Bücher der Reihe After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France

Marginal Bodies and Precarious Lives in North Africa sheds light on marginal bodies and the (post)colonial State, revealing the deep interconnectedness of the past with the recent situation of North Africa. Insecurity is not the consequence of a society perceived as uncivilized, but rather the result of an indecent society.

As one of the most prominent voices from and about the French Caribbean, Gisele Pineau has garnered significant scholarly attention; however, this interest has culminated in precious few volumes devoted entirely to the author and her work. In response to this lack of in-depth critical attention, Reimagining Resistance in Gisele Pineau's Works brings together a range of perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic and across the Pacific to explore the unique ways in which Gisele Pineau's works redefine the concept of resistance, particularly as it relates to gender, race, history, and Antillean identity. As this volume ultimately demonstrates, resistance holds up a mirror to the political, economic, and cultural forces that have shaped the past, construct the present, and build the future. It argues that Pineau's characters open the narrative frame for reading them and move us beyond the categories of the wholly defiant or the inherently complicit. Above all, as they invite us to reimagine resistance, they expose our expectations and hopefully shift our understanding about what it means to rise and to fall in a world we seek to call our own.

This study interrogates how the French empire was imagined in three literary representations of French colonialism: the conquest of Tahiti, and the established colonial systems in Martinique and in India. The study is the first in either English or French to demonstrate that representations of power relations, as well as the broader discourses with which they were linked, were as closely concerned with probing the similarities and differences of rival European colonial systems as they were with reinforcing their imagined superiority over the colonized, and that such power relations should not be conceptualized as a dualistic categorization of ';colonizer' versus ';colonized'. In doing so, it aims to go beyond examining the interaction between colonized and colonizer, or between colonial centre and periphery, and to interrogate instead the circulation of ideas and practices across different sites of European colonialism, drawing attention to a historical complexity which has been neglected in the necessary race to recover voices previously occluded from academic analysis. In exploring how the notion of the French empire overseas was construed and how it was infused with meaning at three different historical moments, 1784, 1835 and 1938, it demonstrates how precarious the French empire was perceived to be, in terms of both European rivalry and resistance from the colonized, and how the rhetoric of a French colonisation douce was pitted against the inscribed excesses of the more powerful British empire. Rather than employing the sorts of recuperative agenda which focus on how the colonized were elided (viz., Subaltern Studies) or on the writings of the formerly colonized (viz., Francophone Studies), the study concerns itself specifically with how French colonialism and imperialism were perceived, and thus offers a further corrective to any generalizations about European colonialism and imperialism. More particularly, by examining how the representational strategy of nostalgia is used in these texts, the study demonstrates how perceived loss, and nostalgia for an imperial past, played a role in dynamically shaping the French colonial enterprise across its various manifestations.

The book is the first edited collection in English on Moroccan author Abdellah Taia and frames the distinctiveness of his migration by considering current scholarship in French and Francophone studies, post-colonial studies, affect theory, queer theory, and language and sexuality.

The contributions of this volume explore the political, social, and cultural legacies of May '68 revolt in France and similar protest movements in other nations around the globe. These events share a global utopian imaginary which found expression in a variety of artistic productions.

This book examines representations of the body in the works of four Oceanian women authors of French expression, considering postcolonial and feminist theoretical concepts in relation to Oceanian literary production.

Remnants of Empire in Algeria and Vietnam proposes a new approach to Francophone Studies through an examination of four specific Algerian and Vietnamese novels written in French by women. The connections between their works and shared colonial history lead us to a deeper understanding of postcolonial literature.

Breadfruit or Chestnut? examines gender construction comparatively across the fiction of contemporary writers of Guadeloupe and Martinique. In particular, it explores the construction of gender identity by six authors-three male and three female-who have never been brought together in a study of this issue.

Addresses the development since the 1950s of a type of Francophone African novel created by first-generation black African authors living in France. This work draws parallels with other literatures, and examines how these authors, are parting from mainstream African literature by exploring more personal avenues.

