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Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past explores the complex interchange between shared and personal pasts and how they impact upon individual lives. Through their historically-informed self-writings, the five Caribbean authors that have been selected for this study–Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière–offer compelling insights into confronting, coming to terms with and reconciling with their past, both collective and individual. A central question is the conceptual link between singular and plural, between personal and collective notions of history and the connections that exist between them. The employment of ‘personal narratives’ as the vehicle to carry out this investigation encompasses the tension that is evident in the writers’ reflections, which constantly move between the collective and the personal and is embodied in the idea of ‘their past’–a complex, rhizomatic network that extends beyond the notion of a single, private life. The contrasting yet complementary nature of the book’s title–connecting histories and the personal past-underlines the existence of a shared past of which the five writers are deeply conscious, but also their own past, which overlaps with these historical inheritances. The book’s central focus, then, is trifold: it concerns a collective, and to some extent documented and shared, historical past; a more variable, unique, personal past revealed in the ‘personal narratives’ of the five authors as well as on the connections between these two pasts.

Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France offers a critical assessment of the ways in which French writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists descended from immigrants from former colonial territories bring their specificity to bear on the bounds and applicability of French republicanism, “Frenchness” and national identity, and contemporary cultural production in France.

The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture argues That globalized media has allowed for efficient transmission of transnational culture, and in turn, our everyday experiences are informed by sounds ranging from voices, to music, to advertising, to bombs, and beyond. In considering cultural works from French-speaking North Africa and the Middle East all published or released in France from 1962-2011, Solheim’s study of listening across cultural genres will be of interest to any scholar or lay person interested in contemporary postcolonial France. This book is also a primer to contemporary Francophone culture from North Africa and the Middle East. Some of the French-speaking world’s most renowned and adored artists are the subject of this study, including preeminent Algerian feminist novelist, filmmaker and historian Assia Djebar (1936-2015), the first writer of the Maghreb to become part of the Académie Française; celebrated Iranian graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis, Chicken with Plums); the lauded Lebanese-Québecois playwright and dramaturge Wajdi Mouawad (Littorial, Incendies), and Lebanese comic artist and avant jazz trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, whose improvisation with Israeli fighter jets during the 2006 Israeli War, “Starry Night,” catapulted him to global recognition. An interdisciplinary study of contemporary Francophone cultures, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in literary studies, performance studies, gender studies, anthropology, history, and ethnomusicology.

Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from around the World consists of eleven scholarly essays on contemporary authors (born 1950 or later) of science fiction who publish in languages other than English, or who publish from the English-speaking “periphery”: i.e., outside the United States, the United Kingdom, and Anglophone Canada. Each essay examines one author, making a case for their importance internationally and contextualizing their work within the science-fictional traditions of their own culture and those of the genre globally (themes, tropes, tendencies, subgenres, etc.). Each also offers an in-depth analysis of a major work or works. The book thus identifies major contemporary authors of science fiction outside the “center” of the English-speaking world and presents them to students and scholars in the Anglophone world. The scholars respond to questions such as: Who are these authors, and why are they important? What innovative thematic material or formal elements do they offer? What unique elements from their culture do they bring to the genre? How do they dialogue with the history of the genre, and how do they fit into the contemporary SF scene? The authors studied are Angélica Gorodischer from Argentina, Yves Meynard and Jean-Louis Trudel writing collaboratively as Laurent McAllister (Francophone Canada), Liu Cixin (China), Daína Chaviano (Cuba), Johanna Sinisalo (Finland), Jean-Claude Dunyach (France), Andreas Eschbach (Germany), Sakyo Komatsu (Japan), Olatunde Osunsanmi (Nigerian American), Jacek Dukaj (Poland), and Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky (Russia/USSR).

