Francophone intellectuals writing in the lead-up to the decolonisation were faced with an impossible dilemma. How could they redefine their culture, and the 'humanity' they felt had been denied by the colonial project, in terms that did not replicate the French thinking by which they were formed? Figures such as Senghor, Cesaire, Fanon, Amrouche, Feraoun and Kateb were all educated, indeed immersed, in French culture and language, yet they intervened forcefully in political debates surrounding decolonisation and sought to contribute to the reinvention of local cultures in a gesture of...

Branding the Beur Author focuses on the mainstream media promotion of literature written by the descendants of North African immigrants to France (often called beurs). These conversations between journalists and 'beur' authors delve into contemporary debates such as the explosion of racism in the 1980s and the purported role of Islam in French society in the 1990s. But the interests of journalists looking for sensational subject matter also heavily shape the promotion and reception of these novels: only the 'beur' authors who employ a realist style to write about the challenges faced by the...

During what has become officially known as the genocide against the Tutsi, as many as one million Rwandan people were brutally massacred between April and July 1994. This book presents a critical study of fictional responses by authors inside and outside Rwanda to the 1994 genocide. Focusing on a large and original corpus of creative writing by African authors, including writers from Rwanda, Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994 examines the positionality of authors and their texts in relation to the genocide. How do issues of 'ethnicity', nationality, geographical location and family...

Being Contemporary is a volume of original essays by 23 preeminent scholars of French and Comparative literature, hailing from both sides of the Atlantic, in response to the editors' invitation to "think through the contemporary." The volume offers a sustained critical reflection on the contemporary as a concept, a category, a condition, and a set of relationships to others and to one's own time. Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of a critical urgency to probe the notion of "the contemporary" and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. Its...

This book considers the differing emotional investments in Israel of, on the one hand, Jews physically domiciled in Israel and, on the other hand, diasporic Jews living outside Israel for whom the country nonetheless forms a central point of affect. The book's purpose is to trace how these two types of investment are represented by francophone Jewish writers. Israel is at once a problematic geopolitical reality in international politics and a salient topos within Jewish cultural imaginaries that transcend national boundaries. However, it has often been claimed that Israel has a"special"...

In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France's rhetoric of 'internal otherness', asking her reader not to spot those deemed France's others but rather to deconstruct the very gazes that produce them. Weaving together a vast corpus of colonial French children's comics, Francophone novels, and African popular music, fashion, and dance, Knox traces how the ways colonial 'human zoos' invited their French spectators to gaze on their colonized others still inform the frameworks through which racial and ethnic minorities are made-and make themselves-visible in...

Is Theory Good for the Jews? is the first attempt at exploring the cultural, intellectual, literary, and ideological roots of French engagement with the global and local upsurge of antisemitism in the 21st century. It is also the first attempt at analyzing the French responses to this new crisis.

Chaouat endeavors to understand phenomena of repression, distortion, perversion, or outright denial, within the specific context of French intellectual and cultural history. By looking back to the 1960s and the emergence of a theoretical discourse on trauma, victims and suffering, the Holocaust...

"The Colonial Fortune" highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clezio, Paule Constant, Edouard Glissant, Tierno Monenembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leila Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stephane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Regis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and...

Pacifist Invasions is about what happens to the contemporary French lyric in the translingual Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics, it reveals three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into French in works by Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabes (Egypt), Salah Stetie (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan).