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A critical study of fictional responses by authors inside and outside Rwanda to the 1994 genocide.
Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the me...
Unique in its analysis both of literary and linguistic techniques, this text draws together extracts from novels written in French by writers from Francophone areas outside Europe, including North Africa, Black Africa, the Caribbean and North America.
Mediating Violence from Africa explores how African and non-African Francophone authors, filmmakers, editors, and scholars have packaged, interpreted, and filmed the violent histories of post-Cold War Francophone Africa. This violence, much of which unfolded in front of Western television cameras, included the use of child soldiers facilitated by the Soviet Union's castoff Kalashnikov rifles, the rise of Islamist terrorism in West Africa, and the horrific genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. Through close readings of fictionalized child-soldier narratives, cinematic representations of Islamist militants, genocide survivor testimony, and Western scholarship, George S. MacLeod analyzes the w...
"[W]ithout a doubt one of the most important studies so far completed on literature in French grounded in the experiences of migrants of sub-Saharan African origin." —Alec Hargreaves, Florida State University France has always hosted a rich and vibrant black presence within its borders. But recent violent events have raised questions about France's treatment of ethnic minorities. Challenging the identity politics that have set immigrants against the mainstream, Black France explores how black expressive culture has been reformulated as global culture in the multicultural and multinational spaces of France. Thomas brings forward questions such as—Why is France a privileged site of civilization? Who is French? Who is an immigrant? Who controls the networks of production? Black France poses an urgently needed reassessment of the French colonial legacy.
This book deals with literary representations of the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. The focus is a transnational, polyphonic writing project entitled ‘Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire’ (Rwanda: Writing by Duty of Memory), undertaken in 1998 by a group of nine African authors. This work emphasizes the Afropolitan cultural frame in which the texts were conceived and written. Instead of using Western and Eurocentric tropes, this volume looks at a so-called ‘minority trauma’: an African conflict situated in a collectivist society and written about by writers from African origin. This approach enables a more situated study, in which it becomes possible to draw out the local notions of ubuntu, oral testimonies, mourning traditions, healing and storytelling strategies, and the presence of the ‘invisible’. As these texts are written in French and to date not all of them have been translated into English, most academic research has been done in French. This book thus assists in connecting English-speaking readers not only to a set of texts written in French with significant literary and cultural value, but also to francophone trauma studies research.
The 2007 manifesto in favour of a "Litterature-monde en francais" has generated new debates in both "francophone" and "postcolonial" studies. Praised by some for breaking down the hierarchical division between "French" and "Francophone" literatures, the manifesto has been criticized by othersfor recreating that division through an exoticizing vision that continues to privilege the publishing industry of the former colonial metropole. Does the manifesto signal the advent of a new critical paradigm destined to render obsolescent those of "francophone" and/or "postcolonial" studies? Or isit simply a passing fad, a glitzy but ephemeral publicity stunt generated and promoted by writers and publis...
This book reads mid-twentieth century poetry by British, American and Sub-Saharan women to postulate the desirability and possibility of feminist monolithism. It shows that there is a remarkable consistency in the themes and aesthetic preoccupations of poets widely separated from each other by both geographical space and historical epochs, which highlights that there are pertinent cross-cutting trends in women’s poetry which could be exploited as a basis for monolithism. The text identifies the main tenets of feminism as recognition of women’s oppression and a determined effort through concerted strategies to resist and thwart this oppression and to navigate women out of peripheral positions into positions of power. By showing that these tenets are uniformly present in the poetry of very different women, it posits this uniformity as a stable ground on which feminist monolithism could be constructed, without glossing over existent differences between and among women.
This volume explores violent perpetration in diverse forms from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. From National Socialist perpetration in the museum, through post-terrorist life writing to embodied performances of perpetration in cosplay, the collection draws upon a series of historical and geographical case studies, seen through the lens of a variety of texts, with a particular focus on the locus of the museum as a technology of sense making. In addition to its authored chapters, the volume includes three contributed interviews which offer a practice-led perspective on the topic. Through its wide-ranging approach to violence, the volume draws attention to the contested and...
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The 1990s witnessed an explosion in women’s writing in France, with a particularly exciting new generation of writer’s coming to the fore, such as Christine Angot, Marie Darrieussecq and Regine Detambel. Other authors such as Paule Constant, Sylvie Germain, Marie Redonnet and Leila Sebbar, who had begun publishing in the 1980s, claimed their mainstream status in the 1990s with new texts. The book provides an up-to-date introduction to an analysis of new women’s writing in contemporary France, including both new writers of the 1990s and their more established counter-parts. The edito...