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The article situates Mémoires d'outre-mer in current debates about lieux de mémoire, and in particular about the ways in which the concept elaborated by Pierre Nora is increasingly scrutinized in the light of its silences relating to colonial memory. Ferrier focuses on realms of memory such as the Mahajanga cemetery around which much of his text is constructed, but also engages directly with one of the subjects of Nora's collection, the school textbook Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants, in order to open up a discussion of contemporary memory practices in contemporary France. He argues that French memory is often limited to national boundaries, and that any internal diversity is regulated, sanitized, hierarchized, with France's status as a transculturated, "travelling" culture denied in the process. The novel is a creative reaction to this mnemonic tendency, with the work situated at the intersection of the transnational and postcolonial, two concepts that are far from being synonymous but are nevertheless closely related throughout the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including postcolonialism in France, decolonization between 1950s-1960s and difference between postcolonial and 19th century studies.

In Pierre Nora's Lieux de me ´moire project, there are no obvious references to the bagne. The omission is surprising, for this institution has long played a significant role in the French imagination. It persists in the French language in several prominent expressions, and continues to be associated with key national symbols such as the bonnet phrygien. This silencing is associated with representations of the penal colony in popular culture and in heritage practices, both of which tend to associate the bagne with 'dangerous' white French bagnards, failing accordingly to recognize the wider impact of the institution on colonized spaces. The article draws on a corpus of postcolonial representations or discussions of the bagne to propose a new, more enabling way of exploring (and memorializing) this essentially nineteenth-century phenomenon. Analysis of texts by Le ´on-Gontran Damas, Kateb Yacine, Leı ¨la Sebbar, Anouar Benmalek, Mehdi Lallaoui, and Patrick Chamoiseau suggests that this 'postcolonialization' of the penal colony through new forms of creative engagement allows the recognition of transcolonial axes of penal trans- portation, exemplified by the banishment of Kabyle rebels to New Caledonia following their revolt against the impact of French occupation in spring 1871. The article concludes by drawing on recent postcolonial engagement with concepts such as 'legacies' and 'ruins' -- particularly in the work of Ann Laura Stoler and Chamoiseau -- to suggest that alternative narratives, and new critical and aesthetic approaches to the penal colony, have begun to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a research concerning the effect of dark tourism and slavery in several thanatouristic destinations including Caribbean, West Africa, and France. It highlights the historical and contemporary enslavement as well as radical transformation in education, legislation and historiography to various destinations. It also emphasizes that practice of dark tourism involves trips to Victorian cemetery and churchyard and witness public executions.

The article explores the 'significant missed rendezvous' and posthumous critical dialogue between Victor Segalen (1878-1919) and Édouard Glissant (1928-2011). It studies the ways in which the Martinican novelist, poet and theorist identified Segalen as a catalytic presence in his thought and as one of his privileged, lifelong interlocutors. The study tracks the role of Segalen's work in the steady emergence and elaboration of Glissant's thought, but also analyses the place of Glissant's readings in the progressive reassessment of Segalen's own writings (and particularly in their recent recontextualization in a postcolonial frame). The article contributes to reflections on the formation of communities of thought in which intellectuals from different moments and different ideological niches - in this case colonial and postcolonial - are drawn into dialogue in ways that appear achronological. Segalen and Glissant are presented as part of a wider community of French-language writers, linked with 'relational' ties, whose engagements with questions of contact and cultural diversity overlap, intersect and ultimately interact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]