Presents a study of the autobiographical writings of three Francophone writers from the Maghreb Assia Djebar, Hlne Cixous, and Abdelkbir Khatibi. This book presents alluding to music as a means of comprehending the writers' improvisational writing styles.

Stephanie Corinna Bille is a Swiss short-story writer, playwright, poet, and novelist and winner of the 1975 French Prix Concourt. This work assembles and translates a collection of Bille's work that exposes an English-speaking audience to Bille's exotic, captivating, and sexually provocative stories.

A striking number of hysterical or insane female characters populate Francophone women's writing. To discover why, Orlando reads novels from a variety of cultures, teasing out key elements of Francophone identity struggles.

Miller synthesizes Karen Horney's model of submission, aggression and withdrawal, Jean Baker Miller's concept of relational being, Julia Kristeva's idea of psychic space, and Kelly Oliver's notions on social support to advance a penetrating analysis of the fiction of Paule Constant.

Presents a study of five writers from lands formerly or currently ruled by France (Algeria, Cambodia, Guiana, Madagascar, and Mali) and an interrogation of the relevance of postcolonial theory, criticism and studies to these writers. This work places the writers against the background of postcolonial studies.

Drawing links between the Francophone literatures of Canada, the French Caribbean, and North Africa, Spaces of Creation demonstrates that problematic issues of dynamic, postcolonial societies can and do fuel creative acts on the part of women. The trying experiences of displaced mothers and their daughters, including isolation, domestic violence, and single parenthood, often serve to inspire introspection and creative action. In effect, their painful, frustrating existence provides the opportunitythe space of creationnecessary to weave and transmit stories. Organized around different manifestations of culturally diverse or transcultural spaces depicted in postcolonial literaturerural villages, domestic spaces, city centers, and spaces of othernessthe monograph uncovers the complexities of mothering and ';daughtering' in contemporary Francophone contexts. Through discussion of these spaces, the book attests to a specifically ';feminine' transculturality. This vision of diversity acknowledges both the heartening and tragic aspects of life in dynamic, multicultural communities, revealing creative synergies between the literatures of different Francophone diasporas and inviting the reader to reconsider the mother-daughter relationship.

Women Writers of Gabon: Literature and Herstory demonstrates how the invisibility of women (historically, politically, cross-culturally, etc.) has led to the omission of Gabon's literature from the African canon, but it also discusses in depth the unique elements of Gabonese women's writing that show it is worthy of critical recognition and that prove why Gabonese women writers must be considered a major force in African literature. This book is the only book-length critical study of Gabonese literature that exists in English and although there are titles in French that provide analyses of the works of Gabonese women writers, no one work is comprehensive nor is the history of women's writing in Gabon considered in the such a manner. Throughout the various chapters, the book explores, among other things, contributions that are unique to Gabonese women writers such as: definitions of African feminisms as they pertain to Gabonese society, the rewriting of oral histories, rituals, and traditions of the Fang ethnic group, one of the first introductions of same-sex couples in African Francophone literature, discussions on the impact of witchcraft on development, and the appropriating of the epic poetry known as the mvet by women writers. The chapters explore works by all major voices in Gabonese women's writing including Angele Rawiri, Justine Mintsa, Sylvie Ntsame, Honorine Ngou, and Chantal Magalie Mbazoo-Kassa and the book concludes with brief introductions of a younger generation of Gabonese women writers such as Edna Merey-Apinda, Alice Endamne, Nadia Origo, Miryl Eteno, and Elisabeth Aworet among others.

The front covers of books written by Algerian women serve as the primary source of investigation in Front Cover Iconography and Algerian Women Writers. These covers have implications that extend beyond selling the book. What we see on one side of the pageor in this case, the cover, (recto) controls what we read on the reversein this case, the text itself (verso). Using theories of the paratext, including those of Gerard Genette and Jonathan Gray, this book determines how four dominant iconographies used on the covers of Algerian women's writing Orientalist art, the veil, the desert, and the author portrait work with and against the texts they represent. These images have an impact on the initial reception of the book, but beyond that, book covers determine how both the informed and uninformed reader categorize and interpret francophone Algerian women's writing in France and beyond. As the covers help to sell the works, they also produce messages, represented via their iconographies that embed themselves into the texts. A sometimes explicit, and at the very least, implicit dialog between the visual paratextual representation and the written textual one is created: a dialog that extends beyond the life of the physical book to a sort of canonical paradigm for reading these authors' works. Thus, even if the cover image appears ephemeral, it never truly disappears. Its powerful control over critical reception and, ultimately, interpretation of francophone Algerian women's writing remains.

