SFPS Monthly Mailing: January 2016

1. Calls for Papers 

1.1 Representations of cinema and spectatorship in Francophone Africa

1.2 The Battle of Algiers at 50: Legacies in Film and Literature

1.3  Représentations de l’ailleurs (XVIe-XXIe siècles)

1.4 Overstepping the Boundaries / Transgresser les limites: 21st-Century Women’s Writing in French’ Contemporary Women’s Writing in French

1.5 Final Call: The Performance of Pan-Africanism: from Colonial Exhibitions to Black and African Cultural Festivals

1.6 Transnational French Modernisms

2. Announcements

2.1 Retentissements de la guerre: Les écrivain(e)s des mondes (post)coloniaux face aux conflits mondiaux

2.2 Remise du prix UNESCO-UNAM/Jaime Torres Bodet à Bernard Dadié à Abidjan

3. New Titles

3.1 Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994

3.2 C. L. R. James: La vie révolutionnaire d’un « Platon noir »

3.3 La première Compagnie des Indes: Apprentissages, échecs et héritage, 1664-1704

3.4 Crimes d’auteur: De l’influence, du plagiat et de l’assassinat en littérature

3. 5 Pour un récit transnational: La fiction au défi de l’histoire

1. Calls for Papers

1.1 Representations of cinema and spectatorship in Francophone Africa

May 24-25, 2016

Marrakech 

Research on African cinemas has until recently remained quite limited in scope. The films, filmmakers, and the political contexts as well as the images of the regions conveyed by the films have been the main focus of interest. The circulation of the films, film exhibition, cinema as a leisure activity, the ways in which people watch films are questions that have remained marginal in the production of knowledge, treated by isolated researchers whose work has been largely overlooked.

More recently, a few historians have raised the issue of film as spectacle in colonial Africa (Goerg 2015) or the development of cinema as a leisure activity in Tunisia at the end of the colonial period (Corriou 2011). Other research projects have explored other forms of public film screenings, the video-clubs in Tchad (Ndiltah 2012) or festival activity in North Africa, from a geographical perspective that brings together North Africa and the Middle East (Iordanova et de Peer 2014). The MENA Cinemas project « MENA Cinémas: Cartographie, enjeux, acteurs, publics des cinémas en présence en Afrique du Nord et au Moyen Orient » (MSH Paris Nord – Universités Paris 3, Paris 13 et de Strasbourg), in its first conference in Saint-Denis (May 2014) focused on the circulation of films and its second conference in Strasbourg (May 2015) looked at audiences. These two events provided an opportunity for researchers from different disciplines to explore cinema in the context of increasingly diversified practices of film spectatorship, from commercial cinemas, legal or otherwise, screenings in cultural centers, all the way to pirated screens. The Strasbourg conference shed light on the necessity to redefine spectatorship in the global age of the digital circulation of films. Research on piracy, the informal economy and the circulation of films via multiple platforms and media have contributed to a shift in perspective (Mattelart 2011, Lobato 2007, 2011). Such work is all the more necessary as these digital, economic and cultural shifts have radically transformed the relationships of the public to films.

The research project “Representation of cinema and spectatorship in Francophone Africa: Comparative empirical approaches” funded by the IdEx attractivité of the University of Strasbourg, brings together researchers from four different countries. It proposes to address the issues raised above through comparative studies of film practices, based primarily on several thousand questionnaires filled in by people living in Morocco, Chad, Togo and Tunisia.

The objective of the conference is to bring together researchers from different disciplines and to develop a comparative study of film spectatorship and audiences in Francophone North and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Abstracts are invited on several issues related to spectatorship in Africa:

• Reception theories, their relevance and applicability to the African context in the digital age
• Multiplication of methods for the dissemination of films: the role of cinemas, itinerant film screenings, television, video and the internet.
• Impact of these different methods on film spectatorship (individual/collective, regular/occasional, official/secret)
• Definitions of audiences and film spectatorship in the post-cinema era
• Realities of film and television programming available to the public as well as analyses of the resulting range of films. What is the impact of this offer on the film culture of various audiences?
• New film cultures, where are they located and how are the films assessed in these contexts?
• The representation of cinema in countries that no longer have any movie theatres.

The papers, which can be presented in French or in English, are strictly limited to thirty minutes.

The conference will include contributions and workshops featuring teams that have been researching these questions in other countries, as well as professionals working in the area.

The contributions to the conference will form the basis for a publication.

Send your abstracts to abdel.benchenna@orange.fr, a.bouhouhou@uca.ac.ma,  patricia.caille@unistra.fr, c.forest@unistra.fr

Extended deadline: January 30, 2016.

1.2 The Battle of Algiers at 50: Legacies in Film and Literature

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO FRIDAY 12TH FEBRUARY 

18th May, 2016    University of Sheffield, Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Sciences

‘The Battle of Algiers at 50: Legacies in Film and Literature’ is a one-day symposium organised by graduate students from the University of Leeds and Sheffield from the fields of Francophone studies and Geography. The symposium will offer a transdisciplinary platform for bringing together researchers at all stages in their careers who are interested in transcultural politics, literature and film, with the specific objective of considering the legacy and the futures of the anti-Colonial epic The Battle of Algiers 50 years since its release in 1966.

The formative effect that Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers has had on cinema in North Africa cannot be underestimated. It has largely been celebrated as an accurate and balanced depiction of violence during the battle of Algiers, and by extension, the Algerian War for Independence (1954-62). However, The Battle of Algiers is a film that has led many afterlives which transcend national and cultural borders. Both celebrated as an anti-colonial epic and example of Algerian nationalist heroism, the film, conversely, has been held up as an example of French military expertise. The Criterion Collection’s 2004 re-release of the film in the United States demonstrates the constantly shifting status of the film on the global stage, featuring commentary from contemporary directors such as Spike Lee, but also interviews with counterterrorist experts in ‘The Battle of Algiers: A Case Study’.

This symposium is a unique opportunity to consider how these various legacies of The Battle of Algiers continue to inform understandings of Algerian history, but also influence perspectives on political violence and national identity throughout North Africa and beyond. What does it mean to consider the film as a ‘case study’ in terrorist and counterterrorist activities? How can we think about film as an alternative historical narrative of decolonization? In what ways has Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers influenced cinema and the arts in Algeria and beyond?

Confirmed Keynote

We are delighted to welcome Dr Jamal Bahmad from the University of Leeds as the symposium keynote speaker.

We welcome proposals for papers which explore the following areas:

• The spectacle of political violence
• Colonial legacies in film and literature
• Memories of colonialism and anti-colonialism
• Postcolonial and/or transcultural cinema(s)
• ‘Accented’ cinema
• Transvergent filmmaking
• Gender in revolution
• Queer perspectives on the nation
• Alternative histories in the arts
• The screen as veil

Please send abstracts for papers (300 words) to Alex Hastie, Beatrice Ivey and Takfarinas Abdiouene at batailledalger50@gmail.com by the 12th February.

While the principal language of the symposium will be English, the organisers welcome contributions in French and Arabic.

