1. Calls for Papers/Contributions
1.1 Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Postgraduate Study Day 2015, Queen’s University Belfast, 30 May 2015
1.2 Bonds & Boundaries UCL Society for Comparative Cultural Inquiry Postgraduate Conference 18th – 19th June, 2015
1.3 Global France, Global French Humanities Research Centre, ANU 21-23 October 2015
1.4 Figures du traducteur/de la traductrice
1.5 Travel and the Maghreb: Encounters
1.6 London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies (LINKS) 5th Annual Graduate Student Conference in Comparative Literature
1.7 Call for Papers for an Edited Volume on Cinéma-monde
2. New Titles
2.1 Quelle histoire pour la France?
2.2 Les Écritures migrantes: De l’exil à la migrance littéraire dans le roman francophone
3. Announcements
3.1 Podcast: Are We Charlie?
3.2 New Website: Childhood and Nation in World Cinema
3.3 Postgraduate Research on SFPS Facebook Page
1. Calls for Papers/Contributions
1.1 Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Postgraduate Study Day 2015, Queen’s University Belfast, 30 May 2015
‘Un souffle rauque traverse ma mémoire chaque fois que le monde se tait.’
Kamel Daoud, Meursault, contre-enquête (2014).
Representations of memory and/or amnesia have always played a salient role in Francophone postcolonial studies. Events of late, such as the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ attacks in Paris or the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, have generated narratives in the public sphere that demonstrate the strong connection between memory/amnesia and the legacies of colonialism in the Francophone world. Recent literary publications as well, such as Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête (2014) and Kim Thúy’s Mãn (2013) express an ongoing preoccupation with the subject.
This year’s Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Postgraduate Study Day will be held at Queen’s University Belfast on 30 May 2015 and will focus on the notions of memory and/or amnesia in Francophone postcolonial literary and cultural productions. We are delighted to welcome Professor Max Silverman (University of Leeds) as the keynote speaker and Dr. Charlotte Baker (University of Lancaster), the president of the Society, has kindly agreed to offer a career-training session.
The SFPS PG study day aims at bringing together postgraduate students, both on MA/MSc and PhD level, to showcase their current research on memory and/or amnesia in a supportive environment and to facilitate discussion and exchange between PG students working in the field of Francophone postcolonial studies.
We invite papers from a variety of disciplinary and comparative perspectives (arts and humanities, cultural studies, other social sciences) to contribute work to these questions and the ‘Memory/Amnesia’ paradigm more broadly in the context of Francophone postcolonial literature and culture.
The following is an indicative, but by no means exhaustive, selection of the kinds of issues we hope to address:
* Constructions of identity
* Nostalgia and denial
* (Trans)national and (trans)cultural memory/amnesia
* Collective memories (linguistic, geographic and cultural)
* Memory/amnesia and race/ethnicity, class, and gender
* Memory/amnesia and trauma; post-traumatic stress disorder
* Personal memory/amnesia: autobiographical writing, memoirs, life stories, biographies
* Post-memory, rewriting the past
* Memory/amnesia of Francophone diasporic communities (e.g. memories of slavery; the Algerian War; genocides and ethnic violence; expulsion, exile, and asylum; labour migration etc.)
* Memory/amnesia of the Holocaust in a postcolonial context
* Politics and political instrumentalisation of memory/amnesia
* Places and spaces of memory (museums, archives, memorials, statues, graves and burial sites, digital sites, documentaries, photos etc.)
* Inheritance and legacies
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, containing your name, institutional affiliation, and contact details, by 23 March to sfpspostgrads2015@gmail.com and email the same address to register for the study day. Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes. The expected conference fee will be £30 (£10 registration + £20 heavily reduced postgraduate society membership), however, this still might be reduced.
