FrancospheresPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.3828/franc.2021.2
Étienne Achille
{"title":"Playing devil’s advocate","authors":"Étienne Achille","doi":"10.3828/franc.2021.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/franc.2021.2","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000While Pierre Nora’s seminal collection Les Lieux de mémoire (1984-1992) has been continuously praised for the elaboration of a groundbreaking paradigm, it has also been the object of a significant amount of criticism due notably to the ‘nothing short of fantastic’ absence of references to the French colonial past. However, when sifting through the seven volumes’ 5,000+ pages, it becomes obvious that if the colonial has not been granted its due place, it is not at all absent, with at least 38 of the 132 entries broaching the topic. The objective of this article will be first to highlight and reflect upon these textual and visual colonial traces, and then question why an influential study that has elicited so much interest and commentary for almost thirty years continues to be presented as a work deprived of any reference to colonial heritage apart from Charles-Robert Ageron’s entry on the Paris 1931 exhibition. Ultimately, it is the attitude of scholars towards the roman national that this article wishes to interrogate, while proposing to rethink the ways in which a wider postcolonial sensibility may be reinforced in the challenging context of contemporary France.","PeriodicalId":53133,"journal":{"name":"Francospheres","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41695249","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}
FrancospheresPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.3828/franc.2021.6
Andrew J. Mcgregor
{"title":"Liminal lieux de mémoire","authors":"Andrew J. Mcgregor","doi":"10.3828/franc.2021.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/franc.2021.6","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article examines the representation of postcolonial memory in Tony Gatlif’s 2004 film Exils / Exiles. The constant movement that occurs in the film through travel, music, and dance reinforces the permanent dislocation of the film’s pied-noir and beurette protagonists. The film’s road-movie narrative represents, on the one hand, a gravitational pull away from the French Republican integrationist ‘centre’ towards an increasingly complex and diverse landscape of cultural identities linked by France’s colonial history, and on the other, a sense of nostalgia for an Algeria that no longer exists and may never have existed. In so doing, Exils represents modern metropolitan France as a dynamic and polycentric postcolonial space whose lieux de mémoire can and should be positioned not only in geographical and cultural territories that lie outside its contemporary national borders, but also in the liminal spaces that characterize the migrant experience. In line with the title of Gatlif’s film, the protagonists find themselves in a state of permanent exile, both from Algeria and from France. The ‘destination’ of the return to cultural origin, Algeria, emerges as a fundamental but nevertheless mirage-like lieu de mémoire that, notwithstanding its cultural and geographical significance, serves primarily to facilitate a deeper understanding by the protagonists of their personal and collective identity that has long been internalized in the unanchored liminal space of the postcolonial migrant journey.","PeriodicalId":53133,"journal":{"name":"Francospheres","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48578122","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}
FrancospheresPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.3828/franc.2021.5
Michelle Bumatay
{"title":"Comics as commemoration?","authors":"Michelle Bumatay","doi":"10.3828/franc.2021.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/franc.2021.5","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Drawing on previous research about the ubiquity of the Banania logo, this article considers the recent trend of commemorating the tirailleurs sénégalais via bandes dessinées through a chronological comparison of bandes dessinées produced in France and Senegal since 2003 about the tirailleurs sénégalais and World War I. As an important part of popular visual culture in France and Belgium, bandes dessinées have long been vehicles for teaching and disseminating mainstream values and dominant ideology, thus the choice of medium for recounting the tirailleurs’ history works against colonial-era caricatures. Though each of the bandes dessinées attempts to engender empathy in the reader while educating them about the tirailleurs, critical engagement with their legacy varies as a function of who produced the text. State-sponsored accounts avoid critiques of colonialism and its attendant violence in favour of honouring the tirailleurs’ courage and loyalty, which bolsters the continuity of republican values. Conversely, texts produced as a result of personal connections to the tirailleurs foreground their participation in colonial violence and demonstrate the psychological complexity of their experiences.","PeriodicalId":53133,"journal":{"name":"Francospheres","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49565769","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}
FrancospheresPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.3828/franc.2021.7
Rachel Douglas
{"title":"Entangled Caribbean rewriting, C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, and their books as postcolonial lieux de mémoire","authors":"Rachel Douglas","doi":"10.3828/franc.2021.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/franc.2021.7","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article argues that books such as C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) and Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) can be important postcolonial lieux de mémoire (sites or realms of memory). Examining where memory is crystallized in book form, the article explores the entangled genealogies and rewriting of both key Caribbean works. Both James’s history and Césaire’s poem were rewritten repeatedly over the decades. My argument is that these two Caribbean foundation stones are themselves key Caribbean sites of memory in their own right. Césaire’s Cahier becomes a crucial new element in James’s rewritten history. The article tracks the ongoing and layered process of memory as palimpsest through which James’s 1963 revised edition of The Black Jacobins is itself constituted. James’s creative translation and ‘misreading’ of Césaire’s poem is analysed as the means through which the Trinidadian Marxist makes the poem his own. This article explores a range of postcolonial memory sites including the 1968 Cultural Congress in Havana, Cuba, where both writers met, and the 1969 London performance of Cahier readings. Finally, the article considers the writers’ gravestones to see how the writers’ words have been used to memorialize James, Césaire, and their writing.","PeriodicalId":53133,"journal":{"name":"Francospheres","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44592256","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}
FrancospheresPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.3828/franc.2021.4
Julia Waters
{"title":"Lieu de mémoire, lieu d’oubli, lieu de réparation?","authors":"Julia Waters","doi":"10.3828/franc.2021.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/franc.2021.4","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The destruction of the vernacular case créole has emerged as a striking, recurrent theme in contemporary Mauritian cultural production, as well as a cause of much heated public debate. Reflecting contrasting conceptions of a lieu de mémoire - linked, paradoxically, to processes of memory, loss, forgetting, and occlusion - this article explores the diverse representations of the colonial house and its destruction in recent artistic works (by Florent Beusse and Jano Couacaud) and novels (by J.M.G. Le Clézio and Gabrielle Wiehe). Initially, the artistic works appear to be motivated by a nostalgic yearning for ‘lost traditions, wrecked ways of life’ (Nora), but close analysis hints at a different story hidden behind the houses’ facades. In the literary imaginary, the destruction of colonial-era houses is portrayed not as the subject of nostalgia or regret, but as a necessary means of achieving long-overdue, symbolic reparation for historical injustices. As such, I argue, art and literature offer a site for revealing the ‘récits cachés de la mémoire nationale’ (Nora) - particularly around slavery - in the postcolonial present.","PeriodicalId":53133,"journal":{"name":"Francospheres","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43054162","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}
FrancospheresPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.3828/franc.2021.11
A. Damlé
{"title":"Struggling for breath","authors":"A. Damlé","doi":"10.3828/franc.2021.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/franc.2021.11","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Ananda Devi’s Les Jours vivants (2013) is hauntingly prescient in tracing, against the backdrop of a city propelled ever forwards by cycles of production and consumption, striking contemporary connections between social division, isolation, and racialized violence. At the time of writing this article, the news has been dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic and by global responses to acts of racialized brutality during the summer of 2020. Reading Les Jours vivants with the specificities of urgent global issues in mind, this article draws attention to a sensory trope at the heart of contemporary experience: the life and the suffocation of breath. In the article, I follow the flow of air and breath through the city, between bodies, and on the borderlines of life and death in Les Jours vivants, as a means of disclosing the unequal power relations inherent in the struggle for breath as a defining feature of our living days.","PeriodicalId":53133,"journal":{"name":"Francospheres","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48204746","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}
FrancospheresPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.3828/franc.2021.3
Jennifer Boum Make
{"title":"Décryptage de l’exposition ‘Le Modèle Noir’ au Musée d’Orsay, ou interroger l’évitement du passé colonial français par le biais de l’anonymat des corps noirs","authors":"Jennifer Boum Make","doi":"10.3828/franc.2021.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/franc.2021.3","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000“Le modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse’ est une exposition organisée par Cécile Debray, Stéphane Guégan et Isolde Pludermacher, au musée d’Orsay entre le 26 mars et le 21 juillet 2019. Cet article se propose d’interroger les discours muséaux produits dans le contexte de l’exposition française, notamment les stratégies de neutralisation des termes racisants utilisés à l’époque et de visibilisation des modèles noirs rendus anonymes par la réattribution du nom. Cette interrogation suggère de faire le diagnostic des discours muséaux autour de l’exposition ‘Le modèle noir’, notamment dans leurs manières de dire l’histoire, et plus précisément les aspects sociaux, culturels, politiques et économiques des systèmes esclavagiste et colonial dans le contexte français, ou plutôt de pratiquer le non-dire.\u0000Ainsi, en quoi la muséographie du ‘Modèle noir’ reflète-t-elle le traitement, ou encore l’évitement, du passé colonial français ? Qu’est-ce que cela suppose pour la formulation d’un retour réflexif sur le rapport à l’Autre et ses représentations ? Cet article nous permet donc de questionner la mise sur la ligne de touche, consciente ou non, de l’histoire coloniale française à la lumière d’une ambivalence irrésolue entre la recherche d’une continuité historique et la reconnaissance du passé colonial français et de ses effets. L’impératif de continuité historique prend selon nous la forme d’une inclusion des corps noirs dans le canon de l’art moderne européen jusqu’à les réduire à l’anonymat, et suspend la reconnaissance d’une rupture épistémologique face à des sujets noirs qui interrogent le canon moderniste comme véhicule de codes esthétiques et culturels profondément ancrés dans les réalités coloniales de l’époque.","PeriodicalId":53133,"journal":{"name":"Francospheres","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47650267","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}
FrancospheresPub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.3828/franc.2020.23
{"title":"Index of Articles in Volume 9","authors":"","doi":"10.3828/franc.2020.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/franc.2020.23","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53133,"journal":{"name":"Francospheres","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43759678","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}