The Indian uprisings (185758) against British rule in India represent an iconic period within the history of anti-colonial resistance. Numerous works have considered these historical events from British and Indian perspectives, but none have yet questioned how they were viewed by Britain's foremost colonial rival in India, the French. The French Colonial Imagination examines how the potential for Britain to lose its most lucrative colony at the hands its own colonial ';subjects' allowed French writers to envisage a world freed from British dominance. The uprisings offered the attractive possibility that France could undergo a colonial revival in the wake of British defeat, thereby reversing the devastating losses inflicted upon France's former empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Notable among these losses was Britain's decision (in the Treaty of 1814) to permanently reduce France's presence in India to five small trading posts scattered around the periphery of British territory. The extent to which to the French colonial imagination of the nineteenth century was shaped by the memories of such defeats forms a primary concern of this monograph. This investigation into French responses to the Indian uprisings reveals that French colonial discourse was determined as much by its visions of the colonized ';other,' as by the dominance of their British rivals. Drawing from journalistic, historical, political, and fictional texts written during Louis Napoleon's Second Empire (185270) and in the early years of the Third Republic (18701944), The French Colonial Imagination shows how the uprisings gave French writers the opportunity to speak out against the rapacity of British colonialism and its treatment of colonized Indians, while simultaneously constructing a competing colonial discourse that would justify further expansion in North Africa and South East Asia. Standing at a crossroads between the ';loss' of Ancien Regime's empire and the Third Republic's ideological investment in overseas expansion, this understudied period of colonial history reveals the centrality of loss, fracture, and political emasculation as core preoccupations haunting the French colonial discourse in its quest to regain cultural and ideological ascendancy over its greatest political enemy.

In this book, Author Katharine N. Harrington examines contemporary writers from the French-speaking world who can be classified as literary ';nomads.' The concept of nomadism, based on the experience of traditionally mobile peoples lacking any fixed home, reflects a postmodern way of thinking that encourages individuals to reconsider rigid definitions of borders, classifications, and identities. Nomadic identities reflect shifting landscapes that defy taking on fully the limits of any one fixed national or cultural identity. In conceiving of identities beyond the boundaries of national or cultural origin, this book opens up the space for nomadic subjects whose identity is based just as much on their geographical displacement and deterritorialization as on a relationship to any one fixed place, community, or culture. This study explores the experience of an existence between borders and its translation into writing that. While nomadism is frequently associated with post-colonial authors, this study considers an eclectic group of contemporary Francophone writers who are not easily defined by the boundaries of one nation, one culture, or one language. Each of the four writers, J.M.G. LeClezio, Nancy Huston, Nina Bouraoui, and Regine Robin maintains a connection to France, but it is one that is complicated by life experiences, backgrounds, and choices that inevitably expand their identities beyond the Hexagon. Harrington examines how these authors' life experiences are reflected in their writing and how they may inform us on the state of our increasingly global world where borders and identities are blurred.

The events of 9/11 have cast a shadow of suspicion on Muslims in Western Europe and fostered a public discourse of arbitrary associations with violence and resistance to social and cultural integration. The antagonistic ascendancy of militant Islam globally and the anxiety this has engendered are animating day-to-day debates on the place and loyalty of Muslims in Western societies. Exploring the neglected reality of ethnic radio in Paris and Berlin, Voicing Diasporas: Ethnic Radio in Paris and Berlin Between Cultural Renewal and Retention examines how Muslim minorities of North African descent in France and Germany resist these glaring generalizations and challenge bounded narratives and laws of cultural citizenship in both countries. Through an analysis of Beur FM in Paris and Radio Multikulti in Berlin, this book also questions the reductionist view of diasporic media as expressions of longing, nostalgia, and cultural dislocation. This ground-breaking study is as essential read for not only scholars and higher educational students in various fields, but for those interested in this ever-changing, topical issue.

