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SFPS Monthly Mailing: January 2015

18th January 2015

Calls for Papers/Contributions

 

1.1 Interpreting Communities: Minority Writing in European Literary Fields

1.2 Borders and Crossings/Seuils et Traverses: An International and Multidisciplinary Conference on Travel Writing (22-24 July 2013)

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

1.4 French & Francophone Videogames/Videogaming

1.5 Repairing the Past, Imagining the Future: Reparations and Beyond…

1.6 Transmissions et transgressions dans les littératures de l’Amérique francophone

1.7 Contemporary Caribbean Visual Cultures Conference: Envisioning the Futures of Emancipation and the Emancipation of Futures

1.8 Global France, Global French, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 21-23 October 2015

1.9 At War: Spaces of Conflict, 1860-2014

1.10 Dossier de recherche: Musiques et sociétés au Maghreb

 

 

New Titles

 

 

2.1 Scars of Partition: Postcolonial Legacies in French and British Borderlands

2.2 Locating Hybridity: Creole, Identities and Body Politics in the Novels of Ananda Devi

2.3 Le Film noir français face aux bouleversements de la France d’après-guerre (1946-1960)
Thomas Pillard, Préface de Ginette Vincendeau

 

Announcements

 

3.1 Events at the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Florida State University

3.2 Research Fellow Vacancy, University of Nottingham

3.3 SFPS on Facebook and Twitter

 

 

 

 

 

 

Call for Papers/Contributions

 

 

1.1 Interpreting Communities: Minority Writing in European Literary Fields

 

A Conference at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR), London, 29‐30 October 2015

 

‘The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation.’ ‐ Deleuze and Guattari

 

 

The past three decades have seen a widespread surge of interest in writing by and about ‘minority’ communities across the European continent. Both broad, ‘transnational’ subfields of literary study and more localised and rooted fields have turned to the writing of Turkish authors in Germany, Caribbean and Asian authors in Britain and Somali authors in Italy, to name just three examples, in search of what these writers and their works add to our understanding of the communities from which they hail and the ‘majority’ cultures with which they converse. While these studies have

championed the works of often neglected authors and opened up new areas of enquiry, they have only rarely fed upon each other systematically. This conference aims to redress this. By uniting researchers focused on literary texts produced by ‘minority’ writers throughout the countries of Europe, this conference will offer the opportunity for a systematic, comparative study of the content, status, and reception of ‘minority’ writing in European letters across the 20th and 21st centuries.

 

‘Minority’ identification is, of course, something that is neither fixed nor stable. It is an identity that is always imposed and which alters from decade to decade and from space to space. One of the major issues at stake in this conference, then, is the kind of epistemic work that ‘minority’ identity undertakes and the aesthetic, market and evaluative ramifications of this granted identity. We aim to encourage comparative reflection on how being named or understood as a member of a ‘minority’ group – as fundamentally marginal – shapes artistic response, alters public reception, provides a catalyst for literary art, and forces particular forms of authorial and community representation.

 

 

Questions of particular interest include:

 

How is difference expressed or resisted in minority literatures in terms of language and form?

How have minority authors and texts responded to their positioning in relation to a putative ‘mainstream’?

Are there similarities in the way migrant/minority authors’ identities have been made across Europe, and if so, what are their implications?

How do multiple ‘minority’ identities, not least those of sexual orientation and regional location, intersect with and illuminate each other in ‘minority’ writing?

What is the role of markets, marketing and academic practice in creating and curating the concept of ‘minority’ writing?

How do works of ‘minority’ literature interact with and/or alter the prejudices of their readers? Can these works incite change?

 

We particularly encourage papers which do one or more of the following: interrogate the term ‘minority’ (and its equivalents), adopt a comparative approach, question the value of prevailing theories of identity to the European context (including, but not limited to, concepts of ‘minor’ literature expanded from Deleuze and Guattari, and those drawn from post‐colonial studies), and consider the practical implications of teaching minority literatures.

 

Confirmed keynote speakers include Margaret Littler (Manchester), Mari Jose Olaziregi (University of the Basque Country) and James Procter (Newcastle).

 

Please send a 200‐word abstract with a 50‐word bio by 28 February 2014 to both organisers: Malachi McIntosh (Cambridge) and Godela Weiss‐Sussex (IMLR, London/Cambridge): msam2@cam.ac.uk; godela.weisssusssex@sas.ac.uk

 

 

Please note: Postgraduate students are actively encouraged to submit proposals.

 

 

1.2 Borders and Crossings/Seuils et Traverses: An International and Multidisciplinary Conference on Travel Writing (22-24 July 2013)

 

Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Justin Edwards (University of Surrey)
Dr. Carl Thompson (Nottingham Trent University)
Prof. Margaret Topping (Queen’s University Belfast)

 

We invite all with an interest in the study of travel writing to the twelfth Borders and Crossings conference. Proposals for 20-minute papers or for full panels are sought from scholars working in all areas of travel writing, including literary studies, book history, geography, art history, translation studies, anthropology, history and media studies. Papers on all aspects and periods of travel writing are welcome, and areas of enquiry might include (but are not limited to) the following:

 

Travel and translation
Travel, slavery and abolition
Travel writing and science
Contemporary issues in travel writing
Dark tourism and its narratives
Missionary writings
Travel to particular nations/regions
Narratives of pilgrimage
Travel writing and autobiography
Travel writing and intertextuality

Proposal submissions:

 

Individual papers:

Please send a 300-word proposal by email, including a title, a note of your institutional affiliation and any expected audio-visual needs.

 

Panels:
The submission of proposals for pre-formed panels is welcomed. Please provide:
– Panel title
– Brief description of the proposed panel
– Name, institutional affiliation, and contact details of the proposed panel chairperson
– Name, institutional affiliation, and email address of each speaker
– Title and abstract for each paper, along with any expected audio-visual needs

 

The conference languages are English and French – please indicate which language you wish to deliver your paper in. There will be a number of postgraduate bursaries available to cover part of the cost of the conference – please let us know if you would like to be considered for a bursary.

The deadline for proposals is Friday 15th February 2013. Proposals and enquiries should be sent to Dr. Zoe Kinsley: kinslez@hope.ac.uk

 

 

 

 

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

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)

Co-organizers: Tsitsi Jaji (University of Pennsylvania), 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/…/The-Performance-of-Pan-Africa…

Deadline for proposals: 1 February 2016.

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

 

 

 

 

1.4 French & Francophone Videogames/Videogaming

 

A one-day conference is planned in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in September/October 2015 on French and Francophone videogames and videogaming. This conference will be organised as part of the ongoing series of day-conferences coordinated by the French Media Research Group

(FMRG).

 

Organisers: Jonathan ERVINE (Bangor), Chris TINKER (Heriot-Watt) and Hugh

DAUNCEY (Newcastle).

 

Videogames are the most-purchased ‘bien culturel’ in France, with 31 million people playing regularly. Alongside reading, watching films, listening to music, enjoying BD and other cultural consumption, le jeu vidéo is firmly established as a significant popular cultural form and practice. Commercially and industrially, the videogames sector is increasingly important to France, and public policy in innovation, technology, education, culture and commerce has been steadily adapting to its newfound significance.

 

In November 2014 an academic and political furore broke out in the French media concerning the French video games flagship company Ubisoft and its Assassin’s Creed game Unity based on the French revolution. The strength of feeling and tenor of the debate revealed just how sensitive such a popular-cultural medium can be, and the range of the cultural, political, social and economic significance of video games nowadays in France.

 

The academic study of French video games and videogaming arguably remains underdeveloped, especially in UK and US French studies. After the growth of interest of academics in cinema, chanson, bande dessinée, then more latterly still in ‘popular music’, it is now seems opportune to contribute to a focus on French and Francophone video games as ‘popular cultural’ artefacts and practice.

 

Papers are welcome on any aspect of French and Francophone videogames, including, but by no means restricted to, the following areas:

 

– videogames and history / politics

– videogames and literature / art

– videogames and music

– videogames and graphic art / bande dessinée

– videogames and gender / sexuality

– videogames and sport

– videogames and theorisations of the popular

– videogames and cultural policy

– videogames and youth culture / subcultures

 

Abstracts (English or French, 300 words) plus key words to be sent to Hugh Dauncey (hugh.dauncey@ncl.ac.uk) by 30 January 2015.

 

For more details, please contact the organisers: Dr Hugh Dauncey at Newcastle (hugh.dauncey@ncl.ac.uk).