https://battleofalgiers.wordpress.com/about/
https://twitter.com/algiers50

1.3  Représentations de l’ailleurs (XVIe-XXIe siècles)

Colloque international

Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada

12-13 mai 2016

In aliore loco. D’emblée, évoquer la notion de l’ailleurs convoque celle de l’altérité. Dans un autre lieu. Evoquer l’ailleurs, le rêver, le révérer, le renier, c’est d’abord poser un espace autre que celui d’où je suis: « C’est où le locuteur n’est pas à sa place » (Staszak). L’ailleurs implique donc une différence perçue par un sujet par rapport à son lieu d’origine et des ses référents: vis-à-vis de l’Autre, de l’espace géographique, voire de soi-même et il peut être alors vu comme une « source de dépaysement intime » (Moura). Et si « voyager, c’est restaurer contre le familier la sensation de l’étrange » (Urbain), il n’est cependant nul besoin de se déplacer pour vivre l’expérience de l’ailleurs, comme le rappelle l’enfant amoureux d’estampes évoqué par Baudelaire. Une carte, un livre, un tableau, une rencontre, une route, une ville portuaire, un horizon véhiculent l’idée d’un espace autre. La première partie de Will du moulin, de Robert Louis Stevenson, en rend bien compte. La perception de cet ailleurs active un processus représentatif qui produit un espace plus ou moins imaginé, tributaire d’un imaginaire géographique à l’étendue variable, nécessairement lié à des idiosyncrasies sociales et culturelles et à la diffusion croissante de supports déclencheurs (livres, cartes, images, spectacles). Par exemple, l’Ouest américain s’est pendant longtemps résumé en France (et sans doute ailleurs) aux représentations dérivées de la littérature populaire de la fin du XIXe siècle, des premiers films du genre « western » et des spectacles de Buffalo Bill.

Des récits de voyages à la fiction narrative (roman, cinéma) en passant par la poésie, l’image, ou les textes factuels (presse, etc.), ce colloque vise à élargir, le temps d’un questionnement commun, le spectre des études sur l’ailleurs que l’on retrouve dans des ouvrages tels que L’Europe littéraire et l’ailleurs (Moura), L’Ailleurs en question (Née),L’Ailleurs de l’autre (Le Blanc et Weber) ou Désirs d’ailleurs (Michel). Cette approche transgénérique reflète la ligne éditoriale pluridisciplinaire de notre revue Convergences francophones.

Les organisateurs envisagent donc deux journées d’échanges, ponctuées par les interventions des Professeurs Jean-Jacques Tatin-Gourier (Département de lettres, Université François Rabelais de Tours) et Jean-François Staszak (Département de géographie et environnement, Université de Genève).

Date limite d’envoi des propositions de communication (250 mots): 29 janvier 2016 (les propositions de doctorants sont les bienvenues).

Annonce des propositions retenues: 12 février 2016.

Merci d’envoyer vos propositions à Antoine Eche: aeche@mtroyal.ca

1.4 Overstepping the Boundaries / Transgresser les limites: 21st-Century Women’s Writing in French

Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing

Institute of Modern Languages Research

University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, UK

Friday 28 – Saturday 29 October 2016

Keynote speakers: Shirley Jordan (QMUL) and Siobhán McIlvanney (KCL)

Call for papers

This international conference will focus on the leading developments in contemporary women’s writing in French since the turn of the 21st century, and more particularly in its second decade. The conference builds on the findings of the last CWWF conference, held in 2010, that identified the main trends in contemporary women’s writing in the first decade of the 21st century which were shown to be dominated by narratives that overstepped boundaries of both form and content.

Through an examination of the ways in which recent women’s writing in French pushes the boundaries of current thinking about identities, communities, family structures, motherhood, reproduction, desire, the body, ageing, illness, eating disorders, beauty, violence, sexualities and the interface between the public and the private, among other themes, this conference will continue the CWWF’s work of charting the most recent trends in contemporary women’s writing in French.  

Please send your proposals (200 words max. per proposed paper) for 20-min papers or for panels of 3 x 20-min papers, accompanied by 100-word profiles for each proposed speaker, to the organisers Kate Averis (kate.averis@ulip.lon.ac.uk) and Eglė Kačkutė (ekackute@gmail.com) by 31 January 2016. Papers may be in either French or English and must focus on women’s texts written in French and published since 2000 that engage with the transgression of boundaries of, for example:

– geographical/territorial space

– language and languages

– cultures and ethnicities

– gendered identities / gender roles

– sexualities and sexual identities

– bodies and reproduction

– the human / monstrosity

– age

– feminism(s)

– class

– disciplines

– discourses

– genre

– media (textual, visual, oral)

 A publication drawn from the conference is planned.

