International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 10, Issue 1-2, 2007

Until recent years and with several notable exceptions, there appears to have been relatively little interest in Haiti among scholars in the field of francophone studies. The article takes this apparent absence as its starting point, and explores the possible ramifications of a renewed attention to Haitian history and culture for studies of francophone postcoloniality. Central to the discussion is a series of French and British representations of the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, dating from around the time of their subject's death in 1803, that have received only rare critical attention. The article suggests that any study of a postcolonial Toussaint, evident in the work of authors such as Aim Csaire, Bernard Dadi, Ren Depestre, Edouard Glissant and Jean Mtellus, should take these earlier representations into account in order to elaborate a more complex account of francophone history and culture. The conclusion develops this reflection on the association of the colonial and postcolonial by suggesting the ways in which a renewed awareness of the implications of the Haitian Revolution might impact on postcolonial analyses of France itself.

This article argues for the importance of New Orleans within French and francophone studies, with a particular emphasis on a French Atlantic perspective. A historical overview discusses the role of New France, slavery, native Americans, Spain, immigration from Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase and the American Civil War in the formation of the city, and the rich and under-researched field of the city's nineteenth-century literary output in French is surveyed. Among the unique aspects of this history are the coherent African cultures exported to Louisiana due to the trafficking of slaves of mostly Bambara ethnicity, their crucial role in the material survival of the colony and the large presence from intermarriage, manumission under Spanish rule and an influx following the Haitian revolution of free people of colour who contributed to the formation of a Caribbean-type racial hierarchy that did not exist elsewhere in the United States. The article ends with an overview of French representations of the city, in particular A Cotton Office in New Orleans by Edgar Degas, and the city's place in world tourism, generating questions about the mobile and hybrid meanings attaching to Frenchness in this context.

Amongst the contemporary French-Caribbean writers who appear to see themselves as heirs to the Martiniquan poet/politician Aim Csaire, certain writers of the younger generation Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphal Confiant in particular tend to base their reservations, if not their outright hostility towards the figure of Csaire on a negative view of the political tenor of Csaire's poetics. Whereas douard Glissant seems to hold to the middle ground, expressing respectful distance from his precursor's vision, the writers of the crolit movement reject Csaire's poetics, no less than his politics. Their negative perspective on Csaire's writing is based not just on a certain view of the French language as inherently exclusive and oppressive, but also on a certain conceptualization of poetry as a genre. More specifically, their representation (and rejection) of poetry, and of Csaire's poetry in particular, is motivated by a commitment to the Creole language and to oraliture, and above all by their determination to give voice to the highly differentiated collective Caribbean experience. However, the question concerning the different way that Csaire's poetry (as opposed to Glissant's, or Confiant's or Chamoiseau's novels) mediates the relation between the singular self and the collective voice is a highly complex one, as is the question concerning the political value of that mediation and, indeed, of that relation. At the heart of that difficult question, which is partly a question of genre, lies the politically and ethically sensitive matter of the relation between writing and the subject.

Beginning with Mariama B's Une si longue lettre [So long a letter], this article examines representations of domestic space in francophone African women's fiction. In B's text, woman's subjectivity is inextricably linked to domestic space and domesticity is valued as both a refuge and a site of rebellion. The study continues with an analysis of two texts that are bolder and more aggressive in their struggle against patriarchy than B's novel: Calixthe Beyala's C'est le soleil qui m'a brle [The Sun hath looked upon me] and Aminata Sow Fall's Douceurs du bercail [Comforts of the fold]. Beyala counters B's nurturing mother figure and warm hearth with a cold house and no maternal presence. Sow Fall depicts a female protagonist who, refusing the limitations imposed upon the housewife, devotes her energies to a social project that will aid her community in Senegal. If home space functions as refuge (B), haunted house (Beyala), transitional space (Sow Fall), it is above all a subversive space where rebellion begins and often explodes. Thus, domestic space plays a crucial role in the female protagonist's empowerment.