All information can be found on: https://sfpspostgrads2015.wordpress.com/
Organisers: David Cummings (Queen’s University Belfast) and Sarah Arens (University of Edinburgh)
1.2 Bonds & Boundaries UCL Society for Comparative Cultural Inquiry Postgraduate Conference 18th – 19th June, 2015
Keynote Speakers: Dr Katherine Ibbett (University College London)
Second Keynote Speaker to be announced
The negotiation of traditional disciplinary boundaries is central to interdisciplinary study in the Arts and Humanities. In making new connections between disciplines we transgress boundaries and break down barriers, but in doing so, we forge new bonds and new relations between concepts, disciplines, and practices that previously did not exist. To be interdisciplinary, then, is to be involved in the making and re-making of boundaries and bonds, and to consider these processes and their results. Bonds and boundaries provide the interdisciplinary scholar with a rich conceptual network with which to explore, not merely the dynamics that these entail within their own work, but how their work operates within a larger and constantly shifting academic landscape. For the fourth annual Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference, University College London’s Society for Comparative Cultural Inquiry invites proposals for papers relating to the connected theme(s) of ‘Bonds and Boundaries’ from scholars across a wide spectrum of disciplines in the Arts and Humanities. We welcome papers dealing with past as well as contemporary sources from Europe and beyond, from any disciplinary or transdisciplinary perspective. We especially welcome proposal from researchers focusing on interdisciplinary subjects that look outside the traditional remit of the Humanities. Proposals for panel discussions, performances, artistic installations and workshops are also welcome. The aim of this conference is to interrogate and explore the dynamics of bonding and boundaries in the Arts and Humanities from perspectives which might encompass the following. Other interpretations will be gladly received:
Human bonding and boundaries: affection, intimacy, friendship, separation, intersubjectivity
Linguistic bonds and boundaries: translation, hybrid languages, dead languages
Historical and temporal divisions
Geography: spatial and political boundaries
Gender and sexuality
Bonding and boundaries in literary and poetic works, intermediality
Representation of bonds and boundaries in visual arts, plastic arts and cinema
Bonds and boundaries in art: hybrid art forms, emergent practices, technological possibilities Bonds and boundaries in practice and theory
We invite submissions from all cultural disciplines, including but not limited to: Literary criticism and theory; Film studies and photography; Politics and political theory; History; Modern Languages; Philosophy; Art; Psychology/Psychoanalysis; Cultural Studies; Translation Studies; Gender studies Please send an abstract (250 words), 5 keywords and a brief biographical statement (50 words) to culturalinquiry.ucl@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is 17th April 2015.
A selection of contributions to the conference will be considered for publication in the Society’s journal, Tropos.
This conference is organised by: The Society for Comparative Cultural Inquiry, University College London.
Follow us on Twitter: @CultureInqUCL
1.3 Global France, Global French Humanities Research Centre, ANU 21-23 October 2015
Confirmed keynotes: Professor Dominic Thomas, University of California, Los Angeles; Professor Charles Forsdick, University of Liverpool
In the eyes of many, France was the centre of the world throughout the modern age. Home of the Revolution and the Rights of Man, heart of a vast colonial empire, capital of the literary, fashion and art worlds, France, and Paris in particular, was at once historical and mythical. Today, following upon a sequence of ‘turns’, from the postcolonial to the global, this centre has given way to multiple centres, to conflicting and complementary sites of physical, economic and cultural exchange. As France has transitioned from a colonial power to a central member of the European Union, it has been forced to negotiate immigration policies, the rise of political extremism and the growing unrest over the linguistic, cultural and spatial borders that divide French society. Debates about French national identity rage in political and cultural sectors: while some seek to bolster a weakened idea of ‘Frenchness’, others, for example the signatories of the 2007 Littérature-monde manifesto, aim to redefine or ‘world’ that identity. At the same time, the ‘global turn’ in French studies has encouraged scholars to re-examine French literature, language, culture and history through a new, decentred perspective. Recent criticism in