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Pim Higginson draws on race theory, aesthetics, cultural studies, musicology, and postcolonial studies to examine the convergence of aesthetics and race in Western thought and to explore its impact on Francophone African literature. France's "tumulte noir," the jazz craze between the two world wars, consolidated an aesthetic model present in Western philosophy since Plato that coalesced into French "scientific" racism over the 19th century; a model which formalized the notion of music as black. France's "jazzophilia" codified what the author names the "racial score:" simultaneously an archive and script that, in defining jazz as "black music," has had wide-reaching effects on contemporary pe...
Banda, the protagonist, sets off to sell the year's cocoa harvest to earn the bride-price for the woman he has chosen to wed. A series of misfortunes causes Banda to lose both his crop and his bride-to-be. As he makes his way to the city, Banda is witness to a changing Africa.
At Home in Our Sounds examines the ways Black artists reacted to the heightened visibility of racial difference in interwar Paris, illustrating the effect jazz music had on the enormous social challenges Europe faced in the aftermath of World War I.
The Noir Atlantic follows the influence of African American author Chester Himes on francophone African crime fiction.
Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a network of some fifty women writers, working in French, English, Dutch, and German, staked out a lasting position in the European literary field. These writers were multilingual and lived for many years outside of their countries of origin, translated and borrowed from each others' works, attended literary circles and salons, and fashioned a transnational women's literature characterized by highly recognizable codes. Drawing on a literary geography of national types, women writers across Western Europe read, translated, wrote, and rewrote stories about exceptional young women, literary heroines who transcend the gendered destiny of their dist...
More than a book about food alone, French Food uses diet as a window into issues of nationality, literature, and culture in France and abroad. Outstanding contributors from cultural studies, literary criticism, performance studies, and the emerging field of food studies explore a wide range of food matters.
In this book the author argues that a younger generation of South Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over the last decades been informed by notions of forgiveness and reconciliation. The author uses the image of history-rich blood to explore these approaches to intergenerational memory. Blood under the skin is a carrier of embodied and gendered histories and using this image, the chapters revisit older archives, as well as analyse contemporary South African cultural and literary forms. The emphasis on blood challenges the privileged status skin has had as explanatory category in thinking about...
Roland Barthes at the Collège de France studies the four lecture courses given by Roland Barthes in Paris between 1977 and 1980, placing Barthes's teaching within institutional, intellectual, and personal contexts. Theoretically wide-ranging, Lucy O'Meara's account focuses on Barthes's pedagogical style and the insights they provide into his written works, including his focus on essayism and fragmentation and the negotiation between singularity and universality. Linking Barthes's strategies to broad intellectual influences, from Kant and Adorno to Zen and Taoist philosophies, O'Meara reassesses Barthes's critical and ethical priorities in the decade before his death, highlighting the vitality of his late thought.
'An elegant yet accessible work, Postcolonial Realms of Memory not only exposes the colonial blind spot that left Pierre Nora's Lieux de mémoire incomplete, but begins the long task of remedying it. This is a crucial intervention that the field has required for some time.' Gemma King, Contemporary French Civilization
Serial Crime Fiction is the first book to focus explicitly on the complexities of crime fiction seriality. Covering definitions and development of the serial form, implications of the setting, and marketing of the series, it studies authors such as Doyle, Sayers, Paretsky, Ellroy, Marklund, Camilleri, Borges, across print, film and television.