This book studies 20th-century travel literature in French, tracking the form from the colonial past to the postcolonial present. Whereas most recent explorations of travel literature have addressed English-language material, this book complements these by presenting a body of material that has previously attracted little attention, ranging from conventional travel writing to other cultural phenomena (such as the Colonial Exposition of 1931) in which changing attitudes to travel are apparent. This book explores the evolution of attitudes to cultural diversity, explaining how each generation seems simultaneously to foretell the collapse and reinvention of ‘elsewhere’. It also follows the progressive renegotiation of understandings of travel (and travel literature) across the 20th century, focusing in particular on the emergence of travel narratives from France's former colonies. The book suggests that an exclusive colonial understanding of travel as a practice defined along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity has slowly been transformed so that travel has become an enabling figure central to analyses of contemporary global culture. Engaging initially with Victor Segalen's early 20th-century reflection on travel and exoticism and Albert Kahn's ‘Archives de la Planète’, the book goes on to examine a series of interrelated texts and phenomena: early African travel narratives, inter-war ethnography, post-war accounts of Citroën 2CV journeys, the travel stories of immigrant workers, the work of Nicholas Bouvier and the ‘Pour une littérature voyageuse’ movement, narratives of recent walking journeys, and contemporary Polynesian literature.

In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France’s rhetoric of ‘internal otherness’, asking her reader not to spot those deemed France’s others but rather to deconstruct the very gazes that produce them. Weaving together a vast corpus of colonial French children’s comics, Francophone novels, and African popular music, fashion, and dance, Knox traces how the ways colonial ‘human zoos’ invited their French spectators to gaze on their colonized others still inform the frameworks through which racial and ethnic minorities are made—and make themselves—visible in contemporary France. In addition to analyzing how literature and music depicting immigration, immigrants and their descendants in France make race and ethnicity visible, Knox also illustrates how the works she analyzes self-reflexively ask whether they, as commodities sold within wider cultural marketplaces, perpetuate the culture of exoticism they seek to contest. Finally, Knox contends that to take seriously the way the texts interrogate the relationship between power, privilege, and the gaze also requires reconsidering the visions of normalcy from which racial and ethnic minorities supposedly depart. She thus concludes by exposing a critical ‘blind spot’ in French and Francophone cultural studies—whiteness—before subjecting it to the same scrutiny France’s ‘visible minorities’ face.

Critically engaging the concept of the Mediterranean as a “liquid continent” (Gabriel Audisio), the book argues in favor of a “transcontinental” heuristic model that rests on the transmaritime deployment of the Maghreb within the millennia-old relation that has materially and culturally bound it to multiple Mediterranean sites. Studying a Mediterranean-inspired body of texts from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Gibraltar in French, Arabic, and Spanish, the book delivers provocative analyses that complicate the dichotomy between nation and Mediterranean, the valence of the postcolonial topos of nomadism in the face of postcolonial trauma, and conceptions of the Mediterranean as a mythical site averse to historical realization. The book substitutes a trans-Mediterranean reading of Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma as allegory of the Maghreb’s long-standing plurality for Albert Camus’ colonialist Mediterranean utopia. Through this adjusted Mediterranean genealogy, it reveals the intersection of these Mediterranean imaginaries with Maghrebi claims to an inclusive, democratic national ideal yet to be realized. Attuned to both the perpetual fluctuation of the Mediterranean as method and the political imperatives specific to the postcolonial Maghreb, the transcontinental reveals the limits of models of hybridity and nomadism oblivious to material realities. Through a sustained reflection on the potential and limitations of allegory and critical melancholia, the book shows how the Mediterranean successfully decenters postcolonial nation-building projects and mediates the nomadic subject’s reinsertion into a revised national collective respectful of heterogeneity. These far-reaching adjustments to our readings of the Maghreb and the Mediterranean help us rethink not just the space of the sea, the hybridity it produced, and the way it shaped historical dynamics (globalization, imperialism, decolonization, and nationalism) but also the very nature of postcolonial histories and identities along its shores.

