In recent years, Europe has had to constantly rethink and redefine its attitude towards new flows of immigrations. Issues of boundaries and identity have been integral to this reflection. Through a magnificent collection of essays, Migrant Cartographies examines both sites and conflicts and the way in which forms of belonging and identity have been reinvented.

Madame de Pompadour's famous quip, "Apres nous, le deluge," serves as fitting inspiration for this lively discussion of postwar French intellectual and cultural life. Over the past thirty years, North American and European scholarship has been significantly transformed by the absorption of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories from French thinkers. But Julian Bourg's seamlessly edited volume proves that, historically speaking, French intellecutal and cultural life since World War Two has involved much more than a few infamous figures and concepts. Motivated by a desire to narrate and...

Madame de Pompadour's famous quip, 'Apr_s nous, le deluge, ' serves as fitting inspiration for this lively discussion of postwar French intellectual and cultural life. Over the past thirty years, North American and European scholarship has been significantly transformed by the absorption of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories from French thinkers. But Julian Bourg's seamlessly edited volume proves that, historically speaking, French intellecutal and cultural life since World War Two has involved much more than a few infamous figures and concepts. Motivated by a desire to narrate and...

Long repressed following the collapse of empire, memories of the French colonial experience have recently gained unprecedented visibility. This interdisciplinary volume explores the multiple forms of this upsurge and the forces driving it in popular culture, scholarly research, and public commemorations.

In Remnants of Empire in Algeria and Vietnam: Women, Words, and War author Pamela A. Pears proposes a new approach to Francophone studies. The work uses postcolonial theory, along with gender and feminist inquiries, to emphasize the connections between two Francophone literatures, Algerian and Vietnamese. Specifically Pears focuses on four novels: Yamina Mechakra's La Grotte ZclatZe, Ly Thu Ho's Le Mirage de la paix, Malika Mokeddem's L'Interdite, and Kim Lef_vre's Retour DEGREES la saison des pluies. All four novels show the profound transformation of women's roles in Algeria and Vietnam...

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...

Richard Serrano begins his provocative new work Against the Postcolonial with the bold statement that OFrancophone studies is mostly a mirage, while postcolonial studies is mostly a delusion.O He argues that many attempts to use postcoloniality to account for francophone writers tell us more about the criticsO assumptions than about the writersO works. Furthermore, he asserts that postcolonial studies, with its antecedents as an Anglophone Indian project that emerged in response to the weakening British Raj, is but one sort of narrative of colonialism into which writers of French expression...

To what extent, and precisely how, are nationalism and patriotism transnational processes? Youth Mobilization in Vichy Indochina and Its Legacies analyzes the causes and consequences of state-sponsored patriotic youth associations during World War II in French Indochina. Providing an historical account of the transnational policy process of youth mobilization during World War II, this book describes how officials transplanted French doctrines to Indochina with sensitivity toward the varying local political contexts and cultural traditions the French believed they had found there. Engaging the...

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. Rather than following the trend of studying theory and cultural identity in the central male writers and of studying "women's writing" in the works of the female writers, Thomas expertly blurs these traditional boundaries in order to present an unexplored aspect of identity. In addition to...

Time Signatures engages in a close study of the autobiographical writings of three contemporary Francophone writers from the Maghreb: Assia Djebar, HZl_ne Cixous, and AbdelkZbir Khatibi. Alluding to music not only as a 'theme' pulsing throughout these writers' works, but also as a means of comprehending their unique, improvisational writing styles, Alison Rice offers readers a new and beautifully constructed way of reading these authors' texts by demonstrating that the form adopted to address topics of concern is as significant as the content itself. The voice of Jacques Derrida intermingles...