 

See also: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/fmrg/cfpfmrg25videogames/

 

 

 

 

 

1.5 Repairing the Past, Imagining the Future: Reparations and Beyond…

 

An International, Interdisciplinary Event at the University of Edinburgh, UK, in collaboration with Wheelock College, Boston, US
5–7 November 2015

Confirmed Speakers

Sir Hilary Beckles and Professor Verene Shepherd (University of the West Indies)

 

Reparations — or repairing for harm done — is an ancient concept, which has recently surfaced in public debates, most notably in the demands for reparations led by African American and Afro-Caribbean communities for centuries of enslavement. Within the last year, the Caricom Reparations Committee has issued a call upon Europe’s former colonial powers (the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark) to commit to their ten-point plan, or justice programme, which seeks reparative justice for the indigenous and African communities descended from slavery and the slave trade. Caricom’s demands have coincided with the sudden increase in public awareness concerning the slave past. This has notably been the case following the recent spate of high-profile films, such as Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, which A. D. McKenzie credits with ‘Breaking Silence on the Slave Trade’ and opening many people’s eyes to the barbarity of slavery and other exigencies of that period in world history. The interest in slavery and reparations will no doubt continue unabated into the year 2015. Following in the footsteps of France and Britain, which in 1998 and 2007, respectively, commemorated the slavery abolition bills, the year 2015 will see the US commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment through which slavery was formally abolished. This major anniversary will not only generate an upsurge in public interest into the brutal history of slavery and the slave trade, but it will also give renewed impetus to the reparations debate in both the US and internationally. It may well see pressure mounting on the US government to redress the harms inflicted on African Americans living today and to take seriously Congressman John Conyers’s repeated introduction of bill HR40 ‘Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act’ (first introduced in 1989 and every year since). It will also provide a context in which to explore reparations from other national and transnational perspectives as demands rise not simply to recognize the harms committed in the historical past, but additionally to understand, and ultimately counterbalance, the persistent harms that the history of slavery has had, and continues to have, on the social, economic, political and cultural development of those areas of the world with historical links to the Transatlantic slave trade.

This forthcoming commemoration coincides with the two hundred year anniversary of the first international agreement to abolish slavery during the Congress of Vienna of 1815. These two anniversaries thus provide an important socio-political context in which to discuss the subject of reparations from multiple disciplinary and international backgrounds. While this topic can be easily approached from the vantage point of history, it has a less well-known, but equally significant presence in other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, law, economics, political science, psychology, philosophy, literature and the arts. All of this suggests the importance of approaching reparations from a broad disciplinary base that will not only enable us to define reparations from different positions, but also to bring into dialogue the different national contexts in which reparations movements are emerging and the different challenges that these movements face. This event will bring together academics, activists, artists, curators, teachers and journalists with the aim of creating a network in which to highlight the wealth of established and nascent activism and creativity centred on reparations. As such, its intention is not simply to focus on the legal and financial questions that underpin reparations, but additionally on alternative conceptions of what is needed to repair the past from museological, pedagogic and cultural perspectives. In addition to the thematic headings listed below, a central theme of the conference will be ‘reparations and beyond’; that is a desire to explore the potential of reparations in overcoming the legacies of racial discrimination and socio-economic disadvantage rooted in the slave and colonial pasts. While the focus remains predominantly on reparations for slavery, we also encourage papers, presentations and workshops from scholars, activists and other practitioners who consider the subject of reparations as related to other traumatic histories.

 

This conference is interested in proposals that address the following issues:

Reparations and the legacy of slavery, for example: the economic, cultural, social and environmental chains of implication of enslavement and genocide on past and contemporary societies and communities; the psychological and spiritual ‘price’ of slavery; under-development and the legacy of slavery

Reparations and the law, for example: the legal arguments for reparations from different national perspectives; the relationship between national and international law; reparations as restorative/reparative justice

Reparations and ethics, for example: the ethical and philosophical issues raised by reparations in terms of community/social healing and/or restitution etc.; questions about the nature and scope of our collective legal and moral responsibility; issues of responsibility towards one’s history and how that responsibility shapes our identity as a people, a nation and a world.

Reparations and history, for example: different forms of reparations that have succeeded in the past; reparations that have been rejected or failed and why

Reparations and politics, for example: government responses to reparations; comparisons of different national/transnational political contexts

Reparations and culture, for example: alternative conceptions of what is needed for repair outside of financial and legalistic arguments

Reparation and the arts, for example: how art, literature, music and theatre represents and engages with reparations and reparative narratives

Reparations and activism, for example: social movements and activist networks; links between activists and politics; connections between activism and identity

Reparations and society, for example: what future visions of society do reparations offer?

 

 

We invite proposals from across the disciplines and from across the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone and Lusophone worlds. They may concern historical and/or contemporary theories and arguments for reparations and address a variety of representational forms. We welcome proposals for single papers, panels or for plenary discussions. (Please provide a brief rationale for a panel or a plenary). We also particularly welcome and encourage proposals for workshops with activists, practitioners, artists, curators, teachers and journalists.