literature and history, for example, has returned to early modern literary texts and spaces as well as to major historical events like the French Revolution, exploring the ways in which these traditions and events were not determined in a cultural vacuum, but, as Peter Hulme has noted, ‘were the product[s] of constant, intricate, but mostly unacknowledged traffic with the non- European world’. The goal of this colloquium is to offer an image of global France and global French, past, present and future. How have French culture and politics been shaped by encounters with European neighbours and with the non-European world? How do contemporary migratory patterns and networks between France and the wider world compare to historical ones? How have neo-colonial practices been reshaped by globalized markets and transnational capital? How have various art forms allowed for the articulation of displacement, community and solidarity throughout French history and into the global present? In short, is the global a new horizon, or one that we are just Discovering? Our aim is to generate an interdisciplinary discussion among colleagues in a wide range of fields, including literature, film, linguistics, cultural studies, history, art history, philosophy, music and digital humanities. Topics for papers/panels include but are not limited to:
Global vs. local (cultures, histories, languages, art forms)
Migration: patterns and networks
Migration: language and policy
The European Union and French national identity
Multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic France/Paris
Colonial, postcolonial, neo-colonial flows and encounters
Translation among languages, cultures, media
The circulation of bodies, capital, ideas, linguistic forms, art forms
Borders: visible and invisible, inner and outer, real and imagined, linguistic and geopolitical Travel, tourism, trade Diasporas, past and present
Please send an abstract of 300 words and a CV (max 2 pages) to Leslie.Barnes@anu.edu.au Papers can be in English or French. The deadline for abstracts is 5 April 2015.
1.4 Figures du traducteur/de la traductrice
| Bien du chemin a été parcouru au sein des études de la traduction depuis le « virage culturel » des années 80. En délaissant l’approche strictement linguistique de la traduction, les chercheurs de ce domaine en pleine expansion ne cessent d’interroger la nature, le but et la portée de la traduction, non seulement en tant que produit mais également en tant que processus. De l’audiovisuel au juridique, la traductologie continue de fasciner sociologues, politologues, linguistes et poètes, pour n’en nommer que quelques-uns. Reste toutefois une figure peu étudiée, souvent peu reconnue, au coeur du processus de traduction: le traducteur. Cette journée d’étude propose de mettre en lumière ces acteurs de l’ombre.Il s’agira d’interroger dans une perspective diachronique les représentations du traducteur/ de la traductrice émanant au niveau social mais aussi personnel ainsi que leurs conséquences : comment le traducteur/la traductrice et son activité sont-ils perçus ? Comment se perçoit-il lui-même ? Comment la propre perception du traducteur joue-t-elle sur la traduction ? Qu’en est-il de l’autotraduction où la séparation traducteur/auteur est plus que jamais remise en question? Quels peuvent être les effets d’un discours social ou épitextuel sur le traducteur et son activité?Les actes de cette journée d’études seront publiés dans Convergences francophones ( http://mrjus.mtroyal.ca/index.php/cf/index), une revue semestrielle, pluridisciplinaire et en libre accès sur le site de l’université Mount Royal.Domaines envisagés: traduction littéraire, traduction audiovisuelle, traduction technique, autotraduction
Les propositions comporteront un titre ainsi que des mots-clés et ne devront pas dépasser 200 mots. Elles doivent être envoyées à Antoine Eche (aeche@mtroyal.ca) et Justine Huet (jhuet@mtroyal.ca). Leurs auteurs enverront également une brève notice bio-bibliographique. Date limite de soumission des propositions : 15 février 2015 Notification des propositions retenues : 20 février 2015 Responsables : Antoine Eche: aeche@mtroyal.ca Justine Huet: jhuet@mtroyal.ca |
1.5 Travel and the Maghreb: Encounters
In 2017 the journal Studies in Travel Writing will publish a special issue, guest-edited by Dr. Patrick Crowley (University College Cork), on travel in the Maghreb (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria). This volume will focus on texts written by European, Arab, Berber, and Ottoman travellers who were active during the period of European colonial expansion, entrenchment, and demise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Essays that reflect upon the relationship between travel in the Maghreb and encounters that lead to unexpected insights are particularly welcome.
