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The article explores the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies in Great Britain and Ireland. It focuses on the first generation of scholars—Richard D.E. Burton, Bridget Jones, Roger Little and others—who were in the vanguard of this opening up of teaching and research in French studies towards the literatures and cultures of the region. The aims of the article are four-fold: (i) to understand these developments biographically, and to consider the professional factors (notably early-career postings to universities outside Europe and early engagement in doctoral research with examples of French literature and culture that spill beyond the Hexagon) that shaped these challenges to the disciplinary status quo; (ii) to situate the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies in relating to what Christophe Campos dubs a wider "cracking of coherence" in the study of French; (iii) to explore the ways in which historically existing disciplinary infrastructure—taking the example of the journal French Studies—adapted with varying degrees of enthusiasm to these changes; and (iv) to analyse the emergence and consolidation of a new disciplinary infrastructure in the 1970s–1990s—in Caribbean studies and Francophone literature more broadly (e.g., ASCALF, with its annual conference and publications)—to support these developments [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The corpus of contemporary translingual writing in French is varied in terms of both the origins of the authors associated with this burgeoning literary phenomenon and the range of topics that writers address. Studies of this translingual corpus tend to focus nevertheless on a recurrent set of aspects including the fictionalization of language acquisition and the active intertextual engagement of authors with canonical French literature. These emphases often feed into a set of assumptions regarding the translingual author, who is read as seeking integration, through a process of progressive accumulation of linguistic and literary competence, into a long-standing French literary tradition. This article engages with the work of the author of Hungarian origin Katalin Molnár to interrogate and disrupt this model. Molnár's oeuvre shows similarities with that of other translingual writers in that if focuses on processes of language acquisition and provides evidence of intertextual engagement. Drawing on recent scholarship on glottophobie, I demonstrate through the study of Molnár's work the under-explored potential of exophonic writing to contribute to processes not of continuity but of a more disruptive renewal of a French literature that seeks to develop a literary praxis where translingual poetics converge with a critical politics of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 to the articles focusing on French author and novelist Michaël Ferrier discussed within the issue is presented, including Ferrier situating himself in relation to the work of predecessors, influence of music and drawing on Ferrier's writing and biography of Ferrier's paternal grandfather.

This introduction outlines the background of our special issue of Studies in Travel Writing, which emerged from reflections on travel and the travelogue in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It details the impact of this global public health crisis on questions of mobility and foregrounds the confinement to which travellers have been subject. The introduction argues that such changes should not be confined to the hypercontemporary moment but need also to be subject to active historicisation across a broad corpus of texts. The aim is to explore in this context the concept of "vertical travel", tracking its elaboration in the work of scholars such as Kris Lackey, Michael Cronin and Alasdair Pettinger, and explaining the meanings it has acquired. The introduction then sets out the taxonomies of this practice and highlights the various forms it takes. It concludes with a brief summary of the selection of articles included in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a conversation conducted in Glasgow on 18 July 2019 between Charles Burdett (CB), Angela Creese (AC), Alison Phipps (AP), Charles Forsdick (CF) and Barbara Spadaro. So, to a degree each member of the large team of researchers was very much concerned with talking about processes of linguistic and cultural translation and seeing the way in which practices, cultures, ways of being in the world change as a result of that transposition, that translation movement. In terms of the question about translation studies, watching that process happen with some of the researchers on my own project, it would be safe to say that really only myself and David Gramling had any background in translation studies - but actually, several other researchers in the team really enjoyed the reading list for translation studies. We found that translation was not only about interlingual translation from one language to another, but also included intersemiotic and intralingual translation as the community advisor worked to translate from official documents to the spoken word, and from different registers of English and Mandarin. [Extracted from the article]

This special issue of I The Translator i brings together key work from several of the innovative projects supported over the past decade by "Translating Cultures" (see http://translatingcultures.org.uk, and Kamali, Forsdick, and Dutton [20]). This generalisation of translation, often deployed in these metaphorical ways, was nevertheless criticised by some translation studies scholars for the ways in which 'the concept itself becomes so broad that its original sense risks being diluted into nothing' (Chesterman [13], 104); and others such as Harish Trivedi ([28]), speaking from an actively postcolonial perspective, saw in such a manoeuvre an added risk of linguistic insensitivity and even anglonormativity, as the study of cultural translation often occurs monolingually, often in English. Notwithstanding such legitimate concerns, the extension of translation to other fields has been largely welcomed, not least because of the way that it serves as a confirmation of the importance of translation studies and an indication of translation's "appeal to contemporary thought and social action" (Simon [26], 210), at the intersection of epistemology and praxis. The final article in this special issue, by the translation studies scholar Kathryn Batchelor, focuses on literary translation and its relationship to soft power, taking the example of African literature in Chinese translation. [Extracted from the article]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses topics within the issue including physical mobility as experienced by migrants and refugees, 2015 political crisis of hospitality faced with unprecedented levels of mobility of refugees and migrants, and refugee anthology.