Please send in your proposals in English or French to our address at reparations@ed.ac.uk before 30 April 2015. Please note that papers must be given in English.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.6 Transmissions et transgressions dans les littératures de l’Amérique francophone

 

Appel de contributions en vue d’un ouvrage collectif ayant pour titre Transmissions et transgressions dans les littératures de l’Amérique francophone qui sera publié par les Éditions Perce-Neige, dans le cadre de la collection « Archipel-Aplaqa ».

 

Descriptif

 

Les notions de transmission et de transgression constituent des sphères de réflexion d’une grande pertinence dans toute considération des littératures issues de l’Amérique francophone. Qu’elles soient québécoise, acadienne ou franco-canadienne, ces littératures, dans leurs trajectoires respectives, portent des traces de croyances, de traditions et de normes éthiques et

esthétiques, auxquelles elles adhèrent dans une dynamique de continuité ou dont elles se distinguent, souvent avec passion et véhémence, au moyen de diverses formes et manifestations de subversion. Les termes de transmission et de transgression sont donc corrélatifs, saisissables à même une dialectique complexe où se tissent des relations et des modes d’être, d’agir et de faire, réunissant les intérêts, les besoins et les sensibilités d’une variété d’individus, de collectivités et de communautés, confrontés à l’ancien et au nouveau du fait même de cohabiter en Amérique du Nord.

 

Si on se fie aux enseignements de Paul Ricœur, de Dominique Viart, de Pierre Nora, d’Arlette Farge, de Régine Robin et de Fernand Dumont, entre autres philosophes et penseurs qui se sont penchés sur les concepts de mémoire, d’héritage, de legs et de testament, le concept de transmission renvoie à l’idée de concéder à autrui, aux descendants ou à la postérité, souvent en fonction de la doxa, des savoirs, des valeurs, des pratiques rituelles, des formes de langage, des histoires ou des biens. En revanche, à la lumière des écrits de chercheurs et créateurs tels Marcel Mauss, Roger Caillois, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Paul-Émile Borduas et Gaston Miron, pour ne nommer que ceux-là, la transgression, au sens éthique, moral ou critique, s’inscrit à l’encontre de la tradition, adopte des contours de la rupture et de la dénonciation, des gestes iconoclastes de refus et de révolte, voire des formes et des modalités d’expérimentation et d’invention qui réorientent l’ordonnance des mentalités, des savoirs et des conduites sociales.

 

Ce double thème interpelle tout particulièrement les littératures issues de l’Amérique francophone en raison de différents facteurs qui ont présidé à leur évolution et à leur dynamisme actuel. À cet égard, on pourrait citer les conditions adverses imposées par les contextes coloniaux, l’assujettissement, l’isolement, les déportations et la domination socio-économique qui caractérisent la francophonie nord-américaine à ses débuts. Plus près de nous, rappelons les nombreuses transformations entraînées par la Révolution tranquille, le Réveil acadien, le passage de l’illettrisme à l’éducation, la laïcisation des institutions, l’éclatement

des structures familiales et sociales, l’émancipation de l’art et de la parole, sans évoquer des phénomènes plus globaux tels l’urbanisation, la démocratisation des institutions et l’immigration.

 

Dans leurs contributions respectives, nous invitons les auteurs à examiner les problématiques de la transmission et de la transgression soit de manière séparée, ou abordées en tant que dyade ou dialectique. Le traitement analytique du sujet pourrait recouvrir une extension large de notions dont les éléments suivants : constance ou brisure de traditions et de pratiques culturelles, héritages, filiations, discours intimes, récits de deuil, mémoires personnelles en partage, lacunaires ou (ré)inventées, archéologie du soi, correspondance, legs culturel, narrations de révolte et de subversion, configurations passionnelles et excessives, procédés littéraires transgressés, transmission de formes classiques ou créations esthétiques inédites, marginales, contre-culturelles, formes transgénériques, intermédialité, pactes de lecture redéfinis, réécritures, transmissions linguistiques, traditions orales, etc.

 

Les articles tiendront compte d’une ou de plusieurs de ces problématiques et démontreront que le retentissement des littératures québécoise, acadienne ou franco-canadienne de l’Amérique est largement redevable aux représentations et aux discours de la transmission et de la rupture.