The nineteenth-century French painter, Eugène Fromentin, who travelled extensively across Algeria, wrote that ‘the Orient […] eludes the conventions [of art], it’s outside any discipline; it transposes, it turns everything on its head’. Fromentin reflected on this transposition, this zone of cultural exchange, in terms of the history and expectations of Western art. Here we have an encounter that is not about the confirmation of European Orientalist stereotypes, even if they are present, but also about a moment of perplexity that unsettles expectations and becomes a conduit of intercultural exploration. In what other texts has travel to the Maghreb prompted reconsiderations of aesthetic conventions, or disrupted conventional forms of knowledge, practices of religion, sexuality, and the formation of national borders across the Maghreb? And in what directions have such reflections led – new understandings of cultural practices in the Maghreb? Or the resistance of what appears to be ‘untranslatable’, or opaque? What are the tropes of such encounters? French accounts of travel to the countries of the Maghreb come quickly to mind (Maupassant, Gide, Eberhardt, Barthes) but ‘writing the Maghreb’ took place in more than just French. From William Shaler’s Sketches of Algiers (1826) to the travel writings of Paul Bowles, North Americans travelled to what were to become the French administered countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and were faced with a range of linguistic differences. German, English and Italian travellers also encountered these Arab and Berber cultures entangled within French colonial modernity. Each was faced with linguistic limits, with the question of whether or not to hire a dragoman, with the issue of translation – its slippages, surprises and frustrations. To what extent do linguistic mistranslations play a part in travel narratives set in the Maghreb?
To varying degrees, Western travellers put the countries and regions of the Maghreb to work – for example, Kerouac’s use of Morocco as a prelude to France in ‘Big Trip to Europe’ (1960). To what strategic ends were the countries of this region, and their peoples, put to rhetorical use? Analyses of travel accounts in which Maghrebian countries, regions, or spaces prove resistant to such strategies would be welcome.
And what of travellers from Egypt and other parts of the Ottoman Empire writing in Arabic, travelling across the Maghreb from Tunis to Fez? In Islam et voyage au moyen âge (Seuil, 2000) Houari Touati provides insights into the jawla, the Islamic Grand Tour, during the Middle Ages. Do similar forms of travel writing, rihla, produced during the colonial period, offer perspectives on colonial modernity across North Africa? Is there an assertion of cultural or religious commonalities across the region that are over and above the formation of national boundaries? And how, as with the other issues above, are they conveyed through the detail and forms put to use in these travel texts?
The issue will accept essays in English of around 7000 – 10,000 words. Submissions must deal with travel texts, but ‘texts’ may be broadly defined to include, among other forms, published books, unpublished manuscripts and documents, letters, diaries, and journals.
The timetable is as follows: Abstracts of around 500 words by 1 June 2015; essays to be commissioned by 25 June 2015; commissioned essays due to editors by 5 February 2016; referees’ reports due May 2016; final copy to editors by 1 December 2016. Please send abstracts to Patrick Crowley pcrowley@french.ucc.ie by 1 June 2015.
1.6 London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies (LINKS) 5th Annual Graduate Student Conference in Comparative Literature
Literary Cosmopolitanism
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
University of London
Saturday the 6th of June, 2015
Room B101, Brunei Suite (Russell Square Campus)
LINKS conferences foster a space to discuss and re-think intercultural ‘links’, and to approach literary and non-literary texts from a comparative perspective. This one-day conference is an opportunity for postgraduate students across the University of London network and beyond to present individual research papers, generate and engage in critical discussions, and meet with other students, professors, and researchers in the field.
‘There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge. A citizen of the world: how far can we take that idea?’
– Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
In the spirit of keeping the topic as broad as possible, Literary Cosmopolitanism can be interpreted in multiple ways. The idea of cosmopolitanism simply refers to ‘global citizenship’, and we are interested in how this idea has been represented and dealt with in literature, both premodern and modern. In considering Cosmopolitanism as much a historical phenomenon as it is contemporary, questions of structures, ethics, identity, class systems, regional borders and barriers of language and genre begin to frame our discussions of literature and literary history. The topic is therefore an effort to critically analyze the transformative process from the non-cosmopolite into the cosmopolite, and to investigate notions of ‘cosmopolitanism’ as they apply to literature.
Call for Papers:
Postgraduate students across the University of London network and beyond are warmly invited to send in proposals for fifteen-minute papers to soaslinks2015@gmail.com. The deadline to send in proposed titles and abstracts (max. 300 words) is Monday 20th April 2015. Proposals are welcome on ANY aspect of comparative literary study under the topic specified above. We strongly encourage submissions from MA students. Essays previously written for MA courses will also be considered. Students do not have to be in Comparative Literature programs for their submissions to be considered.
LINKS does not charge postgraduate students to take part, nor to attend.
For more information, or to contact the organizing students, please consult the following:
Email: soaslinks2015@gmail.com, Facebook: www.facebook.com/linksmaconference
1.7 Call for Papers for an Edited Volume on Cinéma-monde
Editors: Michael Gott (University of Cincinnati) and Thibaut Schilt (College of the Holy Cross)
The first cinema awards specifically dedicated to internationally produced francophone films were created in 2013, under the supervision of the Canadian-based Association Trophées Francophones du Cinéma (or ATFciné), with the assistance of filmmakers and organizers of film festivals and national film awards working in Belgium, Senegal, Quebec, and France. The initiative behind these film awards is unique in that it brings together a variety of film industries and national cinemas, and is inclusive in its definition of “francophone,” expanding the geographical limits of what is customarily considered the francophone world and formally recognizing an increasing number of films that combine French with many other languages. Such inclusivity extends to the academic realm. In a 2012 article, Bill Marshall calls for increased critical attention to develop the concept of “francophone film” in both French and Film Studies, “given the remappings necessary both in relation to the global and transnational turn in analysing film and in rearguard attempts to assert French and other cultural nationalisms that also take place” (51). For Marshall, francophone cinema, by decentering French-language cinema studies, “dramatically focuses attention on four elements: borders, movement, language, and lateral connections” (42).
This collection seeks to build on Marshall’s intervention and to extend the debate that erupted after the publication of the 2007 manifesto “For a littérature-monde in French” from literature to cinema. The manifesto prompted scholars and authors alike to examine the continued validity of the francophone discursive category. Though “francophone” was initially an optic through which to “de-center a model of French studies that was focused exclusively on the Hexagon” (Hargreaves, et al. 2), it also enabled a two-tiered dichotomy that often relegated literature and films made in France and those made in its former colonies to discrete categories. Moreover, to simply say “francophone” runs the risk of eliding both European French-language productions and diversity within the Hexagon that is not derived from the colonial or, as the manifesto signers argued, neo-colonial (Ibid. 2). Our collection examines contemporary cinema within a willfully broad “French-language” category and aims to further explore the opportunities and limitations of adopting the label of cinéma-monde (as opposed to transnational, Francophone, or World Cinema) as a critical framework. Cinéma-monde is not mapped exclusively along the boundaries of French-speaking countries, regions, or zones. It may be multilingual, or in some cases contain very little French, but hold some other connection to the world of French-language cinema. It might float within and across fluid margins.
We seek to expand the discussion of these concepts by analyzing films in which filmmakers, production teams, actors, and narratives are situated within and/or move to, from and through diverse regions of the French-speaking world. This includes Quebec, Belgium, the Caribbean, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, and transnational regional spaces within France that defy strictly national and linguistic categories. We will focus in particular on exploring the porosity of various kinds of borders in and around francophone spaces and the ways in which languages and identities “travel” in contemporary cinema.
