1. Calls for Papers
1.1 Unsettling Communities: Minor, Minority and Small Literatures in Europe
1.2 Teaching Haiti Beyond Literature: Intersectionalities of History, Literature and Culture
1.3 Obéissance
1.4 Expressions maghrébines
1.5 Pratiques du documentaire en Afrique
1.6 Women Behaving Badly(?): Women’s Pleasures and their Discontents in French and Francophone Cultures and Societies
2. Announcements
2.1 Cartographie des mémoires de l’esclavage/Mapping Memories of Enslavement
2.2 Embodied Islands: A Caribbean photographic exhibition
3. New Titles
3.1 French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories
3.2 Victor Jean Louis Baghio’o par lui-même
1. Calls for Papers
1.1 Unsettling Communities: Minor, Minority and Small Literatures in Europe
Thursday, 23 and Friday, 24 February 2017
Venue: University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Following on from a successful cross-language and cross-culture symposium held in October 2015 (‘Interpreting Communities: Minority Writing in European Literary Fields’), this conference will unite researchers for two days of systematic, comparative study of the content, form, status, and reception of ‘minority’ writing in Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries.
This second conference on the topic is designed to feed directly into a publication that aims to offer a continent-spanning consideration of writers and writing from small communities in Europe. By building upon and challenging Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor’ literature and other aligned theories, we aim to find new ways of analysing texts produced by writers who have been ascribed ‘minority’ status. Overall, we are keen to explore the aesthetic and political power of literature to represent, re-formulate and shape communities.
The three main strands of our enquiry, then, are the analysis of acts of representation, the post-representational potential of ‘minority’ literature and the extra-textual factors influencing its production and reception. In this search for new and better ways of understanding works categorised as ‘minority’ (in the manifold terms used across European countries), our enquiry seeks to consider how literary markets, publishers, critics, students and others absorb this categorisation and how works might resist or ‘disorient’ established expectations.
Both the conference and the publication will be organised into three sections:
- ‘Mapping Europe’: papers interested in identity politics; the concepts of ‘centre’, ‘periphery’, ‘minor’, ‘minority’, etc.; small vs. large literatures; Europe’s physical and conceptual boundaries; concepts of ‘Europeanness’ and community/nation/state identity as they affect or appear in literary works.
- ‘Circulation and Readership’: papers engaging with questions of ‘the text in the world’; i.e. the teaching, marketing, publishing and reception of ‘minority’ literatures and how this responds to ‘the world in the text’, as well as papers addressing questions of ‘translation’ in its broadest sense, translingualism, and the dialogue between ‘academic’ reading and other forms of reading practice.
- ‘Acts of Unsettling’: papers focusing on the ways that ‘minority’ writers resist and/or that consider the possibilities for and limitations of critique within systems where ‘minority’ literatures circulate.
While we welcome any proposals engaging with any of the areas listed above and any body of minority writing in Europe, we are particularly interested in:
- Historical and political considerations of ‘Europeanness’, pre- or post-EU
- Minority writing in Southern and Eastern Europe
- The influences of the publishing industry
- The teaching of / academic engagement with minority writing.
N.B.: While primarily focused on literary writing, we are also interested in proposals for papers concerned with film and visual culture.
200-word abstracts for papers of 20-minutes length are invited by 31 August 2016 to Malachi McIntosh (msam2@cam.ac.uk) and Godela Weiss-Sussex (godela.weiss-sussex@sas.ac.uk). All submissions should, within the subject-line, include which of the three strands they align with.
1.2 Teaching Haiti Beyond Literature: Intersectionalities of History, Literature and Culture
In “Poem for the Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere”, poet Danielle Legros Georges chants: “Oh poorest country, this is not your name/ You should be called beacon, and flame.” Haiti, the only country with the last name of “poorest country in the Western hemisphere” is often at the crossroads of either being venerated in History as the First Black Republic or being pitied. Latin American historian Philippe Zacaïr notes that Haiti is “only respected in books as opposed to real life.” The essays in this volume will focus on how to teach about Haiti and its complex history and culture from a transdisciplinary perspective. Its main goal is to provide best practices and practical suggestions for teaching about Haiti from multiple lenses including art, art history, cultural studies, film, gender, history, literature, and sociology to name but a few areas of interest. The volume also seeks critical essays that center on “Fatal assistance” (a term used by filmmaker Raoul Peck) to highlight the problematic of humanitarian aid and NGOs, service learning, volunteerism and disaster tourism in Haiti.