 

Proposition d’article

 

Veuillez nous faire parvenir votre proposition d’article (maximum 250 mots) ainsi qu’une courte notice biographique incluant votre nom, votre affiliation et votre adresse courriel rédigés au traitement de texte (rtf) avant le 1er avril 2015 à l’adresse électronique suivante : Ouvrage.archipel@gmail.com

 

Rédaction et envoi de l’article

 

Les auteurs doivent nous faire parvenir leur article par voie électronique avant le 1er octobre 2015. Rédigé au traitement de texte (rtf) à double interligne (maximum de 4 000 à 5 000 mots), l’article doit être inédit et respecter le protocole de rédaction de la revue Voix et Images (voir http://www.voixetimages.uqam.ca).

 

L’article doit être accompagné d’un résumé (150 mots) et d’une notice biobibliographique (100 à 150 mots).

 

Arbitrage des textes

 

Tous les textes seront arbitrés, c’est-à-dire soumis à un comité de lecture composé de spécialistes pour attester de leur recevabilité au regard des exigences du milieu universitaire.

 

L’ouvrage collectif Transmissions et transgressions dans les littératures de l’Amérique francophone sera publié par les Éditions Perce-Neige, dans le cadre de la collection « Archipel-Aplaqa ».

 

 

1.7 Contemporary Caribbean Visual Cultures Conference: Envisioning the Futures of Emancipation and the Emancipation of Futures

Universidad del Atlántico, Barranquilla, Colombia, 9 al 11 de septiembre de 2015.

 

This conference aims to rethink the continuities and discontinuities between past and future projects of emancipation. The major premise here is that decolonization and the processes of otherness, differentiation, (dis) identification and silencing linked to emancipative processes and projects cannot be thought of as closed events, nor are they attached to any self-evident materialization. On the contrary, their consequences and possibilities have to be tracked in different registers articulated through divergent temporalities and spatialities, allowing conflictive public and private agencies and expressions. Additionally, the emancipative projects arising at the end of colonialism contemplated a vision of the future, an image that implied not only a new sociopolitical and racial distribution, but also a new corpus of representations of self and others and a variety of agendas that were intended to materialize these images.

 

In what way have decolonial images survived in our present? What are the visual fractures existing within the historical and political processes of decolonization taking place in the Caribbean? What lessons can decolonial imaginaries teach to contemporary emancipative initiatives? Can we obtain a different understanding of the past, the present and the futures of emancipation by looking at the images generated by those processes?

 

This conference continues the debates that arose in the International Conference “Contemporary Caribbean visual culture: artistic visions of global citizenship”, held in June 2014 in Birmingham (UK). In order to do that, it seeks to foster interdisciplinary debates on contemporary Caribbean and Atlantic visual culture. We welcome papers and panel proposals focusing on issues such as:

 

·        The visual registers of decolonization and otherness;

 

·        Gendered and racialized visions of emancipation;

 

·        Visual archives of emancipation/the emancipation of the archive;

 

·        The future of emancipation;

 

·        Spaces and times of decolonial experiences;

 

·        Individual and collective visions of emancipation.

 

Individual abstracts (200 words maximum) and panel proposals (800 words maximum) should be sent to caribbeanvisualcultureconf@gmail.com by March 30th 2015. Please use also this email address for any query concerning this event.

 

All the proposals will be peer reviewed. The final decision of the Scientific Committee will be notified within a month after the reception of the proposal.

 

1.8 Global France, Global French, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 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, 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 March 2015.

 

1.9 At War: Spaces of Conflict, 1860-2014

 

This special issue of Romance Notes (to be published in 2015) seeks to start a conversation between scholars in French and Italian studies around conceptualizations of the spaces (and places) of war, from 1860 to the present. How might a consideration of theories of space and place inflect our understanding of war(s)? In what ways might a “world” war encompass and engender distinct local experiences of space?

 

Participants are invited to consider the following topics:

–       war and the space of representation;

–       the negotiation between spaces of war and subjectivities;

–       the everyday space of war;

–       war as an event;

–       the role of war rhetoric in the delineation of national and transnational spaces;

–       the intersection of wartime and war zones;

–       colonial and metropolitan spatialities of war;

–       the space and place of war in French and Italian studies;

–       the space(s) of commemoration.

We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretical approaches. Articles should be 3000-5000 words (including notes and bibliography) and should be written in English; articles will be peer-reviewed. Send completed articles by January 31st to Jessica Tanner (jltanner@email.unc.edu; for French/Francophone submissions) or Marisa Escolar (escolar@email.unc.edu; for Italian submissions). For more information on submissions, see http://romlpub.unc.edu/romance-notes-2/.