Cinéma-monde, as we understand it, is not simply cinema in French from outside of France. Nor does it exclude France. While the French market looms large in the production equation and Paris continues to exert a magnetic pull on filmmakers, France and its capital by no means represent the center of cinéma-monde. Thus we will consider how global production and reception of cinema allows us to “look sideways to lateral networks that are not always readily apparent,” a gesture that opens the door to an exploration of the “relationships among different margins” (Lionnet and Shih 1-2). The city of Montreal, for example, where the National Film Board of Canada has its headquarters and where the aforementioned Association Trophées Francophones du Cinéma is based, thrives as an ever more robust cinema hub, producing francophone films that are gaining significant attention outside the Quebec borders and are often co-produced with other francophone partner countries.
We invite your contribution, and request a proposal in the form of an abstract of 350-400 words, for chapters of 8,000 words that will focus on synergies among spaces and comparisons between films. We request that chapters based on formal analysis cover a minimum of two and, to allow for reasonably close readings, a maximum of four films. This limit does not apply to chapters focused on the economics of the industry, including production, distribution, film festivals, etc. A university press has already expressed strong interest in publishing the collection.
Abstracts should be submitted electronically to both michael.gott@uc.edu and tschilt@holycross.edu by Monday, May 4, 2015. The final version of your chapter would be due in January 2016. Possible topics include:
Geographic approaches (these are not exclusive, and chapters that explore connections between them are welcome)
the Caribbean
North Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa
Switzerland
Quebec
Belgium
Regional filmmaking in the Hexagon or across national borders that cannot be strictly defined as “French”
Lebanon
Films that cover two or more of the above-mentioned regions (literally, via a road movie format, or less literally via juxtaposed narratives)
“Francophone” Europe (a potentially broad category according to the criteria of the ATFciné and the membership in the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie; see Greece, Romania)
“Hubs” of French-language cinema that are not demarcated by France (Montreal, Ouagadougou)
International auteurs working in Paris or international auteurs not based in Paris but making films in French/in France (Aki Kaurismäki, Ursula Meier, Merzak Allouache, Amos Gitai, etc.)
Directors whose work has intersected various francophone spaces
Contemporary African auteurs such as Mahamat-Saleh Haroun and Abderrahmane Sissako
Thematic approaches
Production, distribution, film festivals, economic approaches
the politics of “francophone” cinematic distribution and promotion
French actors/actresses of various ethnicities in global productions
Non-French productions containing French dialogue in them
French productions with little or no French in them
French-language or multilingual travel cinema/road cinema
Bibliography
Hargreaves, Alec G., Charles Forsdick and David Murphy. Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-monde. Liverpool University Press, 2010. Lionnet, Françoise and Shih, Shu-mei. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Marshall, Bill. “Cinéma-monde? Towards a concept of Francophone cinema.” Francosphères 1.1 (2012): 35-51.
Michael Gott, PhD Assistant Professor of French Department of Romance Languages and Literatures University of Cincinnati
- New Titles
2.1 Quelle histoire pour la France?
Dominique Borne
Collection Bibliothèque des Histoires, Gallimard
Parution: 21-11-2014
Certains annoncent la mort de l’histoire de France. En ces temps de mondialisation, et surtout d’arrivée massive de populations issues de pays anciennement colonisés, le récit purement national serait à mettre au rebut. D’autres voudraient le retour d’un âge d’or, avec ses histoires saintes, monarchiques ou républicaines. Dans cet essai qui peut faire débat, Dominique Borne propose de dépasser l’une et l’autre attitudes. L’usure des veux récits est réelle, meême si beaucoup de leurs épisodes éveillent encore un écho profond. Reste que la société française à laquelle on chantait le refrain national a été bouleversée et que les évolutions européennes et mondiales pèsent lourdement sur les destins des peuples.
