Stephanie Corinna Bille, a Swiss short-story writer, playwright, poet, and novelist and winner of the 1975 French Prix Concourt, is often considered the major contemporary Franco-Swiss woman writer. As a writer, Bille excelled at rendering the woman's experience. She stands out as an elegant writer, a compassionate observer of early twentieth-century Catholic rural life, and a precise painter of the beauty of the natural environment. In over thirty volumes of creative writing, she favored short narrative forms from five lines to eighty pages, exploiting her dreams and fantasies in the wake of...

Richard Serrano begins his provocative new work Against the Postcolonial with the bold statement that "Francophone studies is mostly a mirage, while postcolonial studies is mostly a delusion." He argues that many attempts to use postcoloniality to account for francophone writers tell us more about the critics' assumptions than about the writers' 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...

"Rewriting" in the context of critical work on Caribbean literature has tended to be used to discuss revisionism from a variety of postcolonial perspectives, such as "rewriting history" or "rewriting canonical texts." By shifting the focus to how Caribbean writers return to their own works in order to rework them, this book offers theoretical considerations to postcolonial studies on "literariness" in relation to the near-obsessive degree of rewriting to which Caribbean writers have subjected their own literary texts. Focusing specifically on Franketienne, this book offers an overview of how...

The Body Beseiged: The Embodiment of Historical Memory in Nina Bouraoui and Leila Sebbar by Helen Vassallo brings together the work of two important contemporary writers, Nina Bouraoui and Leila Sebbar. Both authors embody a significant historical divide (they are half French and half Algerian), and each author's work returns unfailingly to the legacy of opposition engendered by the colonial past that France and Algeria share: neither Bouraoui nor Sebbar claims any intention to write about the Algerian War of Independence, and yet its impact is felt throughout all of the texts chosen for...

Cave Culture in Maghrebi Literature: Imagining Self and Nation discusses key postcolonial Francophone North African texts, centering on folktales, war, Berber traditions, femininity, sexuality, the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), and the Algerian Civil War (1992-1999). It explores the literary and cultural evidence testifying to the role of the cave as a locus of worship, transfiguration, dominance, and revelation in the context of colonial and postcolonial power struggles, and its wider significance in the context of nationalism and femininity, sexuality, and postcolonial identity...

African Pasts, Presents, and Futures: Generational Shifts in African Women's Literature, Film, and Internet Discourse, by Touria Khannous, provides a history of African women's cultural production, as well as an alternative approach to the arguments that have traditionally dominated post-colonial studies in general, and African and gender studies in particular. It examines some of the more overarching questions that are prevalent in the works of African women authors, who position themselves within the contexts of Islam, feminism, nationalism, modernity, and global and postcolonial politics,...

In Shifting Perceptions of Migration in Senegalese Literature, Film, and Social Media, Mahriana Rofheart proposes a revised understanding of Senegalese migration narratives by asserting the importance of both local and global connections in recent novels, hip-hop songs, and documentary videos. Much previous research on migration narratives in French from Africa has suggested that contemporary authors often do not consider their countries of origin upon departure and instead focus on life abroad or favor a global perspective. Rofheart instead demonstrates that today's Senegalese novelists and...

The Indian uprisings (1857-58) against British rule in India represent an iconic period within the history of anti-colonial resistance. Numerous works have considered these historical events from British and Indian perspectives, but none have yet questioned how they were viewed by Britain's foremost colonial rival in India, the French. The French Colonial Imagination examines how the potential for Britain to lose its most lucrative colony at the hands its own colonial "subjects" allowed French writers to envisage a world freed from British dominance. The uprisings offered the attractive...

High Culture is the symbolic culture inherited from classical literature that is transmitted to French children by the "Schools of the Republic" in the form of citations and cliches that represent a conventional cultural capital. The book follows the process of learning how to read and write in French primary and secondary schools as it is represented in the fiction written by authors whose experience was that of pupils born from North and sub-Saharan African immigrant parents during the 1960-2000 period. Autobiographical novels by 'beur' and Afro-French authors (1980s and 1990s respectively)...

In this book, Author Katharine N. Harrington examines contemporary writers from the French-speaking world who can be classified as literary "nomads." The concept of nomadism, based on the experience of traditionally mobile peoples lacking any fixed home, reflects a postmodern way of thinking that encourages individuals to reconsider rigid definitions of borders, classifications, and identities. Nomadic identities reflect shifting landscapes that defy taking on fully the limits of any one fixed national or cultural identity. In conceiving of identities beyond the boundaries of national or...