 

 

1.10 Dossier de recherche 14 | 2016-I : Musiques et sociétés au Maghreb

 

 

Calendrier du dossier 

1- 15 décembre 2014 : publication de l’appel à communication (échéance : 1er février 2015)
– 16 février 2015 : sélection à partir des résumés de communication et (10-15 propositions)
– 1er juillet 2015 : réception des contributions et début du processus d’évaluation (15 juillet)
– 15 décembre 2015 : limite de renvoi par les auteurs de la version définitive des articles
– 15 mars 2016 : Envoi du numéro à l’éditeur
– 15 juin 2016 : parution du numéro 14 de l’Année du Maghreb (avec des varia)

 

Argumentaire

La chanson de variété au Maghreb nous raconte des histoires de migrations et de circulations. Nombreuses sont les figures du Panthéon de la chanson populaire maghrébine à avoir chanté les affres de l’exil. Ces dernières années, de multiples productions scientifiques ont tenté de retracer ces circulations musicales et linguistiques, notamment en contexte de migration coloniale et postcoloniale, à travers le parcours de vedettes des années 1950-70 mettant l’accent sur leurs identités complexes.

Dans la mesure où la chanson irrigue les imaginaires, il apparaît essentiel de mesurer sa propension à illustrer la diversité et à la valoriser dans l’espace public à différentes périodes.

Dans le contexte maghrébin, l’héritage des écoles arabo-andalouses croise le dynamisme de la tradition orale berbère, le savoir-faire des grands maîtres de l’Andalou de confession juive, et la chanson de variété moderne qui naît en terre d’exil. Il s’agira alors de cerner les trajectoires des artistes qui mènent à l’hybridation de la chanson maghrébine en Méditerranée, espace interculturel de prédilection, qui bouleversent les traditions musicales maghrébines au xxe siècle. En tenant compte du contexte socio-politique et linguistique qui préside à faire de la chanson de variété un miroir des enjeux de la décolonisation de ces territoires, les contributeurs sont invités à réfléchir également au devenir de ces patrimoines musicaux mis en tension par le renouvellement générationnel qui s’opère notamment au sein de la communauté juive du Maghreb, durablement exilée, ou auprès des descendants d’immigrés qui se réapproprient – ou non – ce patrimoine venu d’outre-Méditerranée. Au sein des sociétés d’origines, il s’agira également de mettre en perspective ce qui procède d’une part, de ce dialogue intra-maghrébin et ce qui procède d’autre part d’une réinterprétation des fondamentaux de la tradition classique – Maalouf, Chaabi, Arabo-andalou, Hawzi, etc… – à la lumière des dynamiques d’émancipation propres aux sociétés du Maghreb et qui donnent naissance par exemple au rock arabe des années 1970 ou à la déferlante « Raï » des années 1980-1990.

Ce numéro s’attachera également à réfléchir au processus de production et à la question du marché du disque tout au long de la période, permettant de cerner les grandes séquences qui favorisent l’émergence de ces générations d’artistes, notamment en situation d’exil, mais aussi dans les pays d’origine qui bénéficient à l’époque coloniale de la présence de succursales de grandes maisons de disques occidentales. Ce marché des biens culturels pourra également être envisagé du point de vue des publics et du droit d’auteur qui reste une notion juridique fragile à mobiliser au Maghreb. Il pourra être aussi envisagé du point de vue des scènes émergentes et des festivals.

Plusieurs champs d’investigation historique seront distingués : parcours et destinées d’artistes, études des textes et de la musique avec leur mise en image (scopitones et clips), réception d’œuvres particulièrement significatives ou ensemble d’œuvres situées dans une période donnée, événements particuliers, investissement des artistes dans le champ politique, histoire de l’édition phonographique, dimension économique de la production des œuvres, ou mise en valeur de fonds d’archives originaux.

