The Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies (SFPS) is an international organisation which exists in order to promote, facilitate and otherwise support the work of all scholars and researchers working on colonial/postcolonial studies in the French-speaking world. SFPS was created in 2002 with the aim of continuing and developing the pioneering work of its predecessor organisation, the Association for the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French (ASCALF).
The Society does not seek to impose a monolithic understanding of the ‘postcolonial’ and it consciously aims to appeal to as wide a range of members as possible, in order to engage in wide-ranging debate on the nature and legacy of French/Belgian colonialism. We thus welcome collaboration with the following groups:
- Scholars/researchers working on the colonial and the postcolonial periods;
- Scholars/researchers working on material relating to both metropolitan and non-metropolitan French/Francophone history, literature, cinema, politics, linguistics;
- Scholars/researchers who work on the constituent parts of what is termed ‘the Francophone world’ (including those who work comparatively on metropolitan and non-metropolitan Francophone material);
- Scholars/researchers of the ‘immigrant’ cultures of ex-colonised populations in France/Belgium;
- Scholars/researchers working in the hitherto predominantly Anglophone field of Postcolonial Studies
SFPS encourages work of a transcultural, transhistorical and interdisciplinary nature. It implicitly seeks to decolonise the term Francophone, emphasizing that it should refer to all cultures where French is spoken (including, of course, France itself), and it encourages a critical reflection on the nature of the cognate disciplines of French Studies, on the one hand, and Anglophone Postcolonial Studies, on the other.