This collection offers a new understanding of communities of French heritage in the New World, drawing on archaeological and historical evidence from both colonial and post-Conquest settings. It counters the prevailing but mistaken notion that the French role in New World histories was confined largely to Québec and New Orleans and lasted only through the French and Indian War. Some chapters in the volume reveal new insights into French colonial communities, while others concern the post-Conquest Francophone communities that thrived under British, Spanish, or American control, long after France relinquished its colonies in the New World. The authors in this collection engage in a dialogue about what it meant to be ethnic French or a French descendant, Métis, Native American, enslaved, or a free person of color in French areas of North America, the Caribbean, and South America from the late 1600s until the late 1800s. The authors combine archaeological remains (from artifacts to food remains to cultural landscapes) with a rich body of historical records to help reveal the roots of present-day New World societies. This volume makes clear that, along with Spanish, British, and early American colonial influences, French colonists and their descendant communities played an important role in New World histories, and continue to do so.

Publishing Africa in French provides a critical analysis of the global dynamics and cultural and publishing history of French and African literature. It focuses on French readership and the French literary-political sphere, and engages with issues of authorial authenticity, literary value, and author autonomy. The study is built on careful documentations of the pre- and post-publication process, and explores the relentless interweaving of ideas expressed in literary form, their institutional contexts and underlying human relationships, and asks: Who writes about Africa and who is Africa written for? The book is split into two sections, ‘Institutions’ and ‘Mediations’. The first part of the book, ‘Institutions’, situates three institutions of particular significance, the publishing houses of Le Seuil and Présence Africaine, and the Association nationale des écrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer. ‘Mediations’, the second section of the book, concludes with a consideration on how institutional structures work into or against the literary texture of selected publications, and examines readers’ reports and editorial revision; the use of pseudonyms; the development of named collections and the process of literary translation from English. Publishing Africa in French aims to bring book-historical principles to bear on a decisive period in French literary history and foregrounds the influencing factors on literary expression and its material impressions in the period of decolonization.

Recent years have seen a growing body of literature dedicated to memories of slavery in the Anglophone world, yet little has been done to approach this subject from Francophone perspectives. This collection responds to the urgent need to contribute to current research on slavery and memory studies by focusing specifically on the Francophone world. Featuring the scholarship of leading academics in France, Britain, the United States and Canada, the collection reflects upon contemporary commemorative practices that relate to the history of slavery and the slave trade, and questions how they function in relationship to other, less memorialized histories of exploitation, such as indentured and forced labour. The volume is set against the context of France’s growing body of memory legislation, as well as its close cultural and political connections to its former empire, all of which make it an influential player in how slavery continues to be memorialized and conceptualized in the public sphere. Contributors retrace and redraw the narrative map of slavery and its legacies in the Francophone world through a comparative understanding of how these different, but interconnected forms of labour exploitation have been remembered and/or forgotten from European, West African, Indian Ocean and Caribbean perspectives.

Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria is a book about expatriation, and the constant, necessary revisiting that follows. In the book, Hiddleston seeks to conceptualise Djebar’s progressive struggle and dissatisfaction with the notion of Algerian identity by referring to a number of contemporary theoretical concepts. Hiddleston’s analysis of the Djebar’s gradual and partial ‘expatriation’ is shaped heavily by the writer’s participation in crossroads between French philosophy, multiple Algerian traditions, and Anglo-American postcolonial theory. The study also situates Djebar’s thinking in recent French philosophy, making connections between her understanding of subjectivity and individuation and those produced by contemporary thinkers working in France.

Joseph Zobel (1915-2006) is one of the best-known Francophone Caribbean authors, and is internationally recognized for his novel La Rue Cases-Nègres (1950). Yet very little is known about his other novels, and most readings of La Rue Cases-Nègres consider the text in isolation. Through a series of close readings of the author’s six published novels, with supporting references drawn from his published short stories, poetry and diaries, Joseph Zobel: Négritude and the Novel generates new insights into Zobel’s highly original decision to develop Négritude’s project of affirming pride in black identity through the novel and social realism. The study establishes how, influenced by the American Harlem Renaissance movement, Zobel expands the scope of Négritude by introducing new themes and stylistic innovations which herald a new kind of social realist French Caribbean literature. These discoveries in turn challenge and alter the current understanding of Francophone Caribbean literature during the Négritude period, in addition to contributing to changes in the current understanding of Caribbean and American literature more broadly understood.