Aux chanteurs qui ont vécu l’expérience migratoire mais dont l’identité artistique est dissolue dans l’appellation « chanson de l’exil», viendront s’ajouter ceux qui produisent un répertoire typiquement maghrébin, non exempt des influences de la mondialisation. Comment définir ce répertoire maghrébin en perpétuelle circulation et hybridation notamment désormais grâce au renouveau des médias arabes qui permettent de décloisonner le vedettariat en dehors de la seule sphère occidentale ? (cf. Arab Idol etc…). Le parcours de ces artistes, riche de ses entrelacs avec l’histoire, donne à lire certains aspects du processus de patrimonialisation des répertoires diasporiques incluant les communautés juives : quel transmission et devenir pour ce répertoire au sein de la communauté juive exilée ? Ce dossier fera sa place à l’analyse des corpus de chansons : il s’agira de montrer comment une chanson, à travers son texte, son succès et son interprétation multiple avec sa mise en scène sous forme clip ou en « live » est susceptible d’améliorer la connaissance du rapport à la société maghrébine et son imaginaire quant à l’immigration, les rapports amoureux, l’identité ou les aspirations de la jeunesse. L’ambition sera de replacer des textes dans leur contexte et dans la manière dont ils s’élaborent et de voir en quoi, dans leur période, ces chansons sont significatives d’une ambiance et d’un état d’esprit vis à vis des mœurs d’une société.

Procédure de soumission

8Pour soumettre un projet de contribution, merci de bien vouloir
cliquer sur le lien vers le formulaire de soumission.
Les propositions sont ouvertes jusqu’au 1er février 2015.

 

 

New Titles

 

 

2.1 Scars of Partition: Postcolonial Legacies in French and British Borderlands

William F. S. Miles

 

 

Based on three decades of fieldwork throughout the developing world, Scars of Partition is the first book to systematically evaluate the long-term implications of French and British styles of colonialism and decolonization for ordinary people throughout the so-called Third World. It pays particular attention to the contemporary legacies of artificial boundaries superimposed by Britain and France that continue to divide indigenous peoples into separate postcolonial states. In so doing, it uniquely illustrates how the distinctive stamps of France and Britain continue to mark daily life along and behind these inherited borders in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Caribbean.

 

Scars of Partition draws on political science, anthropology, history, and geography to examine six cases of indigenous, indentured, and enslaved peoples partitioned by colonialism in West Africa, West Indies, South Pacific, Southeast Asia, South India, and the Indian Ocean. William F. S. Miles demonstrates that sovereign nations throughout the developing world, despite basic differences in culture, geography, and politics, still bear the underlying imprint of their colonial pasts. Disentangling and appreciating these embedded colonial legacies is critical to achieving full decolonization—particularly in their borderlands.

 

 

William F. S. Miles is a professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston. He is the author of numerous books, including Hausaland Divided: Colonialism and Independence in Nigeria and Niger and Bridging Mental Boundaries in a Postcolonial Microcosm: Identity and Development in Vanuatu.

 

 

2.2 Locating Hybridity: Creole, Identities and Body Politics in the Novels of Ananda Devi

Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy

 

 

Despite its inherent negative implications as a purveyor of essentialism, the concept of hybridity holds a great deal of critical purchase in the postcolonial world. Hybridity allows identities and cultures to be conceptualized as different and manifold, allowing for the undermining of the binaries of self and other, centre and periphery, colonizer and colonized. In Mauritius, a country where numerous civilizations (African, European, Indian, Chinese) coexist and have constructed a new society, linguistic practices, culture and the body are all intrinsically linked to the concept of identity. The author of this study provides a timely discussion of hybridity in the novels of Ananda Devi, perhaps the most famous name in the Mauritian literary landscape. The book analyses various linguistic practices through the lens of linguistic criticism and theory. It then shifts its attention to psychological dislocations suffered by postcolonial subjects having a hybrid identity, as extolled by theorists such as Glissant and Bhabha, and offers an alternative interpretation of identity. Finally, the physical repercussions of hybridity are discussed in order to gauge its relevance in a society such as Mauritius.

 

Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy is a modern foreign languages teacher in Nottingham. She holds an MPhil from the University of Nottingham. She has published widely on hybridity, corporeality, postcolonial madness, gender and identity issues, focusing on Ananda Devi’s writing as well as engaging in comparative analysis with Caribbean Francophone writing.

 

 

2.3 Le Film noir français face aux bouleversements de la France d’après-guerre (1946-1960)
Thomas Pillard, Préface de Ginette Vincendeau

 