Since the 2010 earthquake that reshaped Haiti forever, there has been an increased interest in Haiti. The mythologization of the Haitian revolution remains a constant trope for writers and critics in the Americas. Yet, paradoxically, the Latin American Studies curriculum in U.S. universities often disregards Haiti. Anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot in his seminal work Silencing the Past challenges the “production of historical narratives” and how they affect our understanding and perception of history and culture. When referencing countries in Latin America, Haiti is positioned at the very bottom, so it is not surprising that in spite of being the first independent black country in the Western Hemisphere, there has been almost complete erasure of its history. An example of Haiti’s marginalization in the Caribbean is its complex rapport with the Dominican Republic. Recently, Haiti as well as the Dominican Republic have been in the news because of issues associated with citizenship. In 2013, the Supreme Court of the Dominican Republic ruled that anyone born between 1929 and 2010 to non-citizen parents could not claim Dominican citizenship and was therefore subject to deportation.
In the recent years of the post-Haiti earthquake, there have been several volumes published in English which focus on Haiti’s history and culture as well as comparative studies of Haiti and other Caribbean islands. Among them we note the following: Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti by Mark Schuller (Rutgers University press, 2016), The Haitian Declaration of Independence edited by Julia Gaffield (University of Virginia Press, 2016), Place in the Sun: Haiti, Haitians and the Remaking of Quebec by Sean Mills (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016)), Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-quake Chronicle by Gina Athena Ulysse (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), Caribbean Crossing: African Americans and the Haitian Emigration Movement by Sara Fanning (New York University Press, 2015), Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and The Caribbean End Times by Martin Munro (University of Virginia Press, 2015), Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois (Metropolitan Books, 2012), From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Vision of Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic by Myriam Chancy (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2012) and Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora in the Wider Caribbean edited by Philippe Zacaïr (University Press of Florida, 2010)
Despite these very impressive volumes, no comprehensive reader proposing methods for teaching about Haiti’s history and culture from transdisciplinary perspectives has been published. This book will fill this gap. The essays will provide practical tips and best practices for instructors teaching about Haiti as well as suggested readings for undergraduate and graduate students at the MA level.
We are looking for unpublished essays focusing on teaching about Haiti from the following perspectives:
Activism/Activists in Haiti
Haitian History
Haitian Painting
Haitian Women
Haitian Immigrants
Haitian Film
Haitian Music
Historical Representations of Haiti
Indigenism Movement
Haitian Architecture
Humanitarianism/Humanitarian aid/NGOs
Service Learning in Haiti
Haitian Literature and Poetry (especially lesser known writers from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries)
Haitian Creole (Link between language and education/language and development)
Gender and Sexuality
Haiti and the Dominican Republic
Haiti and the United States
Haiti/Haitians and African-Americans (beyond Jacques Roumain and Langston Hughes)
Vodou as cultural practice (religion, culture and identity)
Haitian Poetry
Haitian Theater
Post-earthquake
LGBTQ in Haiti
*** This list is not exhaustive.
If you are interested in contributing, please send a 500 word abstract and short bio to Dr. Cécile Accilien and Dr. Valérie K. Orlando at either:cecileaccilien@ku.edu or vorlando@umd.edu by June 25, 2016.
You will be notified by July 15th, 2016
The first draft of the essays will be due by January 10, 2017
About the editors:
Cécile Accilien is Associate professor in the Department of African & African-American Studies and the Director of the Institute of Haitian Studies (haitianstudies.ku.edu) at Kansas University.
Valérie Orlando is Professor of French & Francophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Maryland (College Park), Head of the Department of French & Italian and Series Editor for: “After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France”, Lexington Books
1.3 Obéissance
Association des Études Françaises et Francophones d’Irlande
ADEFFI 2016 – 18ème Colloque Annuel
University College Cork (14-15-16 Octobre 2016)
Pour son 18ème colloque, l’ADEFFI a retenu cette année le thème ‘Obéissance’.
Les pistes de réflexion ci-dessous sont données à titre indicatif.
Maîtres et serviteurs
Autorité et citoyenneté
Travail-Famille-Patrie
Relations parents-enfants
Esclavage, servage, liberté
Soumission, insoumission
Déférence, vénération, respect
Moquerie, mépris, blasphème
Religions, laïcité
Révolte, révolution, soulèvement, désobéissance
Contraintes, obligations, responsabilité
Habitus, habitudes, coutumes
Autorité, auteur
Jugement, justice
Droit, lois, législation, règles, normes
Les propositions de communication, rédigées en français ou en anglais sous la forme d’un résumé de 300 mots maximum (format MS Word), doivent être envoyées par courriel à adeffi.conference@yahoo.ie avant le 15 juin 2016.
1.4 Expressions maghrébines
Revue de la Coordination internationale des chercheurs sur les littératures du Maghreb
www.ub.edu/cdona/em
Vol. 16, no 2, hiver 2017 : Appel à articles
Cultures du mysticisme
Dossier coordonné par Yasser Elhariry
Date limite de soumission des articles : 31 janvier 2017
Parution : décembre 2017
Le mysticisme imprègne et ponctue l’importante production littéraire et artistique au Maghreb. Le soufisme, en particulier, y figure de manière prominente. Lors d’un entretien avec Hervé Sanson en 2012, Habib Tengour fait remarquer que l’écriture maghrébine s’adosse le plus souvent à un fond soufi très présent. Des intellectuels engagés—de Jocelyne Dakhlia à Abdelwahab Meddeb— appellent de leur côté à un renouveau au sein de la culture maghrébine contemporaine : ils souhaitent renouveler ou rétablir, à travers la création, ses liens à un héritage ontologique riche et divers, tant intellectuel que religieux. Leurs réflexions surgissent de l’histoire tumultueuse qui a marqué la rive sud de la Méditerranée durant les dernières décennies et qui n’a pas manqué de déclencher maints débats et polémiques autour de l’héritage et de l’identité de la région. Cependant, la pensée mystique a toujours circulé d’un bout à l’autre des œuvres de Mohammed Arkoun, Yasmina Benguigui, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Assia Djebar, Edmond El Maleh, Abdelfattah Kilito, Fatema Mernissi, Leïla Sebbar et bien d’autres encore. De même, la traduction et la réécriture des figures majeures du mysticisme telles qu’Abu Yazid al-Bistami, Mansur al-Hallaj, Shahab al-Din Sohrawardi et Ibn ‘Arabi sont au cœur de l’œuvre d’un écrivain comme Meddeb.
Dans ce dossier, nous envisageons donc de faire la lumière sur les mécanismes de continuité et de rupture qui accompagnent le retour actuel aux héritages mystiques du judaïsme, du christianisme, de l’islam et de la religion berbère traditionnelle, dans tous les média et les formes littéraires d’expression culturelle dans la région et ses diasporas. Un appareil critique au carrefour des études littéraires, culturelles et séculaires sous-tendra le dossier afin de poser les bases d’une archive des expressions maghrébines mystiques contemporaines. Au travers de lectures fines et attentives des objets littéraires, artistiques et culturels, le dossier se propose d’intervenir dans les débats globaux sur la religion, la sécularisation et la surveillance intensifiées des droits de l’expression religieuse, qui se font le plus souvent sous la bannière d’un humanisme universel très fréquemment athée.