1.5 Final Call: The Performance of Pan-Africanism: from Colonial Exhibitions to Black and African Cultural Festivals

Final Call for Papers: Deadline: 1 February 2016

International Conference

20-22 October 2016
Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Florida State University

Keynote speakers: Andrew Apter (UCLA), Cheryl Finley (Cornell University), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University), June Givanni (Pan-African Cinema Archive), Kwame Kwei-Armah (Center Stage), Alain Mabanckou (UCLA)

Co-organizers: Tsitsi Jaji (Duke University), Martin Munro (FSU), David Murphy (University of Stirling)

In April 1966, thousands of artists, musicians, performers and writers from across Africa and its diaspora gathered in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to take part in the First World Festival of Black and African Culture (Premier Festival Mondial des arts nègres). The festival constituted a highly symbolic moment both in the era of decolonization and the push for civil rights for African Americans in the United States. In essence, the festival sought to perform an emerging pan-African culture, to give concrete cultural expression to the ties that would bind the African ‘homeland’ to black people in the diaspora. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Dakar ’66, this conference seeks to examine the festival and its multiple legacies, in order to help us better to understand both the utopianism of the 1960s and the ‘festivalization’ of Africa that has occurred in recent decades. The conference is also interested in exploring the role of colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs in establishing a set of representational frameworks that would later be contested but also sometimes (unwittingly) adopted by black/African groups in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The Dakar festival was the first, and one of the most significant, attempts to perform and translate African culture in the era of decolonization, forging in the space of the festivalscape a rich, multifaceted, ephemeral, unstable but highly charged sense of a shared Pan-African culture. The conference is interested in exploring whether cultural Pan-Africanism as posited in postcolonial festivals acted as a complete rejection of the representations of blackness in colonial exhibitions or whether it  sometimes in fact continued such tropes, and if so, how?
The festival was organized in the middle of a period extending from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s during which a wide range of cultural, sporting and political organizations were created, and major events were held, all of which were informed by Pan-Africanist ideals. In terms of festivals alone, the 1966 Dakar event was followed by hugely ambitious Pan-African cultural festivals in Algiers (Algeria) in 1969 and in Lagos (Nigeria) in 1977. From an early twenty-first century perspective, the Pan-African ethos of the period appears strikingly utopian. Nonetheless, the Pan-African ideal has endured, in particular in the domain of culture. Indeed, it might be argued that it was the series of cultural festivals organized in the aftermath of decolonization that marked the most meaningful articulations of Pan-Africanism. As was argued above, these festivals witnessed the ‘performance’ of a Pan-African culture, and they facilitated concrete encounters between Africans and members of the diaspora that forged a new and profound sense of cultural affiliation. For instance, in his autobiography, Music is my Mistress (1973), the great US jazz musician Duke Ellington wrote of his performance in Dakar in 1966: ‘the cats in the bleachers really dig it. […] It is acceptance of the highest level and it gives us a once-in-a-lifetime feeling of having broken through to our brothers’.
If Pan-African cultural festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were marked by a profound utopianism, over the past five decades, we have witnessed a growing festivalization of culture across the world from which Africa has not been exempt. There are now literally thousands of festivals held across the continent each year and, in such a context, it is important to assess whether any of the idealism of the past has survived. In 2010, a Third World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture (widely known as FESMAN) was held in Dakar. For Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade, organizing FESMAN was a process of looking to the future but also of renewing with an idealistic, utopian Pan-Africanist past, which was primarily articulated through evocations of the 1966 Dakar festival, indicating that processes of recuperation, nostalgia and amnesia play a major role when we engage today with landmark but ephemeral cultural events from the past.

