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No American city’s history better illustrates both the possibilities for alternative racial models and the role of the law in shaping racial identity than New Orleans, Louisiana, which prior to the Civil War was home to America’s most privileged community of people of African descent. In the eyes of the law, New Orleans’s free people of color did not belong to the same race as enslaved Africans and African-Americans. While slaves were “negroes,” free people of color were gens de couleur libre, creoles of color, or simply creoles. New Orleans’s creoles of color remained legally and culturally distinct from “negroes” throughout most of the nineteenth century until state mandate...
The extraordinary story of African American composer Edmond D d , raised in antebellum New Orleans, and his remarkable career in France In 1855, Edmond D d , a free black composer from New Orleans, emigrated to Paris. There he trained with France s best classical musicians and went on to spend thirty-six years in Bordeaux leading the city s most popular orchestras. How did this African American, raised in the biggest slave market in the United States, come to compose ballets for one of the best theaters outside of Paris and gain recognition as one of Bordeaux s most popular orchestra leaders? Beginning with his birth in antebellum New Orleans in 1827 and ending with his death in Paris in 1901, Sally McKee vividly recounts the life of this extraordinary man. From the Crescent City to the City of Light and on to the raucous music halls of Bordeaux, this intimate narrative history brings to life the lost world of exiles and travelers in a rapidly modernizing world that threatened to leave the most vulnerable behind.
The essays in this volume provide an overview and critical account of prevalent trends and theoretical arguments informing current investigations into literary treatments of motherhood and aging. They explore how two key stages in women’s lives—maternity and old age—are narrated and defined in fictions and autobiographical writings by contemporary French and francophone women. Through close readings of Maryse Condé, Hélène Cixous, Zahia Rahmani, Linda Lê, Pierrette Fleutieux, and Michèle Sarde, among others, these essays examine related topics such as dispossession, female friendship, and women’s relationships with their mothers. By adopting a broad, synthetic approach to these two distinct and defining stages in women’s lives, this volume elucidates how these significant transitional moments set the stage for women’s evolving definitions (and interrogations) of their identities and roles.
While some of the featured works seem dark and pessimistic, they express, collectively, a certain hope for a brighter, more egalitarian future. This anthology brings together cogent critical studies in a way that identifies and illuminates trends among Quebec's contemporary women writers.
Memoria tells the seemingly ordinary story of a woman overwhelmed by grief when her lover abandons her. The loss opens an old wound: some 20 years ago Emma's teenage sister vanished without a trace. Soon Emma will meet another man, but the return to joy is painfully slow. Rarely has the loss of love, as well as the subtle dislocation of a family hit by tragedy, been evoked more poignantly than in this luminous novel. In Memoria's multi-layered narrative, the reader is irresistibly drawn into the slow reconstruction of Emma's outer and inner world, a world of dizzying sensuality, deep sadness, bewitchingly beautiful images, and, ultimately, "the small circle of new beginnings."
This novel tells us about one of the essential Napoleonic campaigns through the lives of several Russian families, which changed drastically because of the war. From the very first pages, the novel captivates by a highly realistic description of the epoch. It opens with a marriage ceremony in the family of nobility. The marriage is set between a boy of ten and a girl of seven, and the marriage party is accompanied by heavy drinking of fathers and the priest, filthy jokes, and the descriptions of the dirty plates on the tables. As the events evolve, the story gives the same realistic account of the French invasion in Moscow: "During these first few days of the French occupation Moscow became a very pandemonium of pillage and violence, of smoke and fire, of orgies and of cruelties too horrible to relate." Being cast into such circumstances, the protagonists show incomparable courage and strength, inspiring more profound interest in the period's history.
An apocalyptic vision of planetary self-destruction provided the context for many late twentieth-century narratives. Women writers from Quebec and English Canada, including Margaret Atwood, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine Gagnon, Betsy Warland, Marie-Claire Blais, and Nicole Brossard, redefined their relationship to time and narrative in order to tell a different, perhaps more hopeful, story. Using "archaeology" as a trope and a methodology, Karen McPherson's "critical excavations" of these women's writings pose questions about loss and mourning, survival and witnessing, devastation and writing, remembering and imagining.
This is Volume 3 of 4 volumes. See Volume 1 for a complete book description.
Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara Godard, one of the most original and wide-ranging literary critics, theorists, teachers, translators, and public intellectuals Canada has ever produced. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars, extend Godard’s work through engagements with her published texts in the spirit of creative interchange and intergenerational relay of ideas. Their essays resonate with Godard’s innovative scholarship situated at the intersection of such fields as literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, feminist theory, arts criticism, social activism, institutional analysis, and publi...
This book finds its origin partly in the International Colloquium on French and Francophone Literature in the 1990's at Dalhousie University, September 1998. number of the papers, since reworked, take their place here alongside other studies subsequently invited. They form a broad and varyingly focused set of cogent and pertinent appraisals of very recent French, and francophone, poetic practice and its shifting, becoming conceptual underpinnings.