlook au Honduras britannique. Il faut leur ajouter, à partir de 1949, le Caribbean Quaterly, créé par l’Université des Indes Occidentales à Saint-Augustine (Trinidad), tout comme Pelican, pour le campus de Mona (Jamaïque), dont Derek Walcott prit la direction le temps de ses études. Pour les Antilles francophones, qui travaillent souvent de concert avec des auteurs africains, ce sera la Revue du Monde Noir, fondée en 1931, Présence Africaine, fondée en 1947 et qui paraît toujours, Tropiques, édité par Aimé Césaire, Légitime Défense ou L’Etudiant Noir – quant à Haïti, elle renoue avec cette tradition avec les Griots, en 1938. Aujourd’hui encore, les revues rendent compte d’une certaine actualité littéraire, telle la Caribbean Review of Books (CRB), qui s’est exportée sur la toile depuis Port-of-Spain et qui continue de laisser des traces vite effacées, pied-de-nez sans cesse relancé à la face d’une supposée monumentalité de l’oeuvre d’art – on pourra donc relier le destin de ces revues à l’émergence de la littérature numérique, et de ce que cette dernière implique de bouleversements de nos catégories critiques.
Toutes ces revues se passent le mot dès avant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale et les bouleversements qu’elle provoquera dans la zone ; on y sort de ce qui tenait souvent, jusqu’alors, lieu de littérature caribéenne, c’est-à-dire de l’imitation sempiternelle d’une poésie d’inspiration romantique qui ressassait les poncifs de la bucolique et de la pastorale, voire de ce roman gothique qui faisait délicieusement peur et dont les contraintes se transposaient si aisément sur les terres des boucaniers, des marchands d’esclaves et des grandes demeures des planteurs. On commence également, dans la droite ligne des travaux du cubain Fernando Ortiz, à s’y intéresser de près aux travaux des ethnologues et des anthropologues sur la culture populaire caribéenne, restée souterraine et tabou jusqu’alors, comme les auteurs de la Renaissance de Harlem l’avaient fait à peine plus tôt pour les Etats-Unis.
Cette journée d’étude se propose de scruter telle effervescence, et au premier chef la manière dont elle a pu contribuer à la fois à la formation de générations successives d’auteurs de plein droit, et dont elle a aidé à forger une conscience, voire une identité, régionales. On espère par ailleurs dégager les migrations d’un genre à un autre à la faveur de ce creuset générique que la revue peut représenter. Une lecture plus politique, sociologique, ou tout simplement historicisante, dégagera peut-être des conclusions quant à l’engagement propre à l’écrivain caribéen, dans une zone où l’idéologie n’est jamais bien loin (marxisme mâtiné d’inspiration garveyenne dans les années 30, nationalisme des années 40 et 50, compte à rebours de l’indépendance pour les territoires anglophones dans les années 60, Black Power dans les années 70, anti-impérialisme dans les années 80, qui ont vu la diplomatie yankee se faire ressentir comme jamais, sans parler des Antilles françaises qui continuent de dire une écriture “en pays dominé” pour reprendre une expression de Chamoiseau – autant de mouvements dont les revues se sont très largement fait l’écho de manière directe ou détournée), tant les revues furent le lieu de la prise de position. On pourra recourir à la théorie post-structuraliste pour tenter de cartographier les caractéristiques d’un phénomène littéraire polyphonique au point de mettre en crise tout point de vue possible. Enfin, dans une perspective plus structuraliste, on pourra suivre les lignes de fuite de certaines notions (l’urgence, le fragment, la forme brève, le mélange, l’hybridité, l’échange, le don et la dette, la série, etc.) toujours implicitement mises en exergue par le mode de fonctionnement de la revue littéraire. Cette liste n’épuise évidemment pas toutes les possibilités offertes par le sujet.
Les propositions de communication doivent être adressées avant le 30 juin 2014 à
Kerry-Jane Wallart kjwallart@yahoo.fr
Renee Lucien rclemy@aol.com
Le programme « La valeur littéraire à l’épreuve de l’archipel: les écritures des Caraïbes et les études postcoloniales », rattaché au Labex « Observatoire de la vie littéraire » de Paris-Sorbonne/ Sorbonne Universités, réunit des enseignants-chercheurs de quatre équipes de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, le CIEF (Romuald Fonkoua), le CRIMIC (Renée-Clémentine Lucien), le CRLC (Véronique Gély) et VALE (Alexis Tadié, Kerry-Jane Wallart).
1.2 ICRH Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference
‘Reconfiguring Urban Spaces: Cultural Exchange through the City’
Mobilities: Cultural Exchange beyond Borders Research Network.
8th and 9th of September 2014
Second Call for Papers
The Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, in conjunction with the School of Modern Languages, at Queen’s University Belfast is hosting an interdisciplinary postgraduate conference on ‘Reconfiguring Urban Spaces: Cultural Exchange through the City’ on Friday the 5th and Saturday the 6th September 2014 as part of the Mobilities: Cultural Exchange beyond Borders research network.
As centres of migration, urban spaces have long been perceived as sites of movement, of cultural traffic and transactions, and places where cultural interface and exchange is a daily reality for many. Debates centred on globalisation, multiculturalism, integration and transculturalism have served to challenge monolithic conceptions of the nation state or ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1981). In their place, models of fluidity, as epitomised by Arjun Appadurai’s theorisation of ‘scapes’, supersede binary conceptions of local and global. With the increased circulation of people, goods, information and ideologies, both physically and virtually, a tension between the impulse to open up to the other and to police the boundaries of the self has the potential to create a third space of mutual transformation and thus transculturation.
New configurations of community, home and belonging, exile, and the possibilities offered by sites of encounter in this contact zone are being explored by critics and theorists with reference to:
· the physical transformation of urban space – cultural, artistic, architectural;
· figurative representations of the city in literature, art and music;
· linguistic innovations of distinct communities in their interactions with one another.
The conference seeks to explore these ideas from a wide range of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives, and the following list of possible focal points is not intended to be prescriptive. Areas for analysis might include:
· the physical and figurative impact of migrant communities on the city
· the everyday practice of urban spaces as a form of tactical resistance in the terms proposed by Michel de Certeau
· the disruptive, unsettling potential of ‘nomadic cosmopolitanism’ (Judt)
· exilic identities as ‘crossing borders, breaking barriers of thought and experience’ (Said)
· the deterritorialisation of ‘home’ as a means of reflecting on community, identity and nationhood
· the meanings of the global and local or ‘glocal’
· the city as a site of celebratory globalism
· the potential of new, digital and virtual media to transform the cityscape, whether physically, figuratively or linguistically
· the reconfigured city as mediator of cultural capital
· the figures of the melting-pot or mosaic associated with particular urban environments as productive metaphors for framing the variously interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary dialogues that are necessary to take forward analysis of global mobility
We welcome proposals focusing on literature, visual culture (photography, street art, fine art), museology and curation, language and linguistics, music, architecture and the creative arts. These topics are merely indicative and so we will be pleased to receive proposals, in English, on these or other related topics. In addition to proposals for the standard 20 minute papers, the organising committee will also welcome proposals for panel sessions, 10 minute flash presentations or poster presentations from early PhD students. Please send your abstracts (maximum 250 words) to Mairead McAleenan at w1532600@qub.ac.uk or Stéphanie Brown at sbrown586@qub.ac.uk by Friday the 19th of May 2014. Informal enquiries are also welcome.
1.3 The politics of colonial comparison
A one-day workshop to be held at All Souls College, Oxford, on 29 September 2014, in connection with the Oxford Transnational and Global History Seminar.
The British thought they were improving on the Spanish empire, French colonial theorists marveled at the Dutch, the Italians believed they could develop a ‘third way’ between the British and French imperial models, and the Portuguese thought their colonies were so different that they were no colonies at all. While historians often compare empires, they have ignored the ways in which people in the past did so as well. Colonial empires are perhaps the last frontier of transnational history: historians of the British, French, Russian or Spanish empires remain focused on their own imperial systems, exploring links between metropoles and colonies in ever greater depth, but ignoring the rich connections across imperial boundaries. The purpose of this workshop is to explore how participants in imperial projects, willing or otherwise, defined themselves through engagement with other contemporary empires. Heeding Ann Laura Stoler’s call to study the ‘politics of comparison’, it asks, in essence, what happens when empires look sideways?
Taking discourses of comparison as its object, the workshop will focus on the following conceptual questions:
– Does modern imperialism always generate a particular form of comparative self-awareness?
– How fundamental are cross-imperial comparisons to imperial self-definition?
– Do these comparisons reinforce a sense of exceptionalism, or do they work to break down presumed barriers?
– Why and how do they change over time?
– How do they relate to the intra- and trans-imperial circulation of ideas, information, and actors?
– How do they vary between administrators, travel writers, theorists, politicians, resistance movements, etc.?
– How, and with what consequences, do these comparisons endure after the end of empire?
We are soliciting 200-word proposals for 20-minute papers which address any of these questions. With a view to achieving broad geographical coverage, abstracts which go beyond British and French imperialism will be particularly welcome, as will papers which challenge the distinction between imperial and nation states. Please send proposals, along with a short academic CV, to alexander.middleton@lmh.ox.ac.uk by 15 May 2014. Participants will be notified by 31 May 2014.
1.4 Connected histories of decolonisation workshop
14 November 2014
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, and Centre for European and International Studies Research, University of Portsmouth
Venue: Senate House, University of London
The recent rise of global history has prompted much reflection amongst imperial historians about the interconnections and cross-influences that existed between and amongst past empires, stretching across vast spatial and chronological frameworks. Taking as its starting point this new trend in historical research, this workshop will explore the connections, entanglements and transnational links between different twentieth century decolonisation processes. In particular, this study day seeks to bring to light the ways in which people, ideas and practices, from both the global North and South, crossed national and colonial borders, and how these connections, in turn, impacted upon on the decline of European colonialism. By going beyond a narrow, nation-state perspective, this workshop aims to break down boundaries in the history of decolonisation, challenging, for example, the divides between the British, French and Portuguese empires, but also, more widely, binaries such as colonial/ post-colonial, metropole/ periphery, coloniser/ colonised.
Suggested areas for exploration include (but are by no means limited to):
· The participation by European actors in another European power’s colonial empire and how these external interventions both promoted and impeded efforts to decolonise.
· How the decolonisation of one colonial empire was perceived by other European colonial powers, the indigenous populations of the European colonial empires, and on a wider international scale.
· Interconnections within the global South with regards to the decolonisation process, not only between those with shared aims, but also amongst those with opposing objectives (for example, between European settlers and African nationalists)
· Local, national and international responses to the Western rhetoric of decolonisation.
· The role played in the decolonisation process by international institutions and transnational groupings/ affiliations.
Proposals for papers (250 words) + a brief CV should be sent to joanna.warson@port.ac.uk by 13 June 2014.
The following panels are confirmed:
France and the decolonisation of Anglophone Southern Africa
· Anna Konieczna (Sciences Po, Paris) – France and Southern Africa
· Roel van der Velde (University of Portsmouth) – France and South Africa
· Joanna Warson (University of Portsmouth) – France and Rhodesia
Forced labour
· Romain Tiquet (Humboldt University at Berlin/ForcedLabourAfrica) – Uneasy continuities: the alleged end of forced labour in Casamance (1945-1970)
· Víctor Fernández Soriano (University of Thessaly, Greece/ForcedLabourAfrica) – The Belgian enigma: reform and stagnation in the Province of Equateur, Belgian Congo (1945-1960)
· Alexander Keese (Humboldt University at Berlin/ForcedLabourAfrica) – Business as usual: repressive practices, the “vagabond problem”, and labour policies in the Middle Congo (1945-1968)
1.5 SOCIETY FOR FRANCOPHONE POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES: ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2014
Conflict and Commemoration in the Postcolonial Francophone World
21-22 November 2014
Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London
Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Roger Little, Armelle Mabon and Siobhán Shilton
2014 is an important year for commemorating conflict, marking as it does the centenary of the beginning of WW1; the twentieth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda; and the seventieth anniversary of the Thiaroye massacre in Senegal. This conference will focus on how wars, battles, massacres and genocides in (post-)colonial history are remembered in the francophone world by considering questions such as: How do francophone postcolonial authors, artists, filmmakers commemorate episodes of violence? Which conflicts do they choose to remember and which have been forgotten? Has postcolonial scholarship succeeded in challenging official colonial and neo-colonial versions of the past? Do processes designed to commemorate past conflicts that have been forgotten or neglected end up sanitizing the violence that took place? And how do cultural forms of remembering conflict relate to national processes of commemoration?
Topics for papers/panels might include, but are not restricted to:
· Acts of remembrance
· Grief and mourning
· Memorials, museums and commemorative tourism
· Devoir de mémoire
· Lieux de mémoire
· Digital commemoration
· The politics of conflict and commemoration
· Individual vs collective memory
· Multidirectional memory
· Canon formation
· Official memory
· The archive
· Postcolonial histories
· Heroes
· Resistance
Please send abstracts of 300 words plus 50-100 words of biography to Conference Secretary, Ruth Bush (sfpsconference2014@gmail.com). Papers can be in English or French.
The deadline for receipt of abstracts is: 2 June 2014
Calls for contributions
2.1 Sites of Desire: Medicine, Race, Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India and sub-Saharan Africa
We are inviting contributions to an edited volume, Sites of Desire:
Medicine, Race, Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India and sub-Saharan
Africa, by Poonam Bala and Nakanyike Musisi
Background:
While the history of medicine, generally, has been a major focus of
historical scholarship in recent years, notions of race and racial
purity, gender and sexuality in comparative studies have not received
much attention. Medical ideologies and their relationship with race,
and gender constructions, hegemony and resistance now call for
detailed analyses of these. The primary aim of the edited volume is to
bring together a cross section of scholars from multiple disciplines
(in the sciences, humanities and the social sciences) and from two
regions of the former British empire on the notions of race, gender
and sexuality as a necessary apparatus of the “imperial project.”
Examining these in comparative and global historical perspectives, the
volume will unravel colonial manifestations, discourses and the
political trajectories of the ways women and men were perceived,
understood, and accommodated in colonial notions of racial, gender and
medical paradigms. The volume will also focus on the “body” and
biomedicine as sites that enabled colonial contacts and
reinterpretation of socio-cultural issues as well as the strategies
that managed parallel notions of race, medicine, gender and sexuality
within the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan African colonies.
With a recent and increasing interest in understanding issues ranging
from demography, scientific research, social control, surveillance,
and even punishment; it is believed that intimate encounters such as
medicalization, desire and pleasurable, were not simply side-effects
of colonial projects but were fundamental structures of colonization.
Scholars of the Indian sub-continent and sub-Saharan Africa seem to be
working in isolation of each other without a much-needed dialogue
between them on these significant topics. The comparative approach in
this volume will, thus, enable a better understanding of the
constructions of race, gender, and human sexualities within the
medical paradigm under global imperialism. In sum, this scholarship
will further provide theoretical and comparative perspectives to
articulate the myriad means by which race, gender and sexualities were
intimately tied to the imperial project.
Proposed chapters are invited on the following themes (but not limited
to these):
Race and colonialism, gendered constructions of health, medicine and
health care, notions of sexuality and colonial constructions,
nationalism and colonial interventions, religion and spirituality,
marriage and reproduction, medicalization, freedom and desires,
prohibitions, cultures and sub-cultures, colonial institutions, body
and space.
Authors interested in proposing a chapter should email us both, an
abstract (350-400 words), a brief bio (including current
affiliation(s), publications and contact email and postal address) by
31 May 2014. Decision on accepted abstracts will be communicated by 15
June 2014 with full chapters expected by 15 October 2014.