Bien que l’islam, sous toutes ses formes, soit la forme dominante d’expression spirituelle dans la région et ses diasporas, l’exclusivité religieuse est loin d’être la règle en pays maghrébins. Ce dossier interrogera le soufisme en convoquant d’autres modes confessionnels et expressifs du mysticisme maghrébin, afin de présenter le plus grand éventail possible des cultures mystiques maghrébines, dans toutes leurs manifestations artistiques, culturelles et politiques. Quels nouveaux genres et formes d’expression littéraires, intertextuelles ou de traduction naissent de ce contexte ? Quelle est leur place au sein des débats qui animent de longue date les études littéraires et culturelles du Maghreb (la langue ; la migration et l’immigration ; l’exil ; le colonialisme et le postcolonialisme ; les polémiques identitaires ; les questions de souveraineté nationale) ? Quelle est leur place au sein des débats actuels sur le sécularisme et la religion-monde (Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Bruno Chaouat, Pheng Cheah, Saba Mahmood, Tomoko Masuzawa) ?
Nous invitons les contributeurs à situer leur analyse au carrefour des histoires complexes et des politiques culturelles du mysticisme, de l’art, de la littérature, du cinéma, du théâtre et des débats actuels qu’elles raniment. Des contributions s’inscrivant dans toutes les disciplines et approches sont les bienvenues. Nous sollicitons particulièrement des articles s’inspirant d’approches nouvelles telles que les études du sécularisme, les études méditerranéennes, les études sonores et le nouveau lyrisme.
Les articles ne devront pas dépasser 40.000 signes, espaces inclus (6.000 mots environ). La ponctuation, les notes et les références doivent être conformes aux normes appliquées par la revue : http://www.ub.edu/cdona/em#guide
Les demandes de renseignements complémentaires et les articles complets doivent être adressés par courrier électronique à la Présidente du comité scientifique à : expressions.maghrebines@ub.edu
La section VARIA de la revue maintient toujours un appel à articles (sans date limite de soumission) concernant les cultures maghrébines : littérature, cinéma, arts…
Vol. 16, no. 2, Winter 2017: Call for Papers
Cultures du mysticisme
Edited by Yasser Elhariry
Final Papers Submission Deadline: 31 January 2017
Publication: December 2017
The mystical strains of religious cultures permeate and punctuate the Maghreb’s wide proliferation of literary and artistic production. Sufism in particular suffuses much of Maghrebi culture. In an interview with Hervé Sanson in 2012, Habib Tengour remarks how Maghrebi writing frequently adopts a pronounced Sufi background. Public intellectuals—from Jocelyne Dakhlia to the late Abdelwahab Meddeb—have, for their part, repeatedly appealed for a revival in contemporary Maghrebi culture: to renew or reestablish its ties to a rich heritage of diverse intellectual and religious modes of being through art. Their claims emerge amidst the tumultuous history of the southern Mediterranean over the past several decades, which has consistently given rise to related debates on the region’s heritage and identity. Nonetheless, mystical thought has always circulated throughout the works of Mohammed Arkoun, Yasmina Benguigui, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Assia Djebar, Edmond El Maleh, Abdelfattah Kilito, Fatema Mernissi, and Leïla Sebbar, amongst many others. Similarly, the translations and rewritings of the traditions surrounding major mystical figures such as Abu Yazid al-Bistami, Mansur al-Hallaj, Shahab alDin Sohrawardi, and Ibn ‘Arabi infuse the œuvre of writers such as Meddeb.
This special issue of Expressions maghrébines will shed light on the dialectics of continuity and rupture within the ongoing contemporary turn to the mystical heritages of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and traditional Berber religion, across the media and literary forms of cultural expression in the region and its diasporas. A critical apparatus at the intersection of literary, cultural, and secular studies will subtend the issue, which seeks to constitute the beginnings of an archive of mystical contemporary Maghrebi expression. Through close and careful readings of literary, artistic, and cultural objects, the issue seeks to intervene in global debates on religion and the heightened secular policing of religious expression, which occurs beneath the banner of universal, and frequently atheist, humanism.
