- Calls for Papers
1.1 Catastrophes, cataclysms, adaptation and survival: 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium
1.2 SFS 60th Annual Conference
1.3 Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade
1.4 “Water Logics” International Conference
- Job Opportunities
2.1 Lecturer in French Language and Cultural Studies (University of Westminster)
2.2 Fixed-Term Teaching Fellow in French (Durham University)
2.3 Associate Lecturer in French (University of Exeter)
- Announcements
- New Titles
4.1 Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France (Liverpool University Press, 2018)
4.2 France, Algeria and the Moving Image Screening Histories of Violence 1963–2010 (MHRA, 2017)
4.3 Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (Nebraska University Press, 2018)
4.4 La Mémoire de l’esclavage: Traces mémorielles de l’esclavage et des traites dans l’espace atlantique (Harmattan, 2018)
4.5 Édouard Glissant: A Poetics of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2018)
4.6 Mythologies postcoloniales: Pour une décolonisation du quotidien (Honoré Champion, 2018)
4.7 Postcolonial Poetics: 21st Century Critical Readings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
- Calls for Papers/Contributions
1.1 Catastrophes, cataclysms, adaptation and survival: 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium
14-16 March 2019 at the Skirvin Hilton, Oklahoma City, OK
Co-hosting institutions: University of Central Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma, and University of Tulsa
The new century has brought with it what seems like an endless series of disasters, both manmade and natural, throughout the Francophone World. Acts of terror in Paris, including the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks, have shaken and moved us. Moreover, cataclysmic forces of nature and global weather catastrophes that include recent flooding in France, earthquakes in Haiti, and Hurricane Irma’s direct hit on Saint Martin, have affected millions of people. As we gather in Oklahoma City, site of the 1995 Murrah Building bombing and no stranger to major meteorological events, it seems appropriate to consider these occurrences as they manifest concretely and metaphorically in contemporary French and Francophone literature, cinema, and art.
What is the nature of catastrophe? What can be considered cataclysmic — both literally and metaphorically? How do catastrophes, cataclysms, adaptation and survival translate in literature? What is a literature of survival?
Possible but not restrictive axes of reflection:
- Memoir/Narrative of cataclysmic events, memorializing, and rebuilding
- Literary sensations and their responses
- Geography/Weather
- Ecology or green literatures/theories/movements
- Marginalized communities and survival
- Surviving and creating in (spite of) the dominant culture
- Hashtag movements (#jesuischarlie, #jesuisparis, #jesuissaintmartin, #metoo, #balancetonporc)
- Personal and/or collective trauma
- Science fiction/Dystopia
- Disaster literature
Paper proposals (250-word maximum, in French or English, along with brief biographical information) and proposals for complete panels (which are strongly encouraged) should be sent by email to this address: FFSC2019@uco.edu
Submission deadline: 15 September 2018
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Catastrophes, cataclysmes, s’adapter et survivre
Du 14 au 16 mars 2019 à Oklahoma City
Le nouveau millénaire semble avoir entraîné une série presque illimitée de désastres à la fois naturels et causés par l’Homme et ce à travers le monde francophone. Les attaques terroristes à Paris (notamment à Charlie Hebdo ou au Bataclan) nous ont choqués et émus. De plus, au niveau mondial, des catastrophes météorologiques ou cataclysmes tels que les récentes inondations en France, les tremblements de terre à Haïti ou l’impact de l’ouragan Irma sur saint Martin, ont affecté des millions d’individus. Puisque nous nous réunirons à Oklahoma City, ville où eut lieu, en 1995, l’attentat à la bombe contre le bâtiment fédéral Alfred P. Murrah—et ville qui a connu son lot de cataclysmes météorologiques—, il nous semble approprié de considérer ces événements et la manière dont ils se manifestent concrètement et métaphoriquement dans la littérature, le cinéma et l’art français et francophones contemporains.
Quelle est la nature de la catastrophe ? Que pouvons considérer comme cataclysmique tant littéralement que métaphoriquement ? De quelle manière traduit-on les catastrophes, cataclysmes, s’adapter et survivre dans la littérature ? Qu’est-ce qu’une littérature de la survie ?