Ces récits portaient en eux une espérance eschatologique qui a déserté quand la croyance au progrès s’est évanouie. Faut-il pour autant abandonner toute l’histoire de France? L’auteur prend vigoureusement parti : «Le besoin d’histoire natioanle est d’autant plus grand que les incertitudes contemporaines sont nombreuses.»
À suivre Dominique Borne, il est possible de reconstruire une histoire à partir de moments d’histoire. Une telle histoire, pluraliste et discontinue, serait tissée avec celle de l’Europe et du monde et prendrait en compte toutes les composantes de la société. Se prêtant lui-même à l’exercice, l’auteur en propose quelques facettes qui redessinent un paysage national, suggèrent d’éventuels héros et donnent même des raisons d’espérer en l’avenir.
2.2 Les Écritures migrantes: De l’exil à la migrance littéraire dans le roman francophone
Sous la direction de Adama Coulibaly et Yao Louis Konan
Espaces Littéraires
Probablement dernier avatar du questionnement de la migration en littérature, les écritures migrantes se présentent comme une figuration de l’entre-deux. Analysées à partir du trauma du départ, de la mobilité et de l’intégration dans le pays d’accueil, elles engendrent des configurations thématiques, narratives et discursives fécondes et problématiques. Les analyses de ce collectif migrent de la question de l’exil vers une mise en texte et en discours des conditions et circonstances de l’émigration/immigration dans la production littéraire.
- Announcements
3.1 Are we Charlie?
A round-table discussion took place on Friday, 30 January 2015 to contextualise the recent Paris killings and their consequences. Academic presentations were followed by an open debate. An audio recording of the event is now available to listen to below.
http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/abouttheschool/news/are-we-charlie/
Guest speaker
Olivier Cyran (Paris-based free-lance journalist; former collaborator with Charlie-Hebdo, 1991-2001). Please note: O. Cyran left Charlie-Hebdo in 2001 in disagreement with its editorial line, which he considered as prejudiced against French Muslims. He discusses the fraught place of secularism in French journalism.
Other speakers
Jonathan Ervine (French Studies, Bangor) ‘Comedy, Controversy and Consensus in France’
Ravi Hensman (History, Manchester) ‘Blaming the Banlieues: a Suburban Perspective’
Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet (Politics, Manchester) ‘The temptation of a Patriot Act à la française… Ain’t we learnt nothing yet?’
Hatsuki Aishima (Middle Eastern Studies, Manchester) ‘Which Muslim perspective?’
Moshe Behar (Middle Eastern Studies, Manchester) ‘Thoughts on killing and the killed’
3.2 New Website: Childhood and Nation in World Cinema
http://childnationcinema.org
The aim of this project is to bring together an international network of scholars in order to address questions of the child and nation in the context of world cinemas.
World cinema is understood not as a commercial label but as a discursive site for the mapping and remapping of local, national and transnational understandings of both child and nation and for the exploration of themes of belonging, encounter and experience as well as agency and representation.
This research project will interrogate how far the image of the child in modern cinema transcends, ignores, contradicts or is deeply embedded in the concept of nationhood.
This is not a study of national cinemas but it does explore where cinema makes the child a national avatar or metonym for a concept of national belonging, intra-national encounter, or dissolution. The complex relations between national borders, language and political cultures are likely to produce conflicted representations of the national subject, all of which require politically and culturally informed and nuanced readings of filmic text. This project aims to produce such readings.
3.3 Postgraduate Research on SFPS Facebook Page
Follow SFPS on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/societyforfrancophonepostcolonialstudies
And on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/SFPSUK
We’re planning to feature 50 word thesis summaries by postgraduate students on the SFPS Facebook Page. If you’re interested in sharing your work in this way, get in touch with sara-louise.cooper@oriel.ox.ac.uk.
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