While Islam, in all of its guises, may be the dominant form of spiritual expression in the region and among its diasporas, it far from claims religious exclusivity. This issue seeks to complement Sufism with an excavation of other confessional modes of Maghrebi mysticism, in order to present the widest possible spectrum of cultures of mysticism in all of their artistic, cultural, and political manifestations. What new forms and genres of literary expression, translation, and intertextuality emerge from this context? What is their place amidst the debates that have long animated cultural and literary studies of the Maghreb (language, im/migration, exile, post/colonialism, nationhood, identity)? What is their place amidst current debates on secularism and world religions (Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Bruno Chaouat, Pheng Cheah, Saba Mahmood, Tomoko Masuzawa)?
Contributors are invited to analyze the complex histories and cultural politics of mysticism, art, literature, cinema, and theater, and the ongoing debates that they raise. Contributors from all disciplines and approaches dealing with all forms of primary and secondary materials are encouraged to submit. Contributions informed by newly emergent approaches such as secular studies, Mediterranean studies, sound studies, and the new lyric studies are especially encouraged.
Articles should not exceed 40,000 characters, spaces included (approximately 6,000 words). Punctuation, footnotes, and references must conform with the journal’s norms: http://www.ub.edu/cdona/em#guide
Articles or requests for further information should be sent to the Chair of the Editorial Board at: expressions.maghrebines@ub.edu The journal’s VARIA section maintains an open call for articles concerning Maghrebi cultures: literature, cinema, arts…
1.5 Pratiques du documentaire en Afrique
Pratiques du documentaire en Afrique : un colloque international
Documentary Filmmaking Practices in Africa : an International Conference
Les 19 et 20 janvier 2017 / January 19-20, 2017
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Conférencière invitée – Keynote Speaker : Sheila Petty, University of Regina, Canada
- Théorie et pratique du documentaire en Afrique
- Fiction et documentaire : frontières et distances
- Histoire et documentaire
- Documentaire et esthétique du témoignage
- Nouvelle économie politique du documentaire
- Les nouvelles technologies : une chance pour le documentaire ?
- Écocritique et documentaire
- Internet et nouvelles plateformes de distribution
- Le documentaire : catalyseur de la diversité culturelle et linguistique
- Le documentaire : un genre plus « féminin » ?
- Organisations non gouvernementales et « commandes de documentaires » : enjeux politiques et éthiques.
- Le documentaire : un genre « fatalement militant » ?
- Theory and practice of documentary filmmaking in Africa
- Fiction and documentaries: relationships and limits
- History and documentary filmmaking in Africa
- The political economy of documentary filmmaking
- Documentaries and the testimony aesthetics
- Ecocriticism and documentaries
- New technologies: opportunities and challenges
- Documentaries as catalysts for cultural, linguistic and creative diversity
- Documentaries, the Internet and emerging distribution platforms
- The documentary: a more “feminine” genre?
- NGO and documentaries: political and ethical issues
- The documentary: an “inevitably activist” genre?
1.6 Women Behaving Badly(?): Women’s Pleasures and their Discontents in French and Francophone Cultures and Societies
Women in French 14th Biennial Conference 2017
LEEDS 19-21 May 2017
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Chantal Chawaf and Nelly Quemener
CALL FOR PAPERS
Feminist approaches to the question of women’s pleasures have generally been premised on the assumption that such pleasures are typically constrained if not ignored, marginalised or forbidden in patriarchal cultures; the foregrounding and pursuit of women’s pleasures is therefore deemed potentially subversive and linked to women’s emancipation in other realms. This conference aims to examine, within a range of historical contexts (though with an emphasis on the contemporary period), the ways in which women’s changing understanding of and struggle for their rights to a range of pleasurable behaviours and activities challenge patriarchal constructions of appropriate pleasurable activities and behaviour for women; as a corollary it addresses the rejection of behaviours, activities and ideologies that impede such pleasures. At the same time, recognising that in many aspects of life contemporary postfeminist consumer societies have successfully co-opted the question of women’s pleasures, the conference also aims to question the extent to which certain forms of pleasure may ultimately be damaging rather than productive in relation to ongoing feminist agendas for women’s equality. Questions to be addressed include: To what extent are women’s pleasures culturally and gender specific? To what extent are women’s pleasures class-related? What theoretical approaches are useful for understanding women’s pleasures? To what extent can we say that women are free to pursue their pleasures, in the diverse range of social contexts globally?
