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This article focuses on the portrayal of Australia by two female French travel writers at the turn of the twenty-first century. Based upon Charles Forsdick's theory of a set of uncertainties locatable in Francophone travel writing at the fin de siecle, this article analyzes how such uncertainties are played out in an Australian setting. It argues that while these texts ostensibly exoticize Australia in stereotypical manners, they gradually complicate these views, especially through their representation of rural Australia. Both writers find in rural Australia the means of recovery from the trauma that has spurred them to travel, which they locate in fast-paced, urban European life. Yet their texts are not simple celebrations of Australia as a site of return to simpler or "primitive" lifestyles, as they uncover links between supposedly exotic Australia and long-repressed aspects of their home cultures. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Recent scholarship has posited the experience of migration as a source of creative, experimental possibilities that allow writers to contest fixed forms of identity; it has also questioned monolingual, monocultural understandings of national literatures that yoke one language to one nation. Building on such work, this article considers French migrant writing that breaks linguistic rules and challenges the norms of national literatures by analyzing various attitudes testifying to multilingualism and linguistic differences in the works of Paul Wenz, Didier Coste and Catherine Rey—authors who had embarked upon their writing careers before migrating, who have settled in Australia and who write from a position of stability and permanence. While travel writers use English to nuance their texts about journeys through Anglophone regions, they ultimately do not displace the primary importance of French in their texts. By contrast, the texts of the writers considered herein articulate both unique understandings of linguistic identity and resistance to linguistic fixity as well as innovative narrative strategies to communicate both. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In this essay, the authors compares two works of life writing by two French-language writers of Caribbean origin: Gisèle Pineau and Fabienne Kanor. Both writers represent contemporary border crossings in their work and, importantly, contextualize these border crossings in terms of the history of the Caribbean and the legacy of slavery. Their texts are read through the lens of Michael Sheringham’s notion of the “autobiographical turning point”—an event in life writing that defines the life and the life writer, that changes the direction of the narrative, and that performs the acts of remembering and forgetting. The authors argue that these writers’ texts present border crossings as turning points in their narratives that are flawed or failures, and that these major events became spiraling rather than turning points. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article broadens the discussion of translingual writing by exploring how it functions in a specific postcolonial context. Senegal remains a stronghold of Francophone literature, but African languages permeate this writing. Most recently, under more deregulated language and publishing policies, writers have published both in Wolof and in French. Following a discussion of this historical context, this article focuses on the translingual practice of contemporary writer Fatou Diome. It explores how this author uses her platform as a popular writer in France to incorporate other languages into her later work but problematizes the linguistic philosophies of her predecessors. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This introduces the special issue on mobility across media in various areas of the Francophone world. Articles treat the notion of mobility as understood in film, literature, visual art and advertising and explore how genres as well as national traditions intersect. They explore a range of representations of mobility, such as the mobility between people, between genres, between languages, between artistic forms and between texts across historical periods. We show that the terminology regarding movement is constantly mobile itself, having undergone significant slippage in recent decades. Overall, this volume does not seek to arrest, but to add to, the understanding of the diverse modes of mobility present in the contemporary world. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Alain Mabanckou, Léonora Miano, and Abdourahhman Waberi are often spoken of as forming part of an 'Afropean' generation of writers, perched between the African and European continents. However, of the six fictional works included in a 2014 volume (eds. Thomas and Hitchcott) on Francophone Afropean writers, three are penned by writers who no longer live in Africa or Europe. My chapter will investigate how such writers exist in an increasingly more cosmopolitan world which stretches beyond Europe and into North America. Then, to further mine the “Afropean” designation, I will explore the works and careers of post-migratory postcolonial minorities of African heritage, such as writers Julien Delmaire, Dembo Goumane, Thomté Ryam, Abd al Malik, Wilfred N’Sondé and Bessora, who were born and raised in France/Francophone Europe. In this way, I query the binary of Africa and Europe in the 'Afropean' designation.

Collaborations between African immigrants in Italy and Italian writers led to the production of several socio-literary works in the early 1990s. The Italian contributors appear to have acted as linguistic experts who allowed (often Francophone) Africans to place representations of their lives and those of other immigrants in Italy into Italian discourse. The fruits of these collaborations are thus, to some extent, translations of oral stories. The collaboration between Saidou Moussa Ba and Alessandro Micheletti, which led to the novel/educational manual La promessa di Hamadi, is examined in order to tease out the process and consequences of such intercultural collaborative translation. Refereed/Peer-reviewed