The article explores the place of reparations for slavery in the contemporary politics and culture of France and the French-speaking Caribbean. Considerable attention has recently been paid to the recent decision of CARICOM leaders to set up a reparations commission, but similar questions relating to slavery and its (financial) afterlives have also been raised (and remain equally unresolved) in the Francophone world. In a press conference in Dakar in October 2012, François Hollande answered questions about the subject: "La réparation", he claimed, "elle n'est pas que morale, elle est aussi de savoir ce que nous voulons faire ensemble." (Weider, Thomas. "Couacs entre l'Elysée et Matignon sur les traites négrières." Le Monde. 14 October 2012). In the wake of these comments, legal action was launched in France by the group CRAN (Conseil représentatif des associations noires) against the Caisse des dépôts, itself accused of profiting from compensation paid by Haiti to the French state from 1825 onwards. The article draws on speeches by Sarkozy and Hollande as well as recent publications by the CRAN in order to locate reparations for slavery within the wider geopolitical, historical, and memorial context of the Francosphere. In conclusion, it will analyse one of the few cultural artefacts to address the question of reparations for slavery, the controversial 2011 comedy Case départ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent international growth of interest in Haiti, there has been an increased focus on the ways in which the narratives and impact of the Haitian Revolution have travelled beyond their historical and geographical points of origin. Researchers have explored the ways in which the Revolution has been actively “used” or instrumentalized in often very different cultural and ideological niches. This article asks whether interpretations of the Revolution have always been localized, and shaped by the clear national contexts in which they occur, or whether it is possible (and indeed helpful) to evoke a type of transnational or even global iconicity that sees the leader of the Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, adopted as a cipher for the wider understandings of Haiti in a global frame. Underlying this analysis is a comparison—often made but rarely scrutinized—between Louverture and Che Guevara. The article concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the status of Toussaint as a revolutionary icon in a global frame has acquired renewed intensity in recent years, but has arguably at the same time taken a new turn, as the focused implications of this iconicity for anti-colonial struggle and postcolonial reflection have lost their specificity and risked being diluted into generality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editors cite the theme of the special issue, the intersections between Haitian and global history and culture, and discuss articles in the issue on topics including Haitian author Jean-Claude Charles, the depiction of Vodou in the film "The Serpent and the Rainbow," and Haitian artist Lenelle Moïse.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the history and archaeology of Xinjiang, China, travel writings, and Turfan expeditions produced by German archaeologist Albert von Le Coq.

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 explores the international and intercultural connections of U.S. and Haiti during the U.S. occupation and World War II. The author reflects on the Haitian Revolution in the book of C. L. R. James' book "The Black Jacobins" which embodies a renewed interwar engagement and a model for popular revolution and unity. Furthermore, he relates on the political and cultural development of Haiti in the play of William Dubios titled "Haiti."

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]

The article discusses the author's views on the aspects of the manifesto in "Pour Une Litterature-Monde En Francais" ( A World Literature in French) that were identified by writer Mary Ann Caws. It explores the relationship between the content and the three additional aspects including self-sufficiency, emphasis on newness, and self-positioning. The author suggests that the publication of the manifesto should employ self-sufficiency and originality in its context.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by the author on stereoscopy and polygraphy that may represent writing practices of travel writing, one by Catharine Mee on travelogue and journalism, and one by Margaret Topping on the empire of the text implicit in travel writing.

This article studies the competing accounts of a 1935 journey undertaken by Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart, News from Tartary (1936) and Forbidden Journey/Oasis interdites (1937). It explores the ways in which these multiple textualisations permit reflection on the nature of such a stereoscopic rewriting of a shared journey, addressing the gendered comparatism to which this emphasis often lends itself, whilst outlining the potential pitfalls of reducing such comparison to questions of gender; at the same time, the study investigates also alternative approaches to Maillart's multiple re-textualisations of this journey in her own work, associating this with the concept of 'polygraphy'. [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]

Discusses the contribution of the peripatetic to modes of travel in French travel literature. Culmination of the Romantic belief that philosophical reflection had found its ideal occasion in the walk; Suggestion that it is in the differing rhythms and practices of walking that issues relating to contemporary travel can be addressed and explored.

It quickly became obvious that it is impossible to translate these expressions in terms of any absolute understanding of distance, according to which ‘close to’ is supposed to refer to shorter distances than ‘far from’. The following two sentences are enough to disperse any remaining doubt about this: 1. Jupiter is close to Saturn 2. the electron is far from its nucleus The expression ‘close to’ in the first sentence actually describes a much greater distance between A and B than the ‘far from’ in the second sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What is travel? Simply a loop or a detour that distorts the linear course of life, a risky event resulting from inspiration or obligation, a calling, a rite, an episode, a rupture, a specific by-product of curiosity or, among other things, a means of understanding, a way to have fun, or even a remedy to get better. […] Travel is perhaps all of those things. But is it not also a proliferation of justified uses of space? Jacques Meunier writes: ‘The real and unique island of Robinson Crusoe is in each one of us. It is a dimension of the mind—and nothing more’. And what about travel? Before it becomes a spatial reality, the tangible fulfilment of a movement or the visible trace of an itinerary drawn out across the surface of the world, is not every journey initially—an idea, an image, a project, a dream or a theory—a dimension of the mind in relation to which motives suggested for it look like secondary rationalizations? Moreover, once they are widely-known, recognized and classified, these reasons for travel look very much like the ad hoc ‘explanations’ provided to the ethnologist by the native informant when the former questions him on his customs. The replies of the traveller—more often than not disappointing—are the same. Reflecting conventions, they legitimize practices rather than explainingthem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]