Suggested areas for papers include but are not limited to:
– Sexual pleasures (female/lesbian/‘queer’/polymorphously perverse/
jouissifs)
– Gendered pleasures (female friendships/communities of women/sisters and mother-daughter relationships, etc.)
– Pleasures of creativity (language, the arts, social sciences, sciences, music, film, new technologies, etc.)
– Intellectual pleasures (feminism/political engagement/textual, reading, writing, visual, aural pleasures/contestation)
– Pleasures of lived experience (women’s spaces/familial and other interpersonal relationships/different ages of women’s lives/work/ civic or spiritual pleasures/sporting pleasures)
– Celebratory/subversive pleasures (carnival/disruption/fantasy/ transgression/selfish pleasures/violent pleasures/humour/ performance)
– Consumer/consuming pleasures (bodies and body images/fashion/ beauty/food)
– Pleasures of the senses/bodily pleasures (tattooing/ cosmetic surgery)
– Pleasures of nostalgia
– Constraints on women’s pleasures (patriarchal oppression/male power/religious oppression/racism/sexual violence/heterosexism/ cissexism/consumerist ideology/the lived environment)
NB:
At the suggestion of our colleagues in Women in French USA (who are planning a similar session at their 2016 conference) we, too, shall include a panel on the writings of Mireille Best. Proposals to be sent to us in the usual manner, see below:
Proposals for papers in English or in French (300 words maximum) should be accompanied by a short CV and sent to ALL THE PROGRAMME ORGANISERS by 1 September 2016:
Programme Organisers:
Maggie Allison: m.e.allison@bradford.ac.uk
Elliot Evans: elliot.evans@kcl.ac.uk
Gillian Ni Cheallaigh: gilliannicheallaigh@gmail.com
Carrie Tarr: carrietarr@btinternet.com
Deadline for proposals: Friday 1 SEPTEMBER 2016
2. Announcements
2.1 Cartographie des mémoires de l’esclavage/Mapping Memories of Enslavement
Throughout the French Republic, the month of May marks a number of commemorative events relating to slavery and its abolition, and the memory of those who were enslaved, including 10th (national day), 22nd (Martinique), 23rd (memory of the enslaved) and 27th May (Guadeloupe). To mark these events, we are releasing a publically-available report entitled “Mémoire, esclavage, réparation” (“Memory, Slavery, Reparation”) that can be downloaded from a new website entitled “Cartographie des mémoires de l’esclavage” or “Mapping Memories of Enslavement” (http://www.mmoe.llc.ed.ac.uk/fr/). This project has been funded by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship. The website and report are currently only available in French, but an English-language version will be launched shortly.
The aims of this project and its website are:
- To address the urgent need to provide activists with access to information about other activists working in similar areas of interest across geographically diverse locations within the French Republic.
- To serve as an important resource connecting academics and activists, enabling users to find and forge connections between geographically, ideologically and politically divergent group.
- To offer a gateway to the work of associations and cultural institutions, allowing users to explore multiple approaches to memory and activism.
To achieve these aims, we have created a fully searchable online map and database for use by activists, researchers and other professionals. Please note that the website is a ‘work in progress’ and that we will continue to add information on different associations and sites of memory. The report ‘Memory, Slavery, Reparations’ is based on a series of interviews conducted with activist groups based in France and its overseas departments (notably Martinique, Guadeloupe and La Réunion) and the government-linked Comité National pour la Mémoire et l’Histoire de l’Esclavage.
Its two primary aims are:
- To assess the efficacy of the State’s commemorative practices from the perspectives of those most affected by this history, and to question the extent to which State recognition has succeeded in recognizing and tackling the long-standing legacies of slavery upon contemporary French society.
- To explore alternative responses to State-led commemorative practices by focusing on the different conceptualizations of, and responses to, the question of reparations for slavery
Overall, this report sets out to highlight and dispel the confusion surrounding reparations in order to contribute usefully to debates on their meaning.