Nous invitons des propositions de communication dans les domaines des littératures d’expression française, de la théorie littéraire, des études culturelles, de genre et postcoloniales, de la traduction, des arts tels que la musique, le cinéma, la photographie et la bande-dessinée.
En plus de propositions individuelles, nous encourageons la soumission de panels.
Voici quelques axes de réflexion possibles :
- Les témoignages ou récits de cataclysmes
- Les phénomènes littéraires et leurs réponses
- La géographie / la météo
- Les communautés marginalisées et la survie
- Les littératures / théories / mouvements écologiques ou vert.e.s
- Survivre et créer dans et/ou en dépit de la culture dominante
- Les mouvements « hashtag » (#jesuischarlie, #jesuisparis, #jesuissaintmartin, #metoo, #balancetonporc)
- Traumatismes personnels et/ou collectifs
- La science-fiction et la dystopie
- La littérature du désastre
Les propositions de communication (250 mots maximum, en français ou en anglais, accompagnés d’une brève notice bio-bibliographique) et de sessions complètes – celles-ci vivement encouragées – sont à envoyer par e-mail à l’adresse FFSC2019@uco.edu
Date limite d’envoi des propositions: 15 septembre 2018
1.2 Society for French Studies 60th Annual Conference
Royal Holloway, University of London
1-3 July 2019
We are pleased to invite proposals for papers (in English or French; duration: 20 minutes) for panel sessions on the following topics:
- Prisons, policing, and security
- Anti-semitism
- Feminisms: Le Deuxième sexe, 70 years on
- What is an author?
- Foucault, 50 years on Hospitality Cinema
- The post-human
- Legality and legislation
- Sound Migration and mobility
- Reading Frantz Fanon in 2019
- Language, social innovations and transformations
The suggested topics may be interpreted widely and are intended to encompass as broad an historical range as may be applicable. Please provide a short abstract (250-300 words), outlining the argument of the proposed paper and indicating the topic you have chosen. Abstracts should be framed with a view to addressing an audience made up of both specialists and non-specialists, and should include the proposer’s contact details (email & regular mail).
The Society encourages proposals for complete panels (of 3 or 4 speakers) on either the suggested topics, or from any area of French studies, and it is hoped that approximately half of the parallel sessions at the conference will emerge from complete-panel proposals. These should include the names, e-mail and postal addresses of all speakers, and those of the proposed session chair, who should not be one of the speakers. As well as a 250-300-word abstract for each speaker, proposals should contain a brief outline of the rationale and motivation of the proposed panel (no more than one printed page). One individual involved should be clearly designated as the proposer with overall responsibility for the proposed session. The Society is also happy to consider other formats than 3 to 4 traditional 20-minute papers for complete panels. Papers and panels are selected on the basis of peer review: you should know by mid November 2018 whether it has been possible to include your paper/panel.
We especially invite applications from postgraduate students. NB In order to encourage as wide a participation as possible, we have revoked the rule that no individual may present a paper at two successive annual conferences. Please send abstracts (by e-mail) by 21 September 2018 to the Conference Officer, Dr Victoria Turner at the following address: sfsconf2019@gmail.com. For further information on the conference, please see www.sfs.ac.uk. The Society for French Studies is charity no.1078038 and is a company, limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales, no.3801778, whose registered office is The Taylor Institution, Oxford OX1 3NA.
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60e Congrès annuel
Royal Holloway, Université de Londres
1-3 juillet 2019
Nous vous invitons à nous faire part de vos propositions de communication (en français ou en anglais; durée: 20 minutes) pour des sessions consacrées aux sujets suivants :
- Prisons, police, et sécurité
- L’anti-sémitisme
- Les féminismes : Le Deuxième sexe, 70 ans plus tard
- Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ?
