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Hospitality has emerged as a category in recent French thinking for addressing a range of issues associated with immigration. Concentrating primarily on France and its former colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa, this book considers how hospitality and its dissidence are defined, practiced, and represented in European and African fictions, theories, and myths at the end of the 20th century.
The authors studied in this book can be visualized as the islands that constitute an unknown, fragile and trembling literary and cultural Francophone archipelago. The archipelago does not appear on any map, in the middle of an ocean whose name we already know. No Francophone anthology would put these authors together as a matter of course because what connects them is a narrative grammar rather than a national origin or even a language. Yet, their writing techniques and their apprehension of the real (the ways in which they know and name the world) both reflect and actively participate in our evolving perception of what Gayatri Spivak calls the "planet". The Reparative in Narratives argues t...
Drawn from insights of the past twenty years, the essays reflect the renewed approach of gender and sexuality as they relate to homosexuality and its representation, and they rely on models that differentiate between sexuality and gender and between natural inclinations and social constructs. Despite the wide variety of subjects, critical positions, and authors' backgrounds, what these essays have in common is the willingness of the contributors to go beyond a set of rhetorics, a set of limitations that were a defining moment in the struggle of gay liberation, and its reflection in both creative and critical writing.
The authors studied in this book are drawn together through their use of narrators who are survivors and, sometimes, inflictors, of unspeakable acts of violence. These authors then repair trauma through the act of writing. The reparative narratives introduced here require that readers be prepared to accept that healing belongs to a whole realm of potential outcomes - and that exposure and denunciation do not exhaust the victim's range of possibilities. The author contends that this context-specific, yet repeating, pattern constitutes a response to our contemporary understanding of both globalized and extremely localized types of traumatic memories.
Against the background of increasing population diversity in contemporary France and its attendant social tensions, Mireille Rosello analyzes how minorities within French cultures have dismantled stereotypes, and then extrapolates techniques that other marginalized groups might employ. Experiences drawn from Jewish, Maghrebian, and Black communities inform Rosello's observations. By examining current French novels, films, and other media where stereotypes of the ethnic other are confronted and reappropriated, the author reveals ways to recognize, subvert, and defuse a wide range of harmful stereotypes. Whether offering a brilliant reading of Coline Serreau's 1992 film La Crise or probing Baudelaire and Hugo for relevant clues, Rosello engages readers with creative insight, impeccable scholarship, and clarity of expression.
Addresses the theoretical and pedagogical implications of redefining French Studies as an interdisciplinary field, while providing practical examples of the kind of criticism that such a shift would entail.
This interdisciplinary collection of critical articles seeks to reassess the concept of hybridity and its relevance to post-colonial theory and literature. The challenging articles written by internationally acclaimed scholars discuss the usefulness of the term in relation to such questions as citizenship, whiteness studies and transnational identity politics. In addition to developing theories of hybridity, the articles in this volume deal with the role of hybridity in a variety of literary and cultural phenomena in geographical settings ranging from the Pacific to native North America. The collection pays particular attention to questions of hybridity, migrancy and diaspora.
Albert Memmi's controversial statements about racism and his call to each of us to devote ourselves to its eradication--futile though this effort will be--are straightforward and lucid, yet also powerful and universal. In this remarkable meditation on a subject at the troubled center of contemporary life, Memmi investigates racism as social pathology--a cultural disease that prevails because it allows one segment of society to empower itself at the expense of another. By turns historical, sociological, and autobiographical, Racism moves beyond individual prejudice to engage the broader questions of collective behavior and social responsibility. Book jacket.
Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France argues that the way France displayed its colonized peoples in the twentieth century continues to inform how minority authors and artists make immigrants and racial and ethnic minority populations visible in contemporary France.
This book will enlighten readers on the importance of literature in contributing to historical knowledge. Will provide readers with comprehensive understanding of the development of writing by French authors of Algerian origin, from its emergence in the 1980s to the present day. Emphasizes the contemporary relevance of the Algerian War and the afterlives of empire on twenty-first century society and culture.