Should you require any further details regarding either of these outputs, or should you wish to contribute to the project, please feel free to contact me at Nicola.Frith@ed.ac.uk.
Pendant le mois de mai, la République française participe à un nombre d’événements commémoratifs liés à l’histoire de l’esclavage et son abolition, ainsi que la mémoire des personnes réduites en esclavage, y compris le 10 mai (journée nationale), le 22 mai (Martinique), le 23 mai (commémoration des victimes de l’esclavage) et 27 mai (Guadeloupe). Pour marquer ces occasions, nous rendons publique un rapport qui s’intitule « Mémoires, esclavage, réparations ». Vous pouvez télécharger ce rapport en accédant à un nouveau site Web qui s’appelle « Cartographie des mémoires de l’esclavage » (http://www.mmoe.llc.ed.ac.uk/fr/). Ce projet est financé par le Conseil pour la Recherche dans le domaine des Arts et Humanités (AHRC) grâce au programme Leadership Fellowship. Le site Web et le rapport sont actuellement disponible en français mais des versions anglaises seront lancées en quelques semaines.
Les objectifs sont les suivants :
- Permettre aux militants d’avoir accès à des informations sur d’autres militants partageant les mêmes centres d’intérêts, et ce sur différentes zones géographiques.
- Servir de ressource permettant de mettre en relation les universitaires et les militants, afin que les utilisateurs puissent établir des connexions avec des groupes plus ou moins éloignés d’un point de vue géographique, idéologique et politique.
- Créer des passerelles vers le travail des associations et des institutions culturelles, pour permettre aux utilisateurs d’explorer différentes manières d’aborder la mémoire et le militantisme.
Afin d’atteindre ces objectifs, nous avons créé en ligne une carte et une base de données entièrement consultable, à l’attention des militants, chercheurs et autres professionnels. Veuillez noter que ce travail est toujours en cours et que nous continuerons à ajouter d’information concernant des associations et des lieux de mémoires.
Le rapport « Mémoire, esclavage et réparation » est basé sur des interviews avec des membres du Comité National pour la Mémoire et l’Histoire de l’Esclavage (et ses versions précédentes) et des associations et militants basés en France et dans l’Outre-mer.
Ses deux objectifs principaux sont les suivants:
- Évaluer l’efficacité des pratiques commémoratives organisées par l’État, du point de vue des personnes les plus concernées par cette histoire, et déterminer si la reconnaissance du passé esclavagiste par l’État a véritablement permis à la société française contemporaine de prendre conscience et traiter les séquelles de l’esclavage.
- Explorer les solutions alternatives aux pratiques commémoratives initiées par l’État, en se concentrant sur les différentes perceptions de ce que constituent les réparations de l’esclavage, ainsi que sur les divers moyens envisagés pour régler cette question.
De manière générale, ce rapport s’attache à mettre en évidence, et à tenter de dissiper, la confusion qui règne autour du sujet des réparations afin de contribuer de manière utile aux débats sur ce qu’elles signifient et ce qu’elles impliquent.
Si vous voulez obtenir plus d’information concernant ce projet et ses résultats, ou si vous voulez contribuer à ce projet, n’hésitez pas à nous contacter : Nicola.Frith@ed.ac.uk.
2.2 Embodied Islands: A Caribbean photographic exhibition
“Embodied Islands: A Caribbean photographic exhibition” takes place on June 20-25, 2016, from 10:00am to 5:00pm at the Helen Martin Studio, Warwick Arts Centre, at the University of Warwick, Coventry, England (UK). The exhibition will be launched with a talk by Dr. Fabienne Viala (Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies) on June 20, 2016, from 5:00 to 6:00pm.
The exhibition includes 200 images from the 19th century as well as work by Nadia Huggins (St. Vincent), Robert Charlotte (Martinique), Jean-Baptiste Barret (Martinique), and Jean-François Manicom (Guadeloupe).
Description: Embodied Islands is a photography exhibition bringing together the past and the present in the Caribbean Region, one of the most creative regions for visual art and photography.
