The Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies is published online twice per annum. The Autumn/Winter 2025/26 issue is available below. The back issues are freely accessible via our online archive.
15.2 online – Autumn/Winter 2025/26, ISSN 2044-4109 (Online), including several book reviews and the awardees of the 2025 SFPS Essay Prize:
Joint winners of the 2025 SFPS Essay Prize
– Sophie-Marie Niang, ‘Haunting in the Undead Empire’: This article explores postcolonial haunting in contemporary France. Through a reading of Diaty Diallo’s 2022 Deux secondes d’air qui brûle novel, I argue that colonial forgetting acts not only on the past but also on the present to obfuscate the systematic state violence against non-white postcolonial citizens. This violence and subsequent forgetting produces haunting, and in this article I analyse how this haunting structures the lives of black and arab postcolonial citizens within the Republic, before exploring the ways that, by enacting solidarity with the dead and caring for each other in myriad ways, the living attend to this haunting.
– Clément Laurelli, ‘Horizons d’un entremêlement-monde dans Le papillon et la lumière de Patrick Chamoiseau’: Cette contribution analyse Le papillon et la lumière (2011) de Patrick Chamoiseau comme un écrit préfigurant les horizons poétiques et environnementaux énoncés par l’auteur dans Faire-Pays : Éloge de la responsabilisation (2023). L’article propose une étude de l’espace urbain dans le conte comme le théâtre d’une progressive « responsabilisation » invitant à repenser notre relation au vivant à la suite de la chute de l’empire. Il interroge en quoi le texte place la conscience de l’entremêlement-monde comme source d’une agentivité et moteur d’un devenir solidaire, social et écologique. Ainsi, nous proposons de rapprocher les récentes observations de Chamoiseau sur le ‘capitalisme-monde’ et le ‘fait relationnel’ avec les travaux d’Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing sur la ‘féralisation’ afin d’étudier la représentation des mécanismes néocoloniaux et écocides mais aussi l’expression d’une forme de résistance de l’Holocène dans l’ouvrage. Nous soutenons que des dynamiques relationnelles s’opèrent au sein du délitement du ‘système Outre-mer’ et que celles-ci nous invitent à repenser notre relation à l’humain et non-humain.
Runner-up of the 2025 SFPS Essay Prize
– Joseph Richmond, ‘Hamid El Houadri, Mostafa El Nissaboury, and the anti-capitalist poetics of Souffles-Anfās (1966–1972)’: This article examines the use of visual imagery and poetic form in two poems published in the anti-colonial Moroccan leftist literary journal, Souffles-Anfās (1966–1972). The article interprets the visual imagery and poetic form in the works of Hamid El Houadri and Mostafa El Nissaboury as small yet significant acts of resistance that delinks the urban landscape of Casablanca from its associations with ideas of ‘empire’ in form. In contrast to existing scholarship on the Souffles-Anfās corpus, this article explores the contents of the journal’s earlier editions for the invocation of natural imagery and modes of Amazigh storytelling as a means of anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian resistance to French occupation and the material, lived conditions of Morocco’s années de plomb (1961–1999). This essay explores two perspectives of the same city, Casablanca, drawing them together to illuminate how each, in turn, forms their own anti-capitalist poetics that do not rely on French or Arabic ways of seeing and knowing narrative, form, and structure.
Contributions on any topic related to Francophone Postcolonial Studies are invited for inclusion in future issues. Authors should submit electronically a word file of their article, 4,000-10,000 words, in English or French to BFPS editors Sarah Arens (s.arens@liverpool.ac.uk) and Paola Sanges Ghetti (Paola.Sanges-Ghetti@warwick.
Editor
Sarah Arens
E-mail: s.arens@liverpool.ac.uk
Book Reviews Editor
Paola Sanges Ghetti
E-mail: paola.sanges-ghetti@warwick.ac.uk
