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- Volume 8, Issue 2, 2005
International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2005
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2005
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From roots to routes: double consciousness in the Francophone Caribbean novel
More LessA comparative treatment of two twentieth-century Francophone Caribbean novelists, Jacques-Stephen Alexis of Haiti and Simone Schwarz-Bart of Guadeloupe, demonstrates how Caribbean authors have been using the discourse of the marvellous to move toward the creation of a sense of identity based on what Paul Gilroy calls a process of movement and mediation as opposed to a search for roots and rootedness. Alexis felt torn between what he perceived as his intellectual debt to Europe and his dedication to the development of a national Haitian literary form. His desire to transcend European literary influences is expressed in his work through issues of authenticity. Schwarz-Bart's work reflects more recent theories of Caribbean identity by demythologizing the very concept of the authentic origin. She uses the narrative technique of magic realism as a way of bringing together opposing discursive systems without evaluating them according to criteria of truth or authenticity. The result is a multiple voice which, like the larger voice of the Black Atlantic as a whole, can be described as a form of antiphony in which, in Gilroy's words, the original call is becoming harder to locate.
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Odyssey of a double consciousness: commonalities and disjunctions in contemporary French Caribbean and Runionese novels
More LessDespite their geographical distance, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Runion tend to produce literary texts with striking commonalities. This can be explained to some extent by the islands' shared experience of slavery and French colonialism and their subsequent 1946 departmentalization. This common background has allowed the development of a literature which foregrounds an acutely felt need to redefine an island identity. This article explores the intermediary position of the characters in Guadeloupean Gisle Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia and Chair piment, Martinican Tony Delsham's Ngropolitains et Euro-blacks, and Runionese Axel Gauvin's Faims d'enfance and Train fou, as the latter negotiate between historic amnesia and cultural memory in an attempt to achieve what Roland Walter calls a double vision.
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Representation in Mauritian politics: who speaks for African pasts?
More LessThe island nation of Mauritius is recognized across most disciplines - from anthropology to tourism - as a plural or multi-ethnic country. This essay will show that any attempt to represent the pluralism of Mauritius must contend with the complex history of representation itself within this postcolonial nation. This complexity, in its turn, is bound up with the intersecting histories of the varied immigrant and diasporic populations that make up this myriad society. The legacy of these tensions in the contemporary era can be symbolized in the public persona of the Mauritian Prime Minister, Paul Brenger, as he sought to represent various groups of the Mauritian electorate in his bid to be re-elected in September 2005. The various and, at times, contradictory ways in which Africanness and Indianness have made their way into the public sphere will be read through an analysis of debates in the Legislative Assembly, articles in the contemporary press, and historical sources that draw on these key issues. If, at bottom, diaspora draws both on making ethnic connections that go beyond the political boundaries of the nation state, and on the more immediate engendering of ethnocultural solidarity within the nation state itself, then these issues are fraught with complex and particular complications for Mauritians of African and/or Malagasy descent.
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Inscriptions of dev/fiance: mtissage in Mauritian literature
More LessThis essay highlights and studies the tensions and paradoxes underlying the concept of mtissage within the Mauritian context. While mtissage has long been considered as the impossible meeting ground that splits entities implicitly inscribed in mutual opposition, critical perspectives on this concept have evolved to the point where it is now read as a generative space of creative tension, giving rise to a liminal identity, a space of rhizomic transculturation. Given the varied and disparate visions of the diasporic experience that traverse our modern world, its corollaries of exile and migration suggest that identity can ultimately be defined only as a postmodern play of displacement and metaphoric representations. With its ethnic history of pluralism, and contemporary claims to an effective representational praxis of its multicultural and multilingual politics, Mauritius suggests itself as an ideal site from which to interrogate the possibilities and parameters of identity, particularly the complex inscriptions of the mtis. Through close readings of Carl de Souza's Le Sang de l'Anglais, Marie Thrse Humbert's A l'autre bout de moi and La Montagne des signaux and selected poems of douard Maunick, the inconsistencies and incongruities of Mauritian mtissage will be underlined and analysed.