The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction seeks to better understand the concept of community as a central and problematic issue in French Caribbean literature. The study examines representations of community in seven French Caribbean novels, including Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, Edouard Glissant’s Le Quatrième Siècle, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Vincent Placoly’s L’Eau-de-mort guildive, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit, and Maryse Condé’s Desirada. Each novel is discussed in chronological order, demonstrating a progressive move away from the ‘closed’ community towards a newer sense of an ‘open’ community. In this study, Britton offers an understanding of the postcolonial societies of the Caribbean by looking at French Caribbean literature’s role in the creation of community. The seven novels analysed reveal a correlation between a tightly knit, purposeful community and a linear narrative that ends in definitive resolution, and, conversely, between a dispersed or heterogeneous community and a narrative structure that avoids linearity and closure.

Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of critical urgency to probe the notion of ‘the contemporary’, and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. Consisting of twenty-two critical essays written by scholars in the field of French studies, the volume offers a sustained reflection on the status of the contemporary in French culture and takes a close look at the contemporary moment itself, as well as its concomitant discourse of crisis. The volume is split into four sections. The first section, ‘Conceptualizing the Contemporary’, offers distinct disciplinary approaches to broader questions about time, period, and categorization. The second section, ‘Contemporary Politics and French Thought’, brings broader theoretical inquiries to bear on the political sphere. The third section, ‘The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives’, rearticulates the concern that the difficult negotiation of the past continues to haunt the present. The fourth section, ‘Writing the Contemporary Self’, features essays that probe the limits of autobiographical writing and self-representation. The fifth section, ‘Novel Rereadings’, offers new interpretations of monumental works of French fiction by literary giants such as Flaubert, Colette, Proust, Beckett. The sixth and final section, ‘Memory: Past and Future’, concludes with three different approaches to memory and representation. The essays in this volume, organised by theme rather than by definitions or denotations, encourage an expansive and elastic theoretical framework that charts a broad conceptual course and attempts to define what it means to ‘be contemporary’ both broadly and in terms of practice.

Branding the Beur Author analyzes mainstream media promotion of literature written by the descendants of North African immigrants to France (often called beurs). Launched in the early 1980s, conversations between journalists and ‘beur’ authors delve into contemporary debates such as racism in the 1980s and Islam in French society in the 1990s. But the interests of journalists looking for sensational subject matter also heavily shape the promotion and reception of these novels: only the ‘beur’ authors who use a realist style to write about the challenges faced by the North African immigrant population in France—and who engage on-air with French identity politics and immigration—receive multiple invitations to participate in interviews. Previous scholarship has taken a necessary first step by analyzing the social and political stakes of this literature (using labels such as ‘beur’ and/or ‘banlieue,’ to designate its urban, economically distressed setting), but this book argues that this approach reproduces the selection criteria deployed by the media that determine which texts receive commercial and critical support. By demonstrating how minority-based literary labels such as  ‘francophone’ and ‘postcolonial’ are always already defined by the socio-political context in which such works are published and promoted, this book establishes that these labels are tautological and cannot reflect the thematic and stylistic richness of beur (and other minority) production in France.

This study discusses how the ways in which Chamoiseau’s work attempts to recover (bring back) the memory of the past have contributed to a collective and individual coming to terms with, and, potentially, a recovery from its effects. In bringing the theme of memory to the forefront of her analysis, and in considering this highly memorial writing alongside work done in a wider context, McCusker generates insights which have resonance in the broader field of postcolonial literary studies. The first and last chapters focus on a single work, Chronique des sept misères and Biblique des derniers gestes respectively, with the chapters in-between counterpointing several texts, so as to suggest recurring and significant themes and issues on Chamoiseau’s literature.

Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel explores autobiographies, memoirs, and novels written by French-language Jewish writers in order to get an idea of Francophone Jewish imaginings of Israel. Cairns contextualises her analysis of the texts in this book by drawing on social and political history as well as ideas of philosophy, journalism, psychoanalysis and sociology. The book foregrounds the differing emotional investments in Israel coming from both Francophone Jews physically situated in Israel and from diasporic Jews in France, thus investigating the ‘special’ Jewish relationship between the two countries.