Contemporary French Civilization: Volume 47, Issue 3最新文献

{"title":"Introduction: from the Algerian War of Independence to the postcolonial mise en scène of memory","authors":"C. Hensey, Barry Nevin","doi":"10.3828/cfc.2022.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2022.16","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":391011,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary French Civilization: Volume 47, Issue 3","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124110690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Impossible reconciliation? The representation of traumatic memories in La meilleure façon de s’aimer (2012) by Akli Tadjer","authors":"Lewis Jonathan","doi":"10.3828/cfc.2022.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2022.19","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article analyzes the representation of traumatic memories of Algeria in the novel La meilleure façon de s’aimer (2012) by Akli Tadjer, a French writer of Algerian origin. While recent decades have seen a more regular engagement in the French political and public spheres with the past shared by France and Algeria, this confrontation with the past is not a straightforward process. As demonstrated by the reactions to the state-commissioned report on France’s colonial past in Algeria, written and submitted by the renowned historian Benjamin Stora in 2021, constructing a singular shared narrative of the past is fraught and laced with difficulty. Drawing on theories of trauma and the representation of traumatic experiences, this article examines the extent to which reconciliation of the past is possible, through a close textual analysis of the representation of memories of Algeria in Tadjer’s text. It will be shown how memories of Algeria are depicted in the novel as incomplete, fractured, and characterized by a difficult transmission from generation to generation. Thus, rather than the simplicity denoted by the notion of reconciliation, La meilleure façon de s’aimer highlights the complexity of communicating traumatic pasts and reiterates that the “unspeakable and the unknown” constitute intrinsic elements of any representation or narrative of such pasts. This does not mean that remembering the past is a futile task, but that recognizing conflict, silence, and forgetting as defining characteristics of the Franco-Algerian past provides a more productive exploration of the past than the potentially facile notion of reconciliation. Furthermore, the article will show how Tadjer’s text reflects the need for multiple, overlaying narratives in order to provide a more inclusive, wide-ranging, though perhaps never complete, account of the past.","PeriodicalId":391011,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary French Civilization: Volume 47, Issue 3","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131349027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Paradis perdus? (Af)filiative returns in Alice Zeniter’s L’art de perdre (2017) and Zahia Rahmani’s France: Récit d’une enfance (2006)","authors":"C. Hensey","doi":"10.3828/cfc.2022.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2022.18","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In recent decades, female descendants of harkis - indigenous Algerian men employed as auxiliary soldiers in the French army during the Algerian War - have privileged the literary text as a site of reconstruction of silenced familial and collective (hi)stories, and of reconnection with their effaced ancestral heritage. This article examines representations of physical, affective, and imaginative “returns” in two literary works by members of different harki (post)generations: France: Récit d’une enfance (2006) by Zahia Rahmani, a daughter of a harki, and L’Art de perdre (2017) by Alice Zeniter, a harki’s granddaughter. It is argued that these multivocal narratives problematize straightforward understandings of belonging and inheritance to interrogate the reparative potential of return - whether real or imagined, spatial or temporal - and to confront the ongoing effects of (neo)colonial narratives and power structures. Both texts present the notion of return as simultaneously intimate and broad in scope, resulting at once from external pressures and personal necessity, and capable of healing certain wounds while resisting definitive closure. Invoking the frequently gendered role of storytelling in Arabo-Berber societies, the novels also establish dialogues and connections with disparate histories, memories, and literary texts, allowing their protagonists to transcend and deconstruct static, assigned identities. The texts’ filiative and affiliative returns across time and space are shown to reflect Marianne Hirsch’s conception of the existence of vertical and horizontal forms of “postmemory” (2012) and Michael Rothberg’s notion of “rhizomatic networks” (2009). It is argued that it is precisely the notion of return which emerges as a creative organizing principle, allowing Rahmani and Zeniter to negotiate aspects of transgenerational trauma, absence, and loss, while also turning their intimate, self-reflexive quests outwards to critique and rewrite pre-established narratives and to inscribe their texts within current interrogations of commemoration and reparation in postcolonial contexts.","PeriodicalId":391011,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary French Civilization: Volume 47, Issue 3","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131518841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"La France se dévoile: revealing remnants from the age of empire","authors":"Aoife Connolly","doi":"10.3828/cfc.2022.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2022.17","url":null,"abstract":"Despite systematic efforts to repress memories of the colonial past in the French collective psyche, evidence of the country’s “fracture coloniale” continues to surface (Bancel et al.). This article outlines some of the ways in which remnants of this past become visible in the form of politico-legal debates and in fixations in popular culture, most notably in literature, and even within state organizations such as the army. Following an overview of these contemporary issues, the article revisits the 1989 “affaire du foulard” as a case study which encompasses ever-present concerns about the banlieues, identity, education, Islam, and memories of Algeria, and which provides a particularly useful illustration of how discourses from the age of empire are visible in France today. In considering the “affaire du foulard,” the article acknowledges the backdrop of an international focus on Islam but also examines relevant practices from the conquest of Algeria in 1830 to its War of Independence (1954-1962) as well as the crucial context of circumstances in Algeria at the time of the “affaire.” The article thereby points to “l’effet de retour” of colonial practice, whereby colonial mechanisms of power were transported back to the West (Foucault 89). Finally, the analysis turns to contemporary discussions on (un)veiling in light of President Macron’s April 2020 statement that citizens should systematically wear “un masque grand publique” as part of COVID-19 health measures. In this way, the article considers how the 2011 law stating that “Nul ne peut, dans l’espace public, porter une tenue destinée à dissimuler son visage” reconciles with representations of face coverings that evoke Republican values in the context of the pandemic.","PeriodicalId":391011,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary French Civilization: Volume 47, Issue 3","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133009343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Algeria and the crisis of the image-mouvement: checking cinéma colonial’s imperial gaze in Muriel ou le Temps d’un retour (Resnais, 1963)","authors":"Nevin Barry","doi":"10.3828/cfc.2022.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2022.20","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000One of the most cryptic characters in Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) is a returning veteran who edits his own amateur video footage of North Africa while contending with his traumatizing memories of torturing a young woman in Algeria. This article’s fundamental argument is twofold: first, Bernard’s experience of editing and watching his footage is co-extensive with his private interrogation of the reductive, propagandist images of Algeria that he viewed in classic colonial cinema prior to serving in the war; second, Resnais’s portrayal of this process provokes spectators to reassess their own consumption of retrograde colonial culture and its impact on their perception of the colony. Key to this analysis is the imperial gaze that E. Ann Kaplan associates with colonial cinema’s reductive construction of the female colonial “other,” Stanley Cavell’s understanding of how film spectator’s “check” their engagement with cinematic narratives, and Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of politics in the image-temps. This article ultimately aims to deepen present understandings of questions regarding preservation, research, and interpretation that Muriel continues to raise sixty years after the signing of the Évian Accords.","PeriodicalId":391011,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary French Civilization: Volume 47, Issue 3","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131308648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}