- Foucault, 50 ans plus tard
- L’hospitalité
- Le cinéma
- Le post-humain
- La légalité et la législation
- Le son
- La migration et la mobilité
- Lire Frantz Fanon en 2019
- La langue, les innovations et les transformations sociales
Ces sujets se prêtent aux approches disciplinaires et aux contextes historiques les plus divers. Veuillez fournir un court résumé (250-300 mots) de votre proposition de communication, indiquer la session dans laquelle il s’inscrit, ainsi que vos coordonnées (nom, institution, adresse électronique). Nous rappelons que les propositions de communication doivent s’adresser à un public de spécialistes comme de nonspécialistes.
Le Comité scientifique examinera également des propositions de sessions complètes portant soit sur les thèmes ci-dessus, soit sur les différents domaines des études françaises et francophones. Les organisateurs encouragent vivement ce type de propositions qui devraient constituer la moitié des sessions du congrès. Les propositions devront être accompagnées des noms et des coordonnées (institution, adresse électronique) de tous les intervenants (3 ou 4) et du président de la session ainsi que des résumés des interventions (250-300 mots par communication) et d’une page résumant les objectifs de la session proposée. Le président de séance ne figurera pas parmi les intervenants. Le nom de la personne responsable de la session doit être clairement indiqué. Le Comité scientifique prendra également en considération d’autres formats de session que le format traditionnel (3 ou 4 communications de 20 minutes). Toutes les propositions seront étudiées par le Comité scientifique et les décisions seront communiquées vers le milieu du mois de novembre 2018. Les doctorant.es sont vivement encouragés à participer. Veuillez noter qu’afin d’encourager une participation aussi large que possible, il est possible de donner une communication lors de deux congrès consécutifs. Les propositions de communication et de sessions sont à envoyer par courriel avant le 21 septembre 2018 à l’organisatrice du congrès, Dr Victoria Turner au courriel suivant: sfsconf2019@gmail.com. Pour plus de renseignements sur le congrès, veuillez consulter www.sfs.ac.uk.
1.3 Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade
8-9 March 2019, Michigan State University (East Lansing, Michigan).
Deadline for submissions: 30 September 2018.
Description/Guidelines: The major objective of this conference is to encourage collaboration among scholars utilizing databases to document and reconstruct the lives of individuals who were part of historic slave trades. This conference will focus primarily on the enslavement and trade of people of African descent before the twentieth century, but we welcome papers from scholars studying other slave trades. We are interested in proposals from scholars who are presenting, interpreting, coordinating, integrating and preserving data about individuals—of slave, free or other status. Databases may be in various stages of development and construction from beginning to complete.
Please send a brief description of your slave database including place, time, type or types of documents, number of records and fields, graphics if any, how it has or can be used to ask and answer new questions, and to link to other slave databases. Limit 500 words. If you wish to be considered for a travel award, please provide a brief statement of need and preliminary budget with your application. If you plan to submit and require a visa to travel to the United States, please notify us before the deadline so that we can provide a letter of invitation/acceptance for your visa application.
Please email abstract and CV to enslavedconference@gmail.com by September 30th. Proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis.
In 2018, Michigan State University (MSU)—in partnership with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, Slave Societies Digital Archives at Vanderbilt University, the University of Colorado Boulder, University College London, the Harriet Tubman Institute at York University, and University of Maryland—received critical support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build a digital hub for students, researchers, and the general public, to search over numerous databases to reconstruct the lives of individuals who were part of the historic slave trade. Using Linked Open Data (LOD), we seek to provide a platform for researchers to upload, analyze, visualize and utilize data, and link that data to other databases, which will create a richer resource than the individual databases alone. African enslavement was fundamental to the making of Europe, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and parts of the Asian subcontinent.
During the past two decades, there has been a significant shift in perceptions about what we can know about enslaved Africans, their descendants, and those who asserted ownership over them throughout the world. Those on the cutting edge of the digital humanities and social sciences have set about identifying, digitizing, analyzing and making these resources available on innovative public history and cultural heritage websites. As a result, a growing number of collections of original digital manuscript documents, digitized material culture, and databases, that organize and make sense of records of enslavement, are free and readily accessible for scholarly and public consumption. At the same time, these projects fail to merge the data across the datasets, resulting in isolated projects and databases that do little to aid scholars in analyzing these sources. Our task as historians is more than to preserve images of primary sources, but to interpret those sources by finding new ways to organize, share, mine and analyze as well as to preserve original materials which might otherwise be discarded or lost.
