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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]