Potential topics for papers might include:

• The role of colonial exhibitions/world fairs in establishing parameters for the representation and performance of black/African culture.
• The role of earlier events—e.g. the 1956 (Paris) and 1959 (Rome) African Writers’ Congresses, the Makerere Writers’ conference in 1962, the First International Congress of African Art and Culture (ICAC) organized by Frank McEwen et al in Salisbury in 1962—in paving the way for the 1966 festival and those that followed.
• Case studies drawn from any of the 4 major pan-African festivals of the 1960s-70s: The First World Festival of Black and African Culture 1966; The Algiers Pan-African Cultural Festival 1969; The black music festival held in conjunction with the Rumble in the Jungle (Kinshasa, 1974); The Second World Festival of Black and African Culture (Lagos, 1977).
• The relationship between cultural festivals and the major Pan-African political gatherings of the twentieth century (e.g. the various Pan-African congresses, the creation of the Organisation for African Unity)
• Competing visions of Africa: e.g. the attacks on Negritude in Algiers; tensions between Nigerians and Senegalese before the Lagos festival regarding the inclusion of North Africa.
• (Pan-)African cultural festivals outside of Africa.
• How is the Caribbean history of cultural festivals like Carifesta related to and articulated with similar events in continental Africa?
• Does the Caribbean phenomenon of carnival function as an articulation of pan-Africanism?
• Recuperation, nostalgia, amnesia
• Does festivalization necessarily connote the commodification of culture?
• How do festivals articulate the relationship between “High” and “Popular” culture?
• Cultural pan-Africanism and Political Pan-Africanism
• The performance of identity
• Diasporic engagements with African culture in these festivals
• Print and other media representations of the festivals
Proposals for panels and papers may be submitted on the conference web page: http://winthropking.fsu.edu/Events/The-Performance-of-Pan-Africanism-from-Colonial-Exhibitions-to-Black-and-African-Cultural-Festivals

Deadline for proposals: 1 February 2016.

For further information, please contact mmunro@fsu.edu, tsitsi.jaji@gmail.com, d.f.murphy@stir.ac.uk

1.6 Transnational French Modernisms

7^th-8^th July 2016, Durham University, UK

Keynote speakers:

Dr. Jonathan Eburne (Penn State)

Professor Susan Harrow (Bristol)

Professor Debarati Sanyal (Berkeley)

The rise of France’s colonial empire in the 19^th century shaped French culture as a global arena and framed the emergence of modernism. Anxieties around the foreign, the exotic, and otherness animated iconic metropolitan works. Writers and artists from the colonies, such as Aimé Césaire and Assia Djebar, later used modernist aesthetics to challenge dominant historical narratives and state power. From the nineteenth century to decolonization, the modernist map of francophonie stretched across North America and the Caribbean to West Africa and South-East Asia. French modernism and empire building are intertwined (Lebovics 2014), but the relationship between French colonial expansion and modernist aesthetics remains unexplored. Debates about the racial and colonial dimension of modernism are largely confined to Anglophone modernism (Walkowitz 2006; Sheshagiri 2010), while francophone postcolonial theory often emphasizes literature’s political message over its aesthetic dimension (Bishop 2014). Without an understanding of the way colonialism and transnational exchanges shaped the French modernist imaginary, however, we elide the ethnic and cultural diversity of French culture.

This conference will connect debates about colonialism in Anglophone modernism to francophone writing, visual culture, and performance. By shifting attention away from the metropolitan, urban experience of modernity towards the transnational scope of modernisms in French, the conference will explore the interconnection of French colonial power and modernist aesthetics. In contrast to the metropolis-colony model, our conference will rethink French modernism as a transnational constellation of colonial and metropolitan spaces. Our animating question will be where was modernism, rather than when was modernism. What institutional, disciplinary, and ideological investments prevent thinking French modernism as transnational? What is the relation between modernist aesthetics and the global flow of capital, goods, and people? Do we maintain cultural imperialism by imposing a metropolitan concept of literary history on francophone artistic production?