Des Portes de la nuit (1946) à Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) en passant par La Môme vert-de-gris (1953), le film noir français d’après-guerre frappe par sa diversité, sa richesse et son originalité.
Diversité des films et des récits : le pessimisme du «réalisme noir» contraste avec l’atmosphère ludique de la «série noire» parodique, elle-même très éloignée de l’univers interlope du «milieu» parisien dépeint dans le film de gangsters… Richesse des talents et des thèmes abordés: du tandem Carné/Prévert à Jacques Becker et Michel Audiard, via des stars comme Simone Signoret, Eddie Constantine ou Jean Gabin, le genre fait appel à des personnalités singulières pour explorer les anxiétés d’une France en mutation, marquée par la Seconde Guerre mondiale et confrontée à l’entrée dans la société de consommation. Singularité artistique et culturelle: loin d’être une simple copie du film noir américain, comme on l’a trop souvent suggéré, le film noir français constitue l’expression nationale d’une forme transnationale, et se distingue à ce titre de Hollywood. Pour évaluer la cohérence de ce genre instable, interroger ses enjeux identitaires et saisir les spécificités hexagonales du «noir», cet ouvrage propose, pour la première fois dans le champ académique, une analyse globale du film noir en France de 1946 à 1960.
Mêlant l’analyse des représentations et la contextualisation historique, Thomas Pillard s’intéresse aux différentes facettes du genre et interroge leurs significations: que nous apprennent les films noirs français sur les bouleversements de la France d’après-guerre?
Thomas Pillard est docteur en études cinématographiques et audiovisuelles de l’université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. Spécialiste du cinéma français classique et contemporain, il a contribué à plusieurs ouvrages universitaires et poursuit des recherches sur les genres cinématographiques, les relations France/Hollywood ainsi que l’histoire économique et sociale du cinéma en France. Il est actuellement post-doctorant à l’Institut de recherche sur le cinéma et l’audiovisuel (IRCAV) et chargé d’enseignement aux universités Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 et Bordeaux Montaigne.

 

 

 

Announcements

 

3.1 Events at the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Florida State University

 

Thursday January 22, 2015 at 5.00 p.m., Student Life Building

Raoul Peck and the Haitian Earthquake: Screening of Fatal Assistance

 

On the fifth anniversary of the Haitian earthquake, award-winning Haitian film director Raoul Peck presents his film Fatal Assistance, which documents the complexities and failures of humanitarian aid following the earthquake.

Followed by Q&A session with Raoul Peck.

 

February 26-28, 2015

International conference

Reorienting Cultural Flows: Engagements Between France and East/Southeast Asia

 

Keynote speakers:

Michaël Ferrier (author and filmmaker)

Koichi Iwabuchi (Monash University)

 

Special guest performance by members of the Tianjin Young Peking Opera Group

 

This conference, one of the first of its kind, brings together leading writers and scholars to explore the literary, artistic, philosophical, culinary, religious, and other cultural exchanges that have occurred over the centuries between Asia and France.

 

Conference organizers: Martin Munro, Bill Cloonan, Aaron Lan, and Laura Lee

Both events are free and open to the public.

For more information on any of these events, please contact Martin Munro.

http://www.winthropking.fsu.edu

 

 

3.2 Research Fellow Vacancy

 

French & Francophone Studies, University of Nottingham

Location: University Park

Salary:   £28,695 to £34,233 per annum, depending on skills and experience. Salary progression beyond this scale is subject to performance.

Closing Date:     Thursday 05 February 2015

 

Reference:         ARTS370414

Applications are invited for the above full-time post based in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham. The purpose of this role will be to carry out research for an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project, ‘Post-Traumatic Growth in Testimonies from Survivors and Perpetrators of the Rwanda Genocide’, led by Dr Nicki Hitchcott.

This project aims to gain a qualitative understanding of the impact of the 1994 genocide on Rwandan people. Through the close analysis of oral testimonies collected and transcribed by our project partner, the Aegis Trust, and stored in Genocide Archive Rwanda, it will focus on the ways in which individuals are beginning to construct their identities in terms of post-traumatic growth. The Research Fellow will work with members of the research team and with colleagues in Rwanda to produce a detailed analysis of a sample of testimonies from survivors and perpetrators of the genocide. The person appointed will be expected to produce publications, both independently and with other members of the team, to disseminate the project’s findings, and to help with the organisation of planned impact and engagement events.

This post is available from 1 March 2015 or as soon as possible thereafter and will be offered on a fixed-term contract of 39 months.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to Dr Nicki Hitchcott, tel: 0115 951 5868 or email: Nicki.Hitchcott@nottingham.ac.uk

For further information or to make an application, visit: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/jobs/currentvacancies/ref/ARTS370414

 

3.3 SFPS on Facebook and Twitter:

SFPS now has a Facebook and Twitter feed:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/societyforfrancophonepostcolonialstudies
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SFPS_UK

We’re planning to feature a ‘Book of the Week’ and would welcome suggestions from members who would like to promote their research.

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