Founded in early 1942 as a conduit for National Revolution propaganda, the publication Dakar-Jeunes would also provide an unexpected forum for far-reaching cultural debates. As part of its investigation of cultural development (l'volution culturelle) in French West Africa, this paper solicited and published a range of articles written by young African elites. It soon became apparent that African contributors to Dakar-Jeunes were staging their own debate, which had little connection to the National Revolution. This article investigates the discursive structure and broader significance of this largely forgotten contest between supporters of cultural mtissage and defenders of African cultural autonomy. Exploring the positions taken by Lopold Senghor, Ousmane Soc, Mamadou Dia and others the author seeks to understand how key intellectual figures debated and imagined the cultural communities of the future. At a moment when political life and discourse were heavily repressed by the colonial state, this debate about culture acquired great symbolic importance and a new explosive potential.

The French government's record of promoting democracy in Cameroon has been a poor one. Since 2002, however, it has been preparing an ambitious development programme, known as the Programme concert pluri-acteurs (PCPA), which aims to strengthen participatory democracy and civil society in this former mandated territory. This article examines France's past collusion with autocratic Cameroonian regimes before setting out the pressures on Paris to introduce a more positive approach to democracy promotion. It then describes the key features of the PCPA and evaluates whether or not this constitutes, as some participants have claimed, a revolutionary approach. It argues that the main constraints on this programme have come from powerful elements within the French political establishment, which have been anxious not to jeopardize France's interests in Cameroon. Finally, it asks whether the PCPA provides a model for future French aid relations with sub-Saharan Africa.

It seems that everything there was to say about the riots which erupted in the French suburbs at the end of 2005 has already been said, even before those who were actually involved had time to make it part of their own experience and even before there was any clear expression of the slightest solidarity with those young people jailed in defiance of the most elementary rights to a legal defence, as provided by the law. Whether they go for explanations of the conflict based on communitarianism or economic determinism, the experts' consensus appears to take for granted that there is no question of emancipation having a role to play here. Yet this absence is now at the heart of our inability to understand the transformations which our world is undergoing. It is through this absence that the powerlessness of a whole generation is revealed. Thus, a new interpretation of these riots is appropriate, within a broader framework that restores the notion of emancipation as one of the decisive elements not because of any need to bring it back, however artificially this is contrived, in order somehow to confer a respectable analysis on these riots, but because the absence of this notion is incompatible with a concrete understanding of the events and their significance. The refusal to grant even the slightest role to the notion of emancipation testifies once again to the exclusion of the undeserving poor. There is of course nothing new in this, except that the intellectual consensus that surrounds it today risks setting up new divisions, which may serve to sanction new forms of violence on the part of the State.

The manner in which forgotten or distorted facts from its colonial past are inscribed in France's postcolonial mentality is approached through the study of the massacre of Algerian immigrants in Paris on 17 October 1961. Firstly, the article lists the various references to the event in written texts during the 1980s and in audiovisual productions during the 1990s, as a step towards understanding the role of the process of anamnesis in creating a postcolonial memory specific to the Hexagon. Then the article examines how repeated references to the event in texts and films create a series of effets d'Histoire that contribute to the reclaiming of forgotten French colonial history. Finally, the article analyses stages in the process of anamnesis between past and present - amnesia, remembering, anamnesis as a way to a better understanding of recent contradictory statements by French politicians as to how colonial history should be presented in postcolonial France.

This article explores two contradictory developments in government approaches to the socio-economic and cultural incorporation of France's post-migrant generations. It focuses on the emergence at the heart of government, of equal opportunity discourses and contrasts this with the recent reassertion of more traditionally republican values, as demonstrated by the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols in public schools. In June 2004, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin announced the launch of a Stratgie nationale pour l'galit des chances. This initiative to encourage the recruitment of French nationals of foreign origin or individuals from the overseas DOM-TOM territories into high-profile jobs would appear to signal a significant change in approach to the issue of minority politics. However, this apparent readiness to enhance the Republic's egalitarian project could be undermined by the recent debates over the Islamic headscarf and the subsequent legislation in March 2004. For while the new discourses of equal opportunities imply a readiness to publicly recognize ethnic difference in the name of greater socio-economic equality, the recent banning of conspicuous religious symbols in schools points to a wider reluctance regarding the recognition of the cultural and religious complexity of contemporary France.

