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This chapter examines a recent iteration of Francophone migrant writing that departs from the genre’s historical tendency to focus on the migratory experiences of authors with access to the cultural if not the material means to tell their story, and which has led the genre to privilege a limited range of migratory experiences. Douna Loup and Gabriel Nganga Nseka’s Mopaya: récit d’une traversée du Congo à la Suisse (2010) adopts an innovative, collaborative approach to write of the collective contemporary experience of crossing the Mediterranean in search of safe haven in Europe. This chapter examines the authors’ collaborative strategies and resulting transposition of the roles of author, protagonist and reader to posit a new poetics and ethics of writing migration in the Euro-Mediterranean space.

This article examines Nancy Huston's writing of female ageing in light of her intellectual and personal trajectory as a feminist thinker. It identifies women's ageing as an integrative and ubiquitous phenomenon in Huston's œuvre, tracing the presence of this thematic and theoretical concern to her very first published works, and outlining its development until her most recent works, before examining a key instance of her fictional treatment of female ageing in Lignes de faille. Drawing on a literary, philosophical and sociological theoretical framework, it argues that Huston furthers feminist approaches to female senescence by inscribing women's experiences of later life not in terms of existential crisis but rather as part of the continuous process of change and transformation inherent to subjective development. The analysis aims to address pressing questions surrounding the intersections of gender and age that are at the forefront of Huston criticism and feminist studies.

Transnational mobility constitutes a frequent feature of much contemporary francophone women’s writing whose origins lie in territories with historical links to French colonial power. Yet whether configured as exile, migration, travel, or other, the experiences of transnational mobility described in postcolonial francophone women’s writing frequently focus on protagonists in childhood and early adulthood: the experiences and challenges of the exile, migrant, or traveller are seldom imagined in these texts as those of an individual in late adulthood or old age. This article analyses the intersection of ageing, mobility, and femininity in Abla Farhoud’s Le Bonheur a la queue glissante (1998), one of few narratives in French to broach the question of female ageing in migration. Reading the text in light of Sara Ahmed’s insights into the relationship between strangers, embodiment, and community (2000), the analysis reveals Farhoud’s challenge to any easy correlation between mobility and youth, and stasis and ...

This article explores the intersections of ageing, gender, and migration in the narrative prose works of Silvia Baron Supervielle. Born in Buenos Aires in 1934 and having lived in Paris and published in French for the best part of her life (since 1961), Baron Supervielle explores the challenges and freedoms posed by ageing as a ‘cultural Other’. Through a focus on two key non-fictional narrative texts by the author, La Ligne et l’ombre [‘The Line and the Shadow’] (1999) and Le Pays de l’ecriture [‘The Land of Writing’] (2002), with reference to more recent works, this article shifts the focus away from the processes of arrival and adaptation that dominate analyses of displacement to examine the evolution of transnational identity into late life in order to reveal a reconsideration of received ideas of both women’s mobility and ageing in the works of this singular author.

This article explores and analyses the representation of violence in contemporary Colombian culture. Violence has come to characterize Colombian society since the onset of the current armed conflict, with devastating consequences for its population. Within this context, the following article examines tendencies in contemporary literary representations of violence, with a focus on La multitud errante (2001) by Laura Restrepo, one of Colombia’s foremost writers. It begins with an outline of the origins and evolution of violence in Colombia in the twentieth century, and draws links with the contemporary crisis. It then goes on to explore the ways in which violence in contemporary Colombian society has been narrativized in political, media, and cultural discourses before focusing on Restrepo’s text to reveal a recent shift in cultural representations of violence. Framing the analysis with regard to recent narratological and cultural studies of the discourse of violence, notably those of Sara Cobb, Yen...

Au seuil d’une revolution dans les rapports entre especes, penser le feminin d’abord en relation au liminal puis a l’animal s’est impose comme une evidence : tandis que l’eco-feminisme se redefinit de maniere plurielle face aux enjeux environnementaux d’aujourd’hui et de demain, le concept " d’exception humaine " se trouve au centre de toutes les preoccupations. A l’heure ou les avancees de la primatologie et de l’ethologie se multiplient, des specialistes d’horizons theoriques et culturels differents disposant d’outils d’analyse en pleine evolution ont ete convoques pour permettre, hors des sentiers battus et de la pensee unique, des explorations croisees, accompagnes d’artistes dont le temoignage assure au propos une dimension poietique ancree dans l’experience. Eve et le Serpent, la Dame a la Licorne, la Belle et la Bete : ce sont les questions soulevees par ce lien censement privilegie et immemorial entre la femme et l’animal, ce lien dont l’existence supposee n’a cesse de hanter l’imaginaire humain, qui sont examinees sans ambages et sans tabous dans une approche diachronique et transculturelle, des Metamorphoses d’Ovide aux Femmes qui courent avec les loups, en passant par les mythes, fables, contes et recits animaliers modernes et postmodernes, mais aussi par l’examen de diverses formes de representation - litteraires, cinematographiques, plastiques et multimedia - de ce lien tisse par l’imaginaire au feminin dans son rapport secret a la liminalite de notre humanite. Marie-Lise PAOLI, MCF en litterature des pays anglophones a l'universite Bordeaux Montaigne, responsable de l'Equipe de Recherches Creativite et Imaginaire des Femmes (ERCIF, E.A. 4593 CLARE), a notamment co-dirige des ouvrages transdisciplinaires tels que Marges et territoires choregraphiques de Pina Bausch (L'Arche, 2013) et Dire les maux (MSH A, 2015).

This article analyses Huston's 1998 novel, L'Empreinte de l'ange, which explores language's fundamental role in transnational mobility, and how the daily migration between French and another language impacts on the negotiation of identity for cultural others in France. This analysis demonstrates how linguistic alterity disrupts the apparently easy coincidence of language, community, identity, and belonging. The first section examines Huston's use of language as both a narrative theme and strategy in the representation of the interstitial subjectivity characteristic of transnational mobility. The second part turns to Huston's concern with her legitimacy as a non-native Francophone writer within the canon of French literature. The conclusion posits the notion that the highly visible formal architecture of Huston's novel can be seen as a deliberate strategy to enact and unravel the links between language, writing, and transnational Francophone identity.Le present article analyse L'Empreinte de l'ange (1998) ...

In his collection of chronicles, Loco afan (1995) , Pedro Lemebel, Chilean writer, performance artist, social commentator, public figure and activist, presents a series of interrelated vignettes of the lives of impoverished, marginalized, gay men, taken from his own life experiences in the slums of Santiago de Chile. In this article, Kate Averis examines Lemebel's complex mapping of social identification from his position on the margins, revealing unlikely associations and unexpected schisms. Averis demonstrates the way in which Lemebel resolves the dilemma of intersecting affiliations—class, gender, sexuality—through the discursive representation of identity as a fluid process of ‘becoming’, rather than a static state of being.

International audience

International audience