Contact Info: enslavedconference@gmail.com
Also see https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/massive-data-project-will-connect-info-slaves-and-their-descendants-180967836/, http://research.msu.edu/enslaved-people-of-the-historic-slave-trade/, and https://acrl.ala.org/dh/2018/02/01/project-enslaved-people-of-the-historic-slave-trade/.
1.4 “Water Logics” International Conference
April 11-12, 2019, Tulane University
Convened by Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (Tulane University) and yasser elhariry (Dartmouth College)
Taking its critical cue from New Orleans’s unique liminal position on the Gulf Coast, Water logics starts from the shoreline as a threshold, as a point of departure away from land. Beyond the shore, where land meets water, how can water and bodies of water be conceived? To what forms of thought, art, literature, or politics do they give shape? The Gulf Coast’s porosity blurs the very notion of the shore as a cartographic threshold point: the land emerges from water and yet is immersed in water, infiltrated by it. In the wake of storms, resurgent floodwaters coat much of the land, eroding its structure. Taking the space of the sea as a point of inquiry, this conference rethinks the aqueous both within and beyond its contiguity with landed logics. It approaches the spatial component intrinsic to considerations of the watery in its complex relationship to the multifold transitions and translations afforded by the sea’s liquidity. Through a comparative approach to waterscapes from oceans to seas to waterways and embayments, we will address the following question: what kinds of aesthetics, transnationalism, knowledge transfer, and translational practices specific to the sea can we devise once diverging, geographically disparate oceanic sites of knowledge production are brought into contact?
Looming increasingly larger over our disciplinary constructs, seascapes have slowly come to complement academic taxonomies rooted in the fragmented, exclusive terrains of national literatures, teleological narratives, and other land-bound theoretical constructs. Drawing from characterizations of the aqueous as a “site of intellection” and “imaginative projection” (Wigen 2007), this conference seeks to foster cultural, archeological, historical, literary, and philosophical inquiries into the production, performance, and dissemination of knowledge across maritime spaces: the Caribbean Sea of our conference locale, but also the circum-Atlantic world, the Pacific Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea in their interrelations. With an eye towards the “material condition and praxis of the maritime world” (Blum 2010), we call for a reorientation of practical methodologies towards a comparative geophilosophy of watery spaces beyond dominant transit tropes (the sea as an expanse to be traversed or bridged in a series of physical, metaphorical, and historical transitions).
Presenters will engage one or several of the following issues in relation to the maritime context(s) of their choice:
- Comparative Maritime Studies: the sea(s) and the wider world
- Literary and cinematic representations of oceans, seas, and bodies of water; Oceanscape art; science-fiction; utopia/dystopia
- Translatio imperii and historical unfolding (from the Black Sea, to the Mediterranean, and the Caribbean Sea)
- Maritime borders; political violence; porosity; thresholds
- Archaeologies of contemporary migrations; water graves; deep-water shipwrecks
- Technological cartographies and mediations; surveillance; humanitarian practices
Detailed abstracts (500 words) and biographical notes are due by October 15, 2018 to Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (etamalet@tulane.edu) and yasser elhariry (yasser.elhariry@dartmouth.edu). Final decisions will be made by early November.
- Job Opportunities
2.1 Lecturer in French Language and Cultural Studies (University of Westminster)
Lecturer in French Language and Cultural Studies
University of Westminster – School of Humanities
| Location: | London |
| Salary: | £40,173 to £44,615 per annum (Inc. LWA) |
| Hours: | Full Time |
| Contract Type: | Permanent |
| Closes: | 5th August 2018 |
| Job Ref: | 50052097 |
The School of Humanities seeks to employ a Lecturer in French Language and Cultural Studies. The post holder will be expected to teach primarily at undergraduate level and to have an emerging research profile in French studies or in cross-cultural/interdisciplinary research which will complement existing research within the School. The post will also include administrative duties appropriate to the level of appointment and will include research supervision. Ideally, the post holder will hold a PhD and have an emerging research record as evidenced in peer-reviewed publications and is expected to be submitted to the Modern Languages UoA for REF2021.
