Search

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.

This article takes as its starting point a symbolically empty site in the French commemorative landscape – the plinth in the Panthéon to where Toussaint Louverture's remains may have been transferred had plans to pantheonize him ever been realized. It argues that the implications of this emblematic absence at the heart of official memorial practices in France are at least twofold: not only does this empty site reflect the persistent and systematic silencing of slavery and the enslaved in national commemorations (traditionally focused instead on abolition), but also, somewhat paradoxically, by avoiding any clear orthodoxy in formal processes of remembrance, it has permitted the opening up of possibilities for a range of alternative practices that have encouraged recognition of what Édouard Glissant dubbed the “nomadic,” “diffracted,” and plural memories of slavery. Drawing on Marcus Wood's recent study The Horrible Gift of Freedom (2010), the article suggests that national commemorations in France tend systematically to remember abolition whilst forgetting slavery. Having explored this analysis in the light of sites such as the Panthéon itself, the focus then shifts to the alternative memorials relating to slavery imagined by the artist Lubaina Himid in her work “What Are Monuments For? Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map.” Her reflection on the potential for politicians and citizens to collaborate actively in creating memorials and monuments allows a concluding study of two locations – Bordeaux and Nantes – where over the past decade different processes of commemoration have emerged, and where there have been dynamic, controversial, innovative, and, at times, highly constructive efforts to remember slavery and abolition in civic space, not least in the cities’ museums. The article concludes with a discussion of the distinctive project of a Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, a site whose ambition endeavours to reject any reduction of slavery to the histories of abolitionism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses French studies, commenting the 2010 book "Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto," by Stephen Greenblatt. It examines concepts of mobility, postcolonialism, and post-nationalism. The author considers the 2007 manifesto “manifeste pour une littérature-monde en français," exploring Francophone literature and the Francophone world. He also reflects on postcolonial literature and travel writings. Other topics discussed in the article include national, cultural, and ethnic identities.

An essay on the intellectual, literary, and political activity of French poet and author Edouardo Glissant is presented. The author provides a discussion on the politics and world literature during the life time of Glissant. He argues that contribution of Glissant in the "Pour une littérature voyageuse" manifesto is in its accompanying "Pour une liteérature-monde" which lacks sociology of literature to which the world literature in French is based.

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]

Until recent years and with several notable exceptions, there appears to have been relatively little interest in Haiti among scholars in the field of francophone studies. The article takes this apparent absence as its starting point, and explores the possible ramifications of a renewed attention to Haitian history and culture for studies of francophone postcoloniality. Central to the discussion is a series of French and British representations of the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, dating from around the time of their subject's death in 1803, that have received only rare critical attention. The article suggests that any study of a ‘postcolonial’ Toussaint, evident in the work of authors such as Aimé Césaire, Bernard Dadié, René Depestre, Edouard Glissant and Jean Métellus, should take these earlier representations into account in order to elaborate a more complex account of francophone history and culture. The conclusion develops this reflection on the association of the colonial and postcolonial by suggesting the ways in which a renewed awareness of the implications of the Haitian Revolution might impact on postcolonial analyses of France itself. A quelques exceptions près, les chercheurs dans le domaine des études francophones se sont relativement peu intéressés jusqu'à une époque récente à Haïti. Adoptant cette absence d'attention en guise de point de départ, cet article met en relief les implications possibles pour l'étude du ‘fait postcolonial’ francophone d'un renouveau d'intérêt dans la littérature et la culture haïtiennes. L'étude est centrée sur une série de représentations françaises et britanniques du leader de la révolution à Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture – représentations qui datent de l'époque de la mort de leur sujet en 1803, mais qui n'ont que rarement attiré une attention critique. Selon l'article, toute étude d'un Toussaint ‘postcolonial’ – chez des auteurs tels que Aimé Césaire, Bernard Dadié, René Depestre, Edouard Glissant et Jean Métellus – doit se rendre compte des représentations antérieures afin d'esquisser une version plus complexe des histoires et des cultures de l'espace francophone. Cette réflexion sur les rapports qui relient le colonial au post-colonial se développe dans la conclusion de l'article, où l'on démontre l'impact considérable de la révolution haïtienne sur une analyse postcoloniale de la France elle-même. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role of Paris as a site of dialogue and exchange in the posthumous freighting of the emblematic figure of the francophone Black Atlantic, Toussaint Louverture. By incarcerating his rival in Joux, Napoleon had attempted to ensure that Toussaint was kept as far away as possible from the French capital, yet the importance of the Haitian revolution in the formation of French republican identity remains indisputable; Toussaint's presence in France symbolized his problematization of the transatlantic axes linking France to its (soon to be former) colony. The article explores the subsequent role of Toussaint - in the work of authors such as Césaire, Glissant, James and Auguste Nemours - in the formation of a certain understanding of twentieth-century Black Paris. It accordingly considers the ways in which representations of Toussaint Louverture encapsulate the complex affiliations on which the construction of Black Paris depends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]