The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb examines literary texts by writers from the Maghreb and positions them in direct relation to increasingly querulous debates on the shifting identity of the modern Mediterranean. This book argues that reading works by writers such as Albert Camus and Tahar Ben Jelloun alongside authors such as Fawzi Mellah and Mahi Binebine in a transnational rather than binary interpretive framework transcends a colonial and postcolonial bind in which France is the dominant point of reference. While focusing on works in French, this book also examines Maghrebi authors who write in Italian. The texts examined in The Narrative Mediterranean critique narrow identitarian labeling, warn against sectarianism, and announce the necessity of multiple forms of translation and historical rewritings. Their modes of expression differ as they range from poetic to baroque to realist, as do their concerns, which include but are not limited tothe human condition, gender identity, and emigration. Claudia Esposito explains how these writers operate between and outside the confines of several nations, tracing imagined affiliative horizons, and consequently address questions of multiple forms of cultural, political, sexual and existential belonging. Esposito convincingly demonstrates that in a Mediterranean context, moving between nations means to be in both foreign and familiar physical, affective and intellectual spaces.

In Packaging Post/Coloniality, Richard Watts breaks from convention and reads Francophone books by their covers, focusing on the package over the content. Watts looks at the ways that the 'paratext'-the covers, illustrations, promotional summaries, epigraphs, dedications, and prefaces or forewords that enclose the text-mediates creative works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia whose place in the French literary institution was and remains a source of conflict. In order to be acceptable for French bookstore shelves, the novels, essays, and collections of poetry created in colonial territories were deemed to need explanation and sponsorship by an authority in the field. Watts finds the French mission civilisatrice, or 'civilizing mission,' manifest in prefaces, introductions, and dedications inserted in the books that appeared in the metropole during the height of French imperialism. In the postcolonial era, book packaging reveals a struggle to reverse the power dynamic: Francophone writers introduced each others' texts, yet books still appeared with covers promoting stereotypical images of the Francophone world. This fascinating journey through a particular cultural history of the book is a unique take on the quest for a literary identity. Watts concludes his study by looking at English mediations of Francophone works, with a chapter on reading and teaching Francophone literature in translation.

The Other Hybrid Archipelago presents the postcolonial literatures of the Francophone Indian Ocean islands to an Anglophone audience. The islands of Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion, the Comoros, and the Seychelles form a region that has a particular cultural identity because of the varied mixture of populations that have settled there and the dominant influence of French colonialism. This survey concentrates on the period since the Second World War, when most of the islands achieved independence, except for Reunion and Mayotte, which maintain a regional status within the French Republic. The postcolonial approach suggests certain recurrent themes and preoccupations of the islands' cultures and an appropriate way to define their recent cultural production, while taking account of the burden of their colonial past. The rich cocktail of cultural and linguistic influences surveyed is situated in relation to the contemporary political and social context of the islands and their marginal status within the global economy.

Globalizing the Postcolony: Contesting Discourses of Gender and Development in Francophone Africa is a study of development in the former French colonies of West Africa. It takes as its starting point the international community's reporting on human and social development and gender in the developing areas which began systematically in 1990 and which has provided a framework for policy-making in this field. International reports suggest that the francophone African countries have been experiencing low levels of social development throughout the past two decades. These levels fall dramatically when the factor of gender is introduced to the point where statistically-speaking francophone African women have had less access to social development than any other population in the world. This study analyzes current thinking on the challenges facing gender and development in Africa, before moving on to examine the historical factors marking the gender and development profile of the francophone West African region. Through an analysis of gender politics in the region from pre-colonial to postcolonial times, the book examines the gradual incursion of exogenous gender policies into the region throughout the 20th century. The discussion concludes by arguing that despite the tendency of the international community, and their colonial administrative forebears, to pursue 'one-size-fits-all' solutions to what they identified as the main development challenges of the day, the impact of standardized solutions remains subject to the unique historical and cultural context in which they are implemented. Adapting formula-driven policies to unique cultural contexts constitutes a major challenge for gender and development politics in the second decade of the new century. Meanwhile, the book coincides with the introduction of a new international development agenda in Africa articulated around issues of security and globalization. While civil unrest continues to destabilize vast regions of the continent making the prospects of human and social development ever more remote, the rise of China among the traditional powerbrokers threatens to push social development and gender equality even further down the international agenda for Africa. This book is a timely reminder of the feminisation of poverty and disadvantage in the region and the need to keep the gender dimensions of development at the top of the social policy agenda for Africa in the 21st century.