The School of Humanities includes single and combined honours degrees in Arabic, Chinese, Creative Writing, English Language, English Literature, French, Global Communication, History, Linguistics, Spanish, and Translation. At MA level, we offer courses in Art and Visual Culture, Culture and Critical Studies, English Language and Linguistics, English Literature, International Liaison and Communication, Museums and Galleries, Translation and Interpreting, and TESOL. We have a varied and lively community of PhD students across all subjects.
The post-holder will join a community of 84 staff and around one thousand students at Westminster’s central London campus. The University of Westminster is among the world’s top twenty international Universities.
For further information and to apply for this post, please click apply and you will be redirected to our website.
Closing Date: Midnight on 5 August 2018
Interviews are likely to be held on: 20 August 2018
Administrative Contact (for queries only): Recruitment@westminster.ac.uk
Please note: We are unable to accept applications by email. All applications must be made online. CV’s in isolation or incomplete application forms will not be accepted.
Embracing diversity and promoting equality.
For more information, see https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BLC247/lecturer-in-french-language-and-cultural-studies/.
2.2 Fixed-Term Teaching Fellow in French (Durham University)
Teaching Fellow in French (Fixed Term)
Durham University – School of Modern Languages and Cultures
| Location: | Durham |
| Salary: | £32,548 to £38,832 |
| Hours: | Full Time |
| Contract Type: | Fixed-Term/Contract |
|
Closes: |
13th August 2018 |
| Job Ref: | 015686 |
Contract Type: 12-month Fixed Term Contract
Working arrangements: This role is full time but we will consider requests for flexible working arrangements including potential job shares
Closing date: 13 August 2018 (midday)
The School of Modern Languages and Cultures seeks to appoint an outstanding candidate to a twelve-month fixed term full-time Teaching Fellowship in French. The appointment is tenable from 1 September 2018. The successful candidate will be expected to provide excellent teaching and carry out service to the School. We welcome applications from exceptional teachers with an ability to contribute to teaching French literature and culture modules as well as core language courses in French to undergraduates studying for the BA in Modern Languages and Cultures and associated programmes, with a preference for candidates with expertise in the pre-1789 period.
The post is to provide temporary cover for teaching duties that a colleague on the academic track will undertake when appointed. The post will commence as soon as possible in September 2018 and will end on 31 August 2019; it is not anticipated that the post will be extended beyond this fixed term.
Interviews will be held 11 September 2018
For more information, see https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BLF887/teaching-fellow-in-french-fixed-term/.
2.3 Associate Lecturer in French (University of Exeter)
Associate Lecturer in French (Education and Scholarship)
University of Exeter
| Location: | Exeter |
| Salary: | The starting salary will be from £26,495 (pro rata) within the Grade E band (£26,495 to £29,799). |
| Hours: | Part Time |
| Contract Type: | Permanent |
| Closes: | 19th August 2018 |
| Job Ref: | S47123 |
The above part-time (0.5 FTE) post is available from September 3rd 2018 on a permanent basis.
The University of Exeter is a member of the prestigious Russell Group of research-intensive universities. We combine world-class teaching with world-class research, and have achieved a Gold rating in the Teaching Excellence Framework Award 2017. The University of Exeter has over 22,000 students and 4600 staff from 180 different countries and has been rated the WhatUni2017 International Student Choice. Our research focuses on some of the most fundamental issues facing humankind today, with 98% of our research rated as being of international quality in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework. We encourage proactive engagement with industry, business and community partners to enhance the impact of research and education and improve the employability of our students.
The role
The post will include supporting the student learning experience using a range of approaches and modes of delivery appropriate to French language teaching from beginner to advanced level and the standard departmental allocation of administration. The post requires up to 12 hours teaching per week in term-time. Details of the language modules can be found at
http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/flc/undergraduate/modules/
The successful applicant will have native or near native competence in French with excellent command of English, experience of teaching language classes which form part of non-specialist HE Foreign Language Centre provision at all levels, and experience of designing, setting and marking appropriate assessment components. S/he will be familiar with a variety of strategies to promote and assess language learning. The applicant will work collaboratively as part of a team.
