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I address the complex trauma of slavery's descendants and the haunting unknowns regarding subjective enslaved memory, examining quests taken by descendants to access memory by engaging with knowledge located in bodily practice. I take as the backbone to my approach a philosophy called Bigidi, developed by Guadeloupean choreographer and scholar Lénablou. Bigidi is a term spoken when someone slips but stays upright. This process is enacted continuously, according to Lénablou, by dancers of Gwo-ka, who adapt their movements to lively drum riffs. To do so, they must lean on all possible points of contact between the ground and the feet, throwing the entire body into conscious disequilibrium. Such a bodily state, for Lénablou, is well adapted to the upheavals and uncertainty of the postcolonial island context. Indeed, she posits that Bigidi evolved from resistance strategies on plantations and is inscribed in everyday ways of Guadeloupean life. My dissertation aims to expand the philosophy beyond Guadeloupe, by looking at works from the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, France, and West Africa, given that material and epistemological uncertainties pervade for black communities throughout. I also look at a variety of media as different modes of "performance," which engage with the past in ways laid out in the philosophy of Bigidi yielding access to positive inheritance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines recent documentary films that have sought to narrate, record and criticise the effects on the French workplace of a shift to a new model of finance capitalism driven by ‘pure’ money. The films give representation to subjective experiences in the workplace showing how abstract economics is played out at the most intimate, personal and material level. The films seem to challenge dominant representations of finance capitalism as an order that has emancipated workers from the physical and disciplinary constraints of industrialism. The workers in these films describe the transition to a new economic order in terms of an intensification of corporeal pain. We see an economic order that pits an infinite accumulation of virtual money against the finite productive capacities of the human body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The existence of thousands of post-war novels and autobiographical narratives written about the Second World War in French, many of them critical of the conventional myths and stereotypes bolstered by the political class and media establishment, shows the need for individuals and the sub-groups to which they belong to bear witness to traumatic experiences and to retrieve memories crucial to their identity and recognition as survivors, combatants, or spectators of overwhelming events. The purpose of this essay is to examine the contribution made by narratives of captivity to this process of individual and collective adjustment and reconciliation to defeat and humiliation. One immediate consequence of the 1940 armistice was the surrender and capture of some 1.8 million French soldiers, many of whom remained in German captivity for the rest of the war. Although some 500 mainly literary texts by or about French prisoners of war have been published, few of these narratives have attracted much notice, let alone detailed critical study. My aim here is to analyse a small but representative sample of fictional and semi-autobiographical accounts of captivity, concentrating mainly on authors such as Ambrière, Boulle, Guérin, Hyvernaud, Lanoux, and Perret, whose experience of captivity is presented in works that combine historical testimony with imaginative and innovative writing. Collectively, such works make a significant contribution to our understanding of how ordinary soldiers came to terms with the war and how they strove to communicate this to post-war generations; they also sometimes reveal how the French experience and cultural representation of World War II differ significantly from Anglo-American perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of thousands of post-war novels and autobiographical narratives written about the Second World War in French, many of them critical of the conventional myths and stereotypes bolstered by the political class and media establishment, shows the need for individuals and the sub-groups to which they belong to bear witness to traumatic experiences and to retrieve memories crucial to their identity and recognition as survivors, combatants, or spectators of overwhelming events. The purpose of this essay is to examine the contribution made by narratives of captivity to this process of individual and collective adjustment and reconciliation to defeat and humiliation. One immediate consequence of the 1940 armistice was the surrender and capture of some 1.8 million French soldiers, many of whom remained in German captivity for the rest of the war. Although some 500 mainly literary texts by or about French prisoners of war have been published, few of these narratives have attracted much notice, let alone detailed critical study. My aim here is to analyse a small but representative sample of fictional and semi-autobiographical accounts of captivity, concentrating mainly on authors such as Ambrière, Boulle, Guérin, Hyvernaud, Lanoux, and Perret, whose experience of captivity is presented in works that combine historical testimony with imaginative and innovative writing. Collectively, such works make a significant contribution to our understanding of how ordinary soldiers came to terms with the war and how they strove to communicate this to post-war generations; they also sometimes reveal how the French experience and cultural representation of World War II differ significantly from Anglo-American perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of thousands of post-war novels and autobiographical narratives written about the Second World War in French, many of them critical of the conventional myths and stereotypes bolstered by the political class and media establishment, shows the need for individuals and the sub-groups to which they belong to bear witness to traumatic experiences and to retrieve memories crucial to their identity and recognition as survivors, combatants, or spectators of overwhelming events. The purpose of this essay is to examine the contribution made by narratives of captivity to this process of individual and collective adjustment and reconciliation to defeat and humiliation. One immediate consequence of the 1940 armistice was the surrender and capture of some 1.8 million French soldiers, many of whom remained in German captivity for the rest of the war. Although some 500 mainly literary texts by or about French prisoners of war have been published, few of these narratives have attracted much notice, let alone detailed critical study. My aim here is to analyse a small but representative sample of fictional and semi-autobiographical accounts of captivity, concentrating mainly on authors such as Ambrière, Boulle, Guérin, Hyvernaud, Lanoux, and Perret, whose experience of captivity is presented in works that combine historical testimony with imaginative and innovative writing. Collectively, such works make a significant contribution to our understanding of how ordinary soldiers came to terms with the war and how they strove to communicate this to post-war generations; they also sometimes reveal how the French experience and cultural representation of World War II differ significantly from Anglo-American perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the celebrated case of Claudine Rouge, the very ordinary medico-legal role of surgeons as witnesses of the senses took on extraordinary proportions as Claude Champeaux and Jean Faissole were tried in the public and medical arenas for their role in the polemic that surrounded their reading of the signs of drowning in Rouge's putrefied corpse. Beneath concern for a potential miscarriage of justice and the condemnation of innocent men and women, Champeaux and Faissole were used as scapegoats for a trial of the epistemology of witnessing based on the evidence of the senses and the role of legal medicine itself within the ancien régime judiciary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Entrepreneurs et Dirigeants Chrétiens (Christian Entrepreneurs and Directors) movement is an effective institutional response to the gulf between the economic and the religious domains in France. The members cite personal testimony and experience instead of doctrine. The movement is structured according to the old division of religious labour: it distributes the symbolic goods of baptism. In this sense, one can say that the EDC is a ‘brotherhood of Christian executives’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the term 'post-Derridean' art or writing I refer to literary, artistic, or philosophical texts which are either 1) directly inspired by Derrida or 2) texts whose inner meaning and function we, after Derrida, in some sense have gained access to by referring to the philosophical concepts, the style, or the historical effects of the work of the French philosopher. In my article I suggest that the work of Imre Kertész may be exemplary for post-Derridean writing in the second sense of the word. Furthermore I will argue that the work of Kertész may be considered as an instance of dealing with history that may seem awkwardly and even monstrously alien to ënormalí exchanges with the past but Kertészí writing is actually 'typical' of any literary dialogue with the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis on the role of history, gender and memory in the work of French Algerian artist Zineb Sedira, with specific reference to the politics of veiling in France and Algeria and hidden family histories of the Algerian War. It discusses the role of the gaze in visual media, self-portraiture, and the politics of veiling.