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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]

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]