About you
For an Associate Lecturer post you will:
- Possess a depth or breadth of specialist knowledge demonstrated by an appropriate qualification in HE teaching and/or foreign-language teaching or appropriate recognised training in foreign language teaching (French).
- Staff at this level are expected to achieve Associate Fellow of the HEA within two years of appointment (if not already achieved) and to attend formal CPD relating to this.
What we can offer you:
- Freedom (and the support) to pursue your intellectual interests and to work creatively across disciplines to produce internationally exciting research.
- Support teams that understand the University wide research and teaching goals and partner with our academics accordingly.
- An Innovation, Impact and Business directorate that works closely with our academics providing specialist support for external engagement and development.
- Our Exeter Academic initiative supporting high performing academics to achieve their potential and develop their careers.
- A multitude of staff benefits including sector leading benefits around maternity, adoption and shared parental leave(up to 26 weeks full pay), Paternity leave (up to 6 weeks full pay), and a new Fertility Treatment Policy.
- A beautiful campus set in the heart of stunning Devon.
Applications should be made via our website. For more information and to apply online please press the apply button below. Please quote reference number P47123 in any correspondence.
The University of Exeter is an equal opportunity employer. We are officially recognised as a Disability Confident employer, an Athena Swan accredited institution and a Stonewall Diversity Champion. Whilst all applicants will be judged on merit alone, we particularly welcome applications from groups currently underrepresented in the workforce.
For more information, see https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BLK836/associate-lecturer-in-french-education-and-scholarship/.
- Announcements
- New Titles
4.1 Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France (Liverpool University Press, 2018)
Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France offers a critical assessment of the ways in which French writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists descended from immigrants from former colonial territories bring their specificity to bear on the bounds and applicability of French republicanism, “Frenchness” and national identity, and contemporary cultural production in France. In mobilizing a range of approaches and methodologies pertinent to their specialist fields of inquiry, contributors to this volume share in the common objective of elucidating the cultural productions of what we are calling post-migratory (second- and third-generation) postcolonial minorities.
The volume provides a lens through which to query the dimensions of postcoloniality and transnationalism in relation to post-migratory postcolonial minorities in France and identifies points of convergence and conversation among them in the range of their cultural production. The cultural practitioners considered query traditional French high culture and its pathways and institutions; some emerge as autodidacts, introducing new forms of authorship and activism; they inflect French cultural production with different ‘accents’, some experimental and even avant-garde in nature. As the volume contributors show, though post-migratory postcolonial minorities sometimes express dis-settlement, they also provide an incisive view of social identities in France today and their own compelling visions for the future.
For more information, see https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/108138.
4.2 France, Algeria and the Moving Image Screening Histories of Violence 1963–2010 (MHRA, 2017)
By Maria Flood
In the contemporary political sphere, the need to address the complex interactions between colonization, past and present violence, and audio-visual representation has never appeared more urgent. This is particularly true of France’s troubled relationship with Algeria where, even after decolonization, episodes of violence — police repression, torture, and terrorism — were often excluded from popular, political and historical accounts on both sides of the Mediterranean. By engaging in close readings of work by both European and Algerian filmmakers — including Michael Haneke, Alain Resnais, Assia Djebar, Xavier Beauvois, and Nadir Moknèche — Maria Flood’s wide-ranging study links historical omission to cinematic aesthetics, ultimately offering conclusions that inform wider thinking of the political power of film in the face of violence.
For more information, see http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/France-Algeria-Moving-Image.
4.3 Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (Nebraska University Press, 2018)
By Kathleen Keller
A Vietnamese cook, a German journalist, and a Senegalese student—what did they have in common? They were all suspicious persons kept under surveillance by French colonial authorities in West Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. Colonial Suspects looks at the web of surveillance set up by the French government during the twentieth century as France’s empire slipped into crisis.
As French West Africa and the French Empire more generally underwent fundamental transformations during the interwar years, French colonial authorities pivoted from a stated policy of “assimilation” to that of “association.” Surveillance of both colonial subjects and visitors traveling through the colonies increased in scope. The effect of this change in policy was profound: a “culture of suspicion” became deeply ingrained in French West African society.
