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What—in the context of the francophone world—is the relationship between social memories and official memory, between the memories of former colonisers and those of the former colonised? What are the links between literary and cultural manifestations of memory and the actually existing memories that these take as their objects of study? The aim of the article is to situate Didier Daeninckx's New Caledonia 'cycle' within the context of current debates surrounding colonial memory in France. Daeninckx focuses on the existence of competing memories, and explores the ways in which often divergent, even contradictory accounts may be read together contrapuntally, permitting the elaboration of what Ricœur dubs a 'récit partagé'. Cannibale and Le Retour d'Ataï suggest that such memories are situated in multiple locations, in the islands of Melanesia as well as in France itself. This article accordingly explores, in the frame of contemporary memory debates, the relationships between France and the wider francophone world of former colonies and overseas territories. Foregrounding key questions relating to the articulation of links between culture and empire in metropolitan France, it suggests the need for identification of more complex spaces and models in the light of which globalised postcolonial formations may be studied and understood. Quels sont—dans le contexte du monde francophone—les rapports entre la mémoire individuelle et la mémoire officielle, entre la mémoire des anciens colonisateurs et celle des anciens colonisés? Quels sont les rapports entre les manifestations littéraires ou culturelles de la mémoire et les souvenirs réels qui servent d'objet à de telles représentations? L'objectif de cet article, c'est de situer le 'cycle' kanak de Didier Daeninckx dans le contexte des débats actuels autour de la mémoire coloniale en France. Daeninckx se fixe sur la concurrence des traditions mémorielles, et explore la façon dont des histoires souvent divergentes et même contradictoires se prêtent à une lecture en contrepoint, ce qui permet l'élaboration d'une forme de ce que Ricœur appelle le 'récit partagé'. Selon des textes tels que Cannibale et Le Retour d'Ataï , il faut situer la mémoire coloniale dans des lieux multiples, en Mélanésie ainsi qu'en France elle-même. L'article explore de cette façon les rapports entre la France et le monde francophone des anciennes colonies et des possessions actuelles d'outre-mer. Il met en relief des questions-clé pour ceux qui s'intéressent aux rapports entre la culture et l'empire dans la France contemporaine, et avance la nécessité d'établir des espaces et des modèles plus complexes—espaces et modèles à la lumière desquels on peut étudier et comprendre des phénomènes mémoriels qui sont en même temps transnationaux et postcoloniaux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although discussions of the French intellectual often address engagement with anti-colonialism and the decolonisation process more generally, most notably in relation to the Algerian War of Independence, critical attention is rarely directed at the existence of a wider yet related intellectual culture that may connect the disparate parts of the French-speaking world. This article explores the rise of the postcolonial intellectual in this politico-cultural and linguistic space, and asks whether such a figure may be seen as part of a coherent tradition. Foregrounding the interdependency and regular overlap of 'French' and 'Francophone' intellectual cultures, the study creates connections between thinkers in metropolitan France and its former colonies, placed here in a dialectical, conjunctive rather than in a binary, disjunctive relationship. The article explores three case studies - those of Victor Segalen (central to the work of such key postcolonial thinkers as Edouard Glissant and Abdelkebir Khatibi), Leopold Sedar Senghor and Frantz Fanon - in order to underline the complex genealogies of the emergent tradition it identifies. It concludes with a consideration of the definitive role of the postcolonial intellectual in debates regarding the legacy of colonialism in contemporary France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Martyn Cornick on colonization in the period following World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution and another by Kate Marsh on French receptions of political leader Mahamta Gandhi.

Connections are rarely established between Roland Barthes and Nicolas Bouvier, writers whom recent commentators on post-war French-language travel literature (such as Michel Le Bris) have routinely situated in diametric opposition to each other. In an often overlooked detail of L'Empire des signes, however, a concrete link exists, for Bouvier provided a number of the photographs to which Barthes's text responds. The article will take this (albeit loose) association as the starting point of a contrastive consideration of the two authors' divergent engagements with Chinese and Japanese cultures in the 1960s and early 1970s. Barthes and Bouvier use their contact with the cultures of post-war China and Japan to explore the (im)possibilities of intercultural dialogue and to foreground challenges to the identity of the Western traveller when faced with a radically different set of cultural codes. Drawing on a range of texts (Barthes's L'Empire des signes, Journal de voyage en Chine and Alors la Chine?; Bouvier's Chronique japonaise, Le Vide et le Plein and Xian), the article will explore the contexts of the two authors' differing engagements with China and Japan, and underline the convergences and divergences present in their respective approaches to and textualizations of the cultures through which they travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]