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Transoceanic echoes: coolitude and the work of the Mauritian poet Khal Torabully
More LessKhal Torabully's poetry (mainly Cale d'toiles coolitude and Chair corail, fragments coolies) surfaces as a marine odyssey of the coolie diaspora. Coolitude epitomizes in many respects a double articulation in Torabully's work: his commitment to denouncing trauma and violence at the eve of the twenty-first century as well as the concern of the contemporary artist to find adequate words, styles and modes to engage with this suffering. Torabully, similarly to Paul Gilroy, maps a more complex picture of the notion of Indian identity, shifting the emphasis from a fossilizing nostalgia for a fixed India to the ocean space that mediates the numerous cultural (ex)changes coolie culture has undergone. His rehabilitation of the coolie memory embodied in coolitude has provided him with a framework to understand, not only his own but on a more universal level, the cross-cultural chaotic relationships that can lead to bursts of creativity but also devastating violence. Coolitude thus emerges as a poetics that attempts to recover and reassess the transoceanic crossing of coolies, establishing it as a central metaphor that is constitutive of a new perspective on Indian identities characterized by multiple crossings: crossings between cultures, heritages, places, generations, gender, historical assertions, and mythical references.
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Book Reviews
Exile According to Julia, Gisle Pineau (trans. by Betty Wilson with an afterword by Marie-Agns Sourieau), (2003) Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 192 pp., 0-8139- 2247-X (hbk), 49.50; 0-8139-2248-8 (pbk), 17.95
Algeria 1839-2000: A Short History, Benjamin Stora (trans. by Jane Marie Todd, foreword by William B. Quandt), (2001) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 283 pp., ISBN 0-8014-8916-4 (pbk), 19.95/11.50
Les Italiens dans la Tunisie contemporaine, Romain H. Rainero (2002) Paris: Publisud, 251 pp., ISBN 2-86600-913-4 (pbk)
Algeria 1839-2000: A Short History, Benjamin Stora (trans. by Jane Marie Todd, foreword by William B. Quandt), (2001) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 283 pp., ISBN 0-8014-8916-4 (pbk), 19.95/11.50
Les Italiens dans la Tunisie contemporaine, Romain H. Rainero (2002) Paris: Publisud, 251 pp., ISBN 2-86600-913-4 (pbk)
Le Soi et l'autre. L'nonciation de l'identit dans les contextes interculturels Pierre Ouellet (dir.), (2002) Qubec: Presses de l'Universit Laval, 446 pp., ISBN 2763780172, 24,70
Siting the Quebec Novel, Rosemary Chapman (2000) Oxford, Berne, Berlin, Brussels. Frankfurt, New York and Vienna: Peter Lang (Modern French Identities, 8), 282 pp., ISBN 3-906758-85-0
Ormerod, douard Glissant (2003) Paris: Gallimard, 361 pp., ISBN 2070767590, 22.50
Dictionnaire des oeuvres littraires du Qubec. 1981-1985. Tome 7, Aurlien Boivin (dir.) avec la collaboration de Gilles Dorion et Gilles Grard, (2003) Montral: Fides, 1229 pp., ISBN 2-7621-2424-7, 79.95/64
Camus l'algrien, Ali Ydes (2003) Paris: L'Harmattan, 272 pp., ISBN 2-7475-5102-4, 22
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 26 (2023)
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Volume 25 (2022)
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Volume 24 (2021)
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Volume 23 (2020)
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Volume 22 (2019)
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Volume 21 (2018)
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Volume 20 (2017)
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Volume 19 (2016)
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Volume 18 (2015)
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Volume 17 (2014)
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Volume 16 (2013)
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Volume 15 (2012 - 2013)
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Volume 14 (2011)
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Volume 13 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 12 (2009)
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Volume 11 (2008)
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Volume 10 (2007)
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Volume 9 (2006)
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Volume 8 (2005)
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Volume 7 (2004)
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Volume 6 (2003)
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Volume 5 (2003)
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Volume 4 (2001 - 2002)