The Constitution allows the president to Ofill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.O In Justice Takes a Recess, Scott E. Graves and Robert M. Howard address how presidents have used recess appointments over time and whether the independence of judicial recess appointees is compromised. They argue that these appointments can upset the separation of powers envisioned by the Framers, shifting power away from one branch of government and toward another. Examining every judicial recess appointment from 1789 to 2005, the authors discover that presidents are conditionally strategic when they unilaterally appoint federal judges during Senate recesses. Such appointments were made cautiously for most of the twentieth century, leading to a virtual moratorium for several decades, until three recent recess appointments to the courts in the face of Senate obstruction revived the controversy. These appointments suggest the beginning of a more assertive use of recess appointments in the increasingly politicized activity of staffing the federal courts. The authors argue that the recess appointment clause, as it pertains to the judiciary, is no longer necessary or desirable. The strategic use of such appointments by strong presidents to shift judicial ideology, combined with the lack of independence exhibited by judicial recess appointments, results in recess power that threatens constitutional features of the judicial branch.

Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures analyzes novels and films that demonstrate how marriage affects Francophone African and Caribbean women in their respective societies. It argues that marriage serves as a catalyst for intense identity formation because it functions as a narrative intersection for a number of overlapping themes on gender and the body, class and economics, religion, interracial and intercultural identity and nation building. Marriage provides a narrative space for commentary on cultural practices presented in the works in question as the foundations of cultural identity.

From its early focus on documentary film and nation building to its more recent spotlight on contemporary culture and feature filmmaking, Moroccan cinema has undergone tremendous change since the country's independence in 1956. In What Moroccan Cinema? A Historical and Critical Study, 1956-2006, Sandra Gayle Carter chronicles the changes in Moroccan laws, institutions, ancillary influences, individuals active in the field, representative films, and film culture during this fifty-year span. Focusing on Moroccan history and institutions relative to the cinema industry such as television, newspaper criticism, and Berber videomaking, What Moroccan Cinema? is an intriguing study of the ways in which three historical periods shaped the Moroccan cinema industry. Carter provides an insightful and thorough treatment of the cinema institution, discussing exhibition and distribution, censorship, and cinema clubs and caravans. Carter grounds her analysis by exploring representative films of each respective era. The groundbreaking analysis offered in What Moroccan Cinema? will prove especially valuable to those in film and Middle Eastern studies.

State Power, Stigmatization, and Youth Resistance Culture in the French Banlieues: Uncanny Citizenship foregrounds the literary, sociological, and political structures of urban literature in France. It uses postcolonial theory, sociology, and political philosophy to investigate the modalities surrounding the question of citizenship in a country where citizens of African descent are not only considered a threat to national identity, but also caught between inclusion and exclusion. By examining the literary, sociological, and political structures of urban literatures produced after the 2005 riots, this book interrogates the questions of citizenship, belonging, and coexistence in a context where literature from the periphery has become a site where central political power and mainstream French literary canons are contested. Moreover, these productions clearly reveal an unexplored correlation between geo-aesthetics and contemporary French national geopolitics. Ultimately, this book is a plea for a serious approach to social formation in postcolonial France in a way that transcends skin color, and instead is based on a shared colonial past, as well as current social disqualifications.