The exhibition will consist of two different visual elements. At the center of the room, the display of 200 stereoviews (the ancestor of photographs) taken at the very end of the 19th century across the Caribbean Region just after the abolition are a rare opportunity to see the conditions of life and work of the Caribbean people in a colonial environment.
Those pictures are as much historical witnesses of the plantation system as visual triggers to reflect on how photography was used as a tool to justify that the exploitation of the worker’s body as a commodity. (Those pictures are suitable for children to see). They are a rare opportunity to think about the history of photography, given that a stereoscope will be displayed in the room to give a real sense of the type of pictures people could enjoy to see at the time.
All across the room, Embodied Islands will also display the works of four contemporary Caribbean artists, whose photographs challenge the ways in which the human body is represented in the Caribbean.
Nadia Huggins from Saint Vincent, winner of the last Caribbean Festival of the Image, takes picture of teenagers while they dive from the cliff into the water as part of a coming of age ritual. The pictures are taken under water and represent the body in quite a supernatural feature, as if movement was fixed under water. Robert Charlotte’s (from Martinique) series of portraits of the Garifuna people of Saint Vincent tell the story of the artist’s encounter with his Caribbean brothers and the Garifunas strong will to remain free.
Jean-Baptiste Barret, another renowned photographer from Martinique, portraits men and women with masks, posing in amazing tropical landscapes while reenacting a mythology of the island as a new Caribbean Odyssey that is open to the spectator’s interpretation.
Jean-François Manicom, from Guadeloupe, was awarded in 2016 the prize for the best photographer at the Vera international Festival of Contemporary Art in Moscow for his series “Darbonne”, which portraits the nightlife on the Route de Darbonne, in Haiti. The silhouettes of adults and children on the Route de Darbonne are like ghostlike dancers in chiaroscuro behind the cars headlights.
For more information you may contact F.Viala@warwick.ac.uk
3. New Titles
3.1 French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories
Edited by Patricia M. E. Lorcin & Todd Shepard
While the Mediterranean is often considered a distinct, unified space, recent scholarship on the early modern history of the sea has suggested that this perspective is essentially a Western one, devised from the vantage point of imperial power that historically patrolled the region’s seas and controlled its ports. By contrast, for the peoples of its southern shores, the Mediterranean was polymorphous, shifting with the economic and seafaring exigencies of the moment. Nonetheless, by the nineteenth century the idea of a monolithic Mediterranean had either been absorbed by or imposed on the populations of the region.
In French Mediterraneans editors Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard offer a collection of scholarship that reveals the important French element in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century creation of the singular Mediterranean. These essays provide a critical study of space and movement through new approaches to think about the maps, migrations, and margins of the sea in the French imperial and transnational context. By reconceptualizing the Mediterranean, this volume illuminates the diversity of connections between places and polities that rarely fit models of nation-state allegiances or preordained geographies.
Patricia M. E. Lorcin is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia: European Women’s Narratives of Algeria and Kenya 1900–Present and Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria, New Edition (Nebraska, 2014).
Todd Shepard is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Voices of Decolonization: A Brief History with Documents and The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France.
3.2 Victor Jean Louis Baghio’o par lui-même
Textes réunis et préfacés par Charles W. Scheel
Lettres, Journaux, Essais et Récits inédits
Le présent ouvrage vient compléter le portrait d’un homme de lettres antillais (1910-1994). Les anthologies retiennent surtout qu’il publia un recueil de poésies, Les Jeux du Soleil, et qu’il obtint le Prix des Caraïbes en 1975 pour Le Flamboyant à fleurs bleues, et un roman sur les O’O de Guadeloupe. Or, en sus de trois autres romans publiés, Baghio’o a laissé de nombreux inédits. Ces œuvres tardives viennent s’ajouter ici à divers textes où Baghio’o raconte ses aventures extraordinaires de Résistant, compagnon de Desnos et de Damas, les missions qu’il accomplit en tant qu’ingénieur de radio dans l’Afrique des indépendances, et sa perception de la littérature antillaise.
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