Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture


Book Description

An examination of the regional and national commonalites and differences of francophone literary culture.




Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought


Book Description

In this wide-ranging guide to twentieth-century French thought, leading scholars offer an authoritative multi-disciplinary analysis of one of the most distinctive and influential traditions in modern thought. Unlike any other existing work, this important work covers not only philosophy, but also all the other major disciplines, including literary theory, sociology, linguistics, political thought, theology, and more.




Pacifist Invasions


Book Description

Pacifist Invasions is about what happens to the contemporary French lyric in the translingual Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics, it reveals three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into French in works by Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan).







The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French


Book Description

This book explores the 'colonial fortune' in light of contemporary concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt and the persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation.




Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print


Book Description

Carrie Noland approaches Negritude as an experimental, text-based poetic movement developed by diasporic authors of African descent through the means of modernist print culture. Engaging primarily the works of Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, Noland shows how the demands of print culture alter the personal voice of each author, transforming an empirical subjectivity into a hybrid, textual entity that she names, after Theodor Adorno, an "aesthetic subjectivity." This aesthetic subjectivity, transmitted by the words on the page, must be actualized—performed, reiterated, and created anew—by each reader, at each occasion of reading. Lyric writing and lyric reading therefore attenuate the link between author and phenomenalized voice. Yet the Negritude poem insists upon its connection to lived experience even as it emphasizes its printed form. Ironically, a purely formalist reading would have to ignore the ways formal—and not merely thematic—elements point toward the poem's own conditions of emergence. Blending archival research on the historical context of Negritude with theories of the lyric "voice," Noland argues that Negritude poems present a challenge to both form-based (deconstructive) theories and identity-based theories of poetic representation. Through close readings, she reveals that the racialization of the author places pressure on a lyric regime of interpretation, obliging us to reconceptualize the relation of author to text in poetries of the first person.




French Civilization and Its Discontents


Book Description

What happens when the study of French is no longer coterminous with the study of France? French Civilization and Its Discontents explores the ways in which considerations of difference, especially colonialism, postcolonialism, and race, have shaped French culture and French studies in the modern era. Rejecting traditional assimilationist notions of French national identity, contributors to this groundbreaking volume demonstrate how literature, history, and other aspects of what is considered French civilization have been shaped by global processes of creolization and differentiation. This book ably demonstrates the necessity of studying France and the Francophone world together, and of recognizing not only the presence of France in the Francophone world but also the central place occupied by the Francophone world in world literature and history.




#You Know You're Black in France When


Book Description

A groundbreaking study about everyday antiblackness and its refusal in an officially raceblind France. What does it mean to be racialized-as-black in France on a daily basis? #You Know You’re Black in France When… responds to that question. Under the banner of universalism, France messages a powerful and seductive ideology of blindness to race that disappears blackened people and the antiblackness they experience. As Trica Keaton notes, in everyday life, France is anything but raceblind. In this interdisciplinary study, drawn from a range of critical scholarship including that of Philomena Essed and Frantz Fanon, Keaton illuminates how b/Black (racialized/politicized) French people distinctly expose and refuse what she calls “raceblind republicanism.” By officially turning a blind eye to the specificity of antiblackness, the French state in fact perpetuates it, she argues, along with structural racism. Through daily life, public policies, visual culture, the private lives of individuals and families shattered by police violence, the French courts where many are fighting back, and her own experiences, Keaton charts the troubling dynamics and continuities of antiblackness in French society.




Friends and Enemies


Book Description

This timely contribution to debates about the future of postcolonial theory explores the troubled relationship between politics and the discipline, both in the sense of the radical political changes associated with the anti-colonial struggle and the implication of literary writers in institutional discourses of power. Using Haiti as a key example, Chris Bongie explores issues of commemoration and commodification of the post/colonial by pairing early nineteenth-century Caribbean texts with contemporary works. An apt volume for an age that struggles with the reality of memories of anti-colonial resistance, Friends and Enemies is a provocative take on postcolonial scholarship.




Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers


Book Description

Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers explores how nine different "outsider" authors treat the theme of alienation in one of their major works. All the novels under review were written in a limited time span (1942 to 1987, approximately 50 years), and all are structured around a hero or heroine who remains culturally, ethically or aesthetically distant from his/her narrative counterparts. Works discussed: Albert Camus' L'Etranger; Richard Wright's The Outsider; André Langevin's Poussière sur la ville; Ernesto Sábato's El túnel; V.S. Naipaul's Guerrillas; Elie Wiesel's Le Cinquième fils; Norbert Zongo's Le Parachutage; Gisèle Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia, and Jean Genet's Querelle de Brest.