We encourage submissions that cover the global map of francophone modernisms, including the Levant, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Louisiana and Quebec, the Indian subcontinent, and the South Pacific. Submissions can cover but are not limited to the following questions and topics:

• Race, empire, and modernism;
• Decolonization, the ‘postcolonial’, and aesthetics;
• Colonial writers and artists imagining ‘post’-colonial communities;
• Cultural exchanges between colonies;
• Tensions between autonomous and committed art;
• Transnational political communities and modernism (communism in Vietnam and Algeria; fascism in Romania and Tunisia);
• The intersectionality of sexuality, gender, and class in transnational French modernisms;
• Modernist memory cultures;
• Tensions and differences between avant-gardes and modernism in French transnational cultures.
• Alternative geographies of modernity.

Supported by the Modern Humanities Research Association and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Durham University.

Abstracts (no longer than 300 words) should be sent to transnationalfrenchmodernisms@gmail.com by January 30, 2016.

Organisers: Sam Bootle, Rebecca Ferreboeuf, Zoë Roth

Modernismes et francophonie: regards croisés

Conférenciers:

Dr. Jonathan Eburne (Penn State)

Professor Susan Harrow (Bristol)

Professor Debarati Sanyal (Berkeley)

L’ambition coloniale de l’hexagone au XIXème siècle renforça la présence de la culture française sur la scène internationale et influença l’émergence du mouvement moderniste. On trouve en effet dans les grandes œuvres de la métropole, les traces d’une anxiété au sujet de l’étranger, de l’exotique et de l’altérité. Des écrivains et artistes issus des colonies comme Aimé Césaire et Assia Djebar utiliseront plus tard l’esthétique moderniste pour remettre en cause l’hégémonie de certains discours sur l’histoire et le pouvoir de l’Etat. Du XIXème siècle à la décolonisation, la carte moderniste de la francophonie s’étendit de l’Amérique du Nord aux Caraïbes en passant par l’Afrique de l’Ouest et l’Asie du Sud-Est. Si le lien entre modernisme et impérialisme français a été établi (Lebovics 2014), la relation entre expansion coloniale et esthétiques modernistes est encore méconnue. Les débats sur la dimension coloniale et raciale du modernisme sont encore largement confinés aux recherches sur la littérature anglophone (Walkowitz 2006; Sheshagiri 2010). Cependant, sans une compréhension approfondie de la relation entre colonialisme, échanges transnationaux et imaginaire moderniste français, nous éludons la diversité ethnique et artistique de la culture française.

Cette conférence a pour but de rassembler les théories sur le colonialisme dans le modernisme anglais, et les arts de la francophonie. S’éloignant d’une vision métropolitaine et urbaine de la modernité, la conférence explorera l’interconnexion du pouvoir colonial français et de l’esthétique moderniste. Notre conférence définira le modernisme français comme une constellation transnationale d’espaces coloniaux et métropolitains. Nous nous concentrerons sur la localisation du modernisme, plutôt que sur sa périodisation. Nous poserons les questions suivantes : quels intérêts institutionnels, disciplinaires et idéologiques empêchent de penser un modernisme français transnational et une culture francophone moderniste ? Quelle est la relation entre l’esthétique moderniste et le flux mondial de capitaux, de biens et de personnes ? Perpétuons-nous l’impérialisme culturel en imposant une conception métropolitaine de l’histoire littéraire à la production artistique francophone?

Nous invitons des communications qui couvrent la carte mondiale des modernismes français: le Levant, l’Afrique Sub-Saharienne, les Caraïbes, la Louisiane, le Québec, le sous-continent indien et le Pacific Sud.