Poonam Bala, Visiting Scholar, Department of Sociology, Cleveland
State University, Ohio (p.bala@csuohio.edu)
Namkanyike Musisi, Associate Professor, Department of History,
University of Toronto, Ontario
(nakanyike.musisi@utoronto.ca<mailto:nakanyike.musisi@utoronto.ca)
New titles
3.1 Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas
F. Bart Miller
Amsterdam/New York, NY 2014. 261 pp. (Francopolyphonies 16)
ISBN: 978-90-420-3826-4 Paper €55,-/US$77,-
ISBN: 978-94-012-1071-3 E-Book €49,-/US$69,- Online info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=FPPH+16
Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas analyses four cases in which Damasian Négritude shifted through generic experimentation: Pigments (1937), Retour de Guyane (1938), Veillées noires (1943) and Black-Label (1956). In doing so, it also advances scholarship on Damas (1912–1978) in two ways. On the one hand, it undertakes the crucial and in-depth research needed to challenge the understanding of Négritude as a bipartite (Césaire and Senghor) phenomenon. On the other hand, it offers an innovative reading of Damas whose work deserves more complete consideration than it has received thus far. Reading this essay will illuminate Damas’s works and their relationship to one another, thus demonstrating the continuity of Damasian Négritude.
F. Bart Miller holds a PhD in French Studies from the University of Liverpool. He is a specialist in French Caribbean Literature, and his other publications have appeared in International Journal of Francophone Studies, Romance Studies and in the volume Adaptation: Studies in French and Francophone Culture, in the series Modern French Identities, with Peter Lang publishers.
3.2 MAÏOTTE Roman Martiniquais inédit
Jenny Manet
Présentation de Jacqueline Couti, L’Harmattan, Autrement même, ISBN : 978-2-343-03194-1 • mai 2014 • 212 pages
“TABLE DES MATIÈRES”
“INTRODUCTION par Jacqueline Couti … … … v”
“Passer à la trappe : les études postcoloniales et l’oubli du roman-feuilleton des Antilles françaises au XIXe siècle” vii”
Le roman-feuilleton aux Antilles : Maïotte prétexte,
contexte et intertexte” … … … … xv”
L’aspect sociologique de Maïotte : l’ennemi intime … xxi”
Le lecteur antillais et la sublimation du quotidien du genre,
de la race et de l’identité … … … xxv”
Les femmes créoles : gardiennes de la culture
et des bonnes mœurs … … … … xxviii
De la câpresse à la négresse : sublimation de l’amour
et de la sexualité dans le désir d’élévation sociale … xxxi Conclusion … … … … … xxxiv
NOTE TECHNIQUE ET REMERCIEMENTS … … xxxvii
BIBLIOGRAPHIE SÉLECTIVE … … … … xxxix
MAÏOTTE … …” “…” “…” “…” 1
Plan de Saint-Pierre avant 1902″ “…” “…” “…” 2
ANNEXE : ARTICLES PARUS DANS LES COLONIES … 175
GLOSSAIRE … … … … … 195
TABLE DES MATIÈRES … … … … 201
“TITRES DE LA COLLECTION AUTREMENT MÊMES … 203
Events
4.1 Representing and Remembering Slavery in the Americas
University of York, 30-31 May, 2014
Registration open
This conference brings together academics interested in the history of slavery in the Americas (c.15-19th century), but also allows scholars to address contemporary cultural and political representations and remembrances of slavery. The past decade has seen significant public and popular engagement with the histories of slavery in the Americas, with memorial events, films, literature, and museums encouraging people to confront and engage with various representations and imaginings of slavery outside of the academy. In this conference we will explore how these representations help shine a light onto the dark past of slavery, as well as the present day, but also the manner in which these imaginings can manipulate, distort, or omit vital elements of the stories of slavery in the Americas.
Confirmed speakers include:
Professor James Walvin, University of York – keynote address
Eleanor Bird, University of Sheffield
Dr David Brown, University of Manchester
Dr Rebecca Fraser, University of East Anglia
Dr Christian Høgsbjerg, University of York
Joseph D. Jordan, Vanderbilt University
Adrian Knapp, University of Leeds
Dr Jane Lancaster, Brown University
Dr Alison T. Mann, United States National Park Service
Dr Annika McPherson, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
Dr Lydia Plath, Canterbury Christ Church University
Dr Bradley Proctor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Dr Anna Pochmara-Ryżko, Warsaw University
Dr Ben Schiller, Teesside University
Professor Zoe Trodd (Nottingham)
Dr Emily West, University of Reading
Registration form and further information can be found at:
http://www.york.ac.uk/history/research/conferences/slavery
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