Kathleen Keller notes that the surveillance techniques developed over time by the French included “shadowing, postal control, port police, informants, denunciations, home searches, and gossip.” This ad hoc approach to colonial surveillance mostly proved ineffectual, however, and French colonies became transitory spaces where a global cast of characters intermixed and French power remained precarious. Increasingly, French officials—in the colonies and at home—reacted in short-sighted ways as both perceived and real backlash occurred with respect to communism, pan-Africanism, anticolonialism, black radicalism, and pan-Islamism. Focusing primarily on the port city of Dakar (Senegal), Keller unravels the threads of intrigue, rumor, and misdirection that informed this chaotic period of French colonial history.
For more information, see http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9780803296916/.
4.4 La Mémoire de l’esclavage: Traces mémorielles de l’esclavage et des traites dans l’espace atlantique (Harmattan, 2018)
De Lawrence Aje et Nicolas Gachon
Le traumatisme culturel de l’esclavage comme structurant, voire comme fondateur d’identités individuelles ou collective a récemment fait l’objet d’un intérêt croissant. L’ouvrage interroge la façon dont les descendants de populations asservies reconstruisent l’histoire de leurs ancêtres ; il évalue les effets culturels, politiques et symboliques que produisent les phénomènes de commémoration, de muséification et de patrimonialisation de la mémoire de l’esclavage ainsi que les contraintes que suppose l’insertion de cette histoire dans l’espace public.
En savoir plus: http://www.editions-harmattan.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=livre&no=60397.
4.5 Édouard Glissant: A Poetics of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2018)
By Sam Coombes
Édouard Glissant was a leading voice in debates centering on the postcolonial condition and on the present and future of globalisation. Prolific as both a theorist and a literary author, Glissant started his career as a contemporary of Frantz Fanon in the early days of francophone postcolonial thought. In the latter part of his career Glissant’s vision pushed beyond the boundaries of postcolonialism to encompass the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation.
Sam Coombes offers a detailed analysis of Glissant’s thought, setting out the reasons why Glissant’s vision for a world of intercultural interaction both reflects but also seeks to provide a correction to some of the leading tendencies commonly associated with contemporary theory today.
For more information, see https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/edouard-glissant-9781350036833/.
4.6 Mythologies postcoloniales: Pour une décolonisation du quotidien (Honoré Champion, 2018)
De Achielle Etienne et Moudileno Lydie
À l’heure où la question du vivre-ensemble français émerge comme le grand défi des décennies à venir, le quotidien, lieu d’interactions sociales déterminantes pour les individus et les communautés, s’impose à nouveau comme terrain d’investigation prioritaire. Selon notre histoire personnelle et notre identité sociale, nous ne traversons pas le réel de la même manière. Pour nombre d’entre nous, loin d’être insignifiant, le quotidien est aussi le lieu d’une violence qui même en restant infime opère avec une efficacité dévastatrice. Ainsi, le contexte actuel de la France multiculturelle nous force à considérer sérieusement le caractère racialisé de la quotidienneté. La race occupant bel et bien une place dans la République, il s’agit d’en penser la permanence dans sa visibilité comme dans son invisibilité. Cet ouvrage s’est donné la tâche d’en relever différentes occurrences, notamment celles qui peuvent sembler anodines à certains.
La nation en crise d’identité est toujours productrice et preneuse de ce que Roland Barthes appelait dans les années cinquante des mythologies. Aujourd’hui encore, la pérennité de représentations renvoyant au discours colonial confirme que la naturalisation des idéologies est insidieuse, et qu’elle conforte toutes sortes de mythes. Mythologies postcoloniales se propose d’examiner ce pouvoir subreptice des signes dans le contexte de la France contemporaine en posant les bases d’un répertoire critique des signes postcoloniaux dans le quotidien, afin de le décoloniser.
En savoir plus: https://www.honorechampion.com/fr/champion/10760-book-08534756-9782745347565.html.
4.7 Postcolonial Poetics: 21st Century Critical Readings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.
For more information, see https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319903408.
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