Nous suggérons les thèmes suivants:

• Race, empire, et modernisme;
• Décolonisation, le ‘postcolonial’, et l’esthétique;
• Artistes coloniaux imaginant des communautés ‘post’-coloniales;
• Echanges culturels entre les colonies;
• Tensions entre arts autonome et engagé;
• Communautés politiques transnationales et modernisme (communisme au Vietnam et en Algérie; fascisme en Roumanie et en Tunisie);
• Sexualité, genre, et classe sociale dans le modernisme transnational français
• Cultures modernistes de la mémoire
• Tensions et différences entre avant-gardes et modernisme dans les cultures transnationales françaises
• Géographies modernistes de la modernité

La conférence est financée par la Modern Humanities Research Association et la Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Durham University.

Les propositions de communication (300 mots maximum) sont à envoyer à transnationalfrenchmodernisms@gmail.com avant le 30 Janvier 2016.

Organisateurs: Sam Bootle, Rebecca Ferreboeuf, Zoë Roth

2. Announcements

2.1 Retentissements de la guerre: Les écrivain(e)s des mondes (post)coloniaux face aux conflits mondiaux

2.2 Remise du prix UNESCO-UNAM/Jaime Torres Bodet à Bernard Dadié à Abidjan

3. New Titles

3.1 Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994

Nicki Hitchcott

During what has become officially known as the genocide against the Tutsi, as many as one million Rwandan people were brutally massacred between April and July 1994. This book presents a critical study of fictional responses by authors inside and outside Rwanda to the 1994 genocide. Focusing on a large and original corpus of creative writing by African authors, including writers from Rwanda, Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994 examines the positionality of authors and their texts in relation to the genocide. How do issues of ‘ethnicity’, nationality, geographical location and family history affect the ways in which creative writers respond to what happened in 1994? And how do such factors lead to authors and their texts being positioned by others? The book is organized around the principal subject positions created by the genocide, categories that have particular connotations and have become fraught with political tension and ambiguity in the context of post-genocide Rwanda. Through analysis of the figures of tourists, witnesses, survivors, victims and perpetrators, the book identifies the ways in which readers of genocide stories are compelled to reevaluate their knowledge of Rwanda and take an active role in commemorative processes: as self-critical tourists, ethical witnesses, judges or culpable bystanders, we are encouraged to acknowledge and assume our own responsibility for what happened in 1994.

3.2 C. L. R. James: La vie révolutionnaire d’un « Platon noir »

Matthieu Renault

Qui, en France, connaît C. L. R. James ? Né en 1901 à Trinidad, alors colonie de la Couronne britannique, et mort à Londres en 1989, celui que le Times dénomma à la fin de sa vie le « Platon noir de notre génération » est pourtant une figure intellectuelle et politique majeure d’un siècle qu’il aura traversé presque de part en part.
Intellectuel diasporique par excellence, militant panafricain de la première heure, James a pris part aux grands mouvements de décolonisation de son temps en Afrique et dans la Caraïbe et fut un acteur de premier plan des luttes noires aux États-Unis.
Fervent partisan de Trotski avant de rompre avec l’héritage de ce dernier pour défendre la thèse de l’auto-émancipation des masses ouvrières-populaires, James eut un destin étroitement imbriqué dans celui du marxisme au XXe siècle. Pour ce « marxiste noir », révolution socialiste et luttes anticoloniales-antiracistes étaient intimement enchevêtrées : elles s’inscrivaient dans l’horizon d’une « révolution mondiale » dont la source et le centre ne pouvaient plus être la seule Europe. C’est à celle-ci que James s’est voué corps et âme pendant plus de cinq décennies, débattant et collaborant avec ses contemporains aux quatre coins du monde.
Dans une conjoncture où la gauche radicale éprouve de grandes difficultés à renouveler ses stratégies face aux revendications des minorités non blanches et où la critique de l’eurocentrisme bat de l’aile, méditer la vie et l’œuvre de James pourrait se révéler essentiel dans la tâche de construction d’une pensée de l’émancipation qui soit, enfin, à la mesure du monde.

3.3 La première Compagnie des Indes: Apprentissages, échecs et héritage, 1664-1704

Marie Ménard-Jacob

Quand Colbert crée la première Compagnie royale des Indes Orientales en 1664, il nourrit de grands espoirs sur l’entreprise asiatique, malgré le demi-siècle de retard qu’accuse la France sur les autres Européens. Dès 1665, arrivent dans la péninsule indienne commis, marchands et directeurs qui ont la responsabilité de fonder les premiers comptoirs. Mais les Français ne connaissent pas l’Inde et doivent passer par une phase d’observation, de compréhension puis de maîtrise de l’espace. À eux de saisir les spécificités du négoce oriental, de prendre en compte la conjoncture locale mais également de déterminer les codes d’une cohabitation française entre négociants, officiers royaux, ecclésiastiques, médecins ou aventuriers.
Mais toutes ces initiatives sont entravées par la distance qui prive les loges de marge de manœuvre, car la Compagnie des Indes est fondamentalement écartelée entre Paris (pôle décisionnel) et Surate ou Pondichéry (pôles d’exploitation). Par conséquent, la Chambre générale peine à comprendre ce dont ont besoin les comptoirs qui émergent, entraînant par là une inadéquation de moyens.
Finalement, malgré quarante ans d’apprentissage laborieux, la Compagnie des Indes, accablée par trois guerres européennes, traversée par de nombreux conflits indiens, et endettée depuis sa création, ne résiste pas au poids des conjonctures. Elle échoue ainsi indéniablement sur les plans économique et administratif. Toutefois les entreprises indiennes du xviie siècle ne sont pas vaines, car elles posent les fondements nécessaires aux succès français du siècle suivant.

3.4 Crimes d’auteur: De l’influence, du plagiat et de l’assassinat en littérature

Anthony Mangeon

Quel est le crime suprême que puisse commettre un écrivain ? Le plagiat, pour sûr. Et à quelle extrémité pourrait bien se résoudre un auteur pour masquer les traces de son forfait, ou pire, pour se débarrasser d’une influence trop encombrante ? Au meurtre du père ou d’un pair – c’est souvent tout un. On devient ainsi, selon les circonstances, « l’auteur d’un crime » comme on est « l’auteur d’une œuvre ». Cet essai s’intéresse donc aux romans des écrivains qui ont mis le plagiat et l’assassinat au cœur de leurs intrigues. Des avant-gardes du début du XXe siècle aux romanciers francophones contemporains, du roman policier au roman de campus, de l’adaptation à la fiction cinématographique, on voit ainsi s’esquisser le portrait-robot de l’écrivain plagiaire ou assassin, simple victime ou, au contraire, bourreau pervers de ses rivaux.

3. 5 Pour un récit transnational: La fiction au défi de l’histoire

Y. Parisot et Ch. Pluvinet (dir.)

Nous sommes heureuses de vous annoncer la parution de Pour un récit transnational: La fiction au défi de l’histoire, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, coll. Interférences, avec une postface d’Emmanuel Bouju et les contributions d’Andrée Mercier, Emilie Etemad, Marie Bulté, Chloé Tazartez, Isaac Bazié, Yolaine Parisot, Oana Panaïté, Myriam Watthee-Delmotte, Christophe Meurée, Jérémy Lambert, Valentina Tarquini, Chloé Chaudet, Barbara Dos Santos, Gabrielle Napoli, Charline Pluvinet, Anthony Mangeon, Gisela Bergonzoni, Béatrice Guéna, Alice Forge, Inès Cazalas, Jean-François Chassay et Alison James.

Publié avec le soutien du Cellam, dans le cadre du programme “Force et vertu de la littérature face à l’histoire immédiate” du groupe Phi, l’ouvrage rassemble les travaux issus de la journée d’étude “L’auteur et ses personnages au miroir de la littérature mondiale” (Rennes 2, mars 2013) et du séminaire “Force et vertu du roman face à l’histoire immédiate” (congrès de l’AILC, Paris, juillet 2013).