Swiss Trash, Dunia Miralles's first novel, became a best-seller in French-speaking Switzerland after it was published in 2000. By showing the feelings of alienation and dereliction experienced by abused women, isolated immigrants, and marginalized drug addicts, Dunia Miralles calls into question the myth of a prosperous and healthy Switzerland and reveals the deep anxiety pervading a society that struggles to acknowledge its internal divisions and differences. This article aims to highlight not only an other Switzerland divided by various social, economic, sexual, and cultural fractures, but also some exoticizing tendencies of Francophone studies which, by privileging a multicultural approach, sometimes fail to examine the margins and peripheries created by the violence of social, economic, political, and ideological practices in European Francophone countries.

The present article studies the survival of French in Algeria despite an assertive policy of linguistic Arabization designed, among other things, to displace French. This language has been maintained and the number of its users has increased substantially since independence. Four major factors affecting language maintenance are considered here against a background of social change: economic change, demographic growth, institutional support and language status. In addition to these measurable predictors of language survival, the attitudes of senior secondary school students towards French and other languages were investigated via a large survey. All four social factors proved important for explaining the maintenance of French. The results of the survey revealed that respondents were attached to the ex-colonizers' language. The study concludes with a number of implications for language planning in Algeria.

After a consideration of the prevalence of notions of haunting in recent literary and cultural analysis, the work of Assia Djebar is taken as an example of contemporary Algerian literature, in which memories of the dead haunt the living, sometimes in the form of ghosts. Djebar's meditations on Camus's death and on his unfinished text, Le Premier Homme, provide a starting point for an analysis of Camus's legacy in contemporary European and Algerian literatures. It is argued that much recent reading, informed by postcolonial theory, accusing Camus of mythologizing both himself and French Algeria, has not engaged fully with literary practice and the work of textual memory. Le Premier Homme is neither a mythologizing text, nor a surrender to nostalgia, but a text of mourning and loss written in full knowledge of the consequences of the war of independence. The article ends with an analysis of how Camus, in the form of the phantom, the phantasm and the fantast, appears in the work of two of other women writers in addition to that of Assia Djebar, the Algerian Massa Bey, and the French-Algerian Nina Bouraoui, showing how knowledge concerning the realities of the postcolonial world are to be found in its imaginative exploration.

The writings of Algerian writers have long been characterised by the emergence in many different forms of a missing reality, which is expressed in terms of a more or less painful absence. This article highlights those categories and objects that are most marked by this absence as necessary motifs, designed to define an interrelated field and discourse, which linked their personal project to the contentious issues of history and culture, in both colonial and postcolonial periods. By way of a critical examination of the narrative forms and literary genres adopted and then deconstructed by these writers, the author traces back their literary genealogies and discovers that the motif of absence is also present in an ancient generic form which the writers were attempting to rediscover, i.e. the divan. The divan, a legacy of their oriental literary heritage, aims to throw light upon aspects of existence and then bring order to this knowledge. In the openness and flexibility of this genre, it is possible to discern the power of the interconnections between the numerous voices and possibilities engaging the first two generations of Algerian writers. As is shown by recent developments in the literatures of Algeria, the divan appears to have calmed the temporal malaise by releasing the power of motifs which now travel across time as well as space and link with each other according to the impulse of desire and happiness, rather than absence, which is now in the process of becoming a distant memory. At the same time, the article shows why these divan-texts are often difficult and inaccessible and how an easier reading may be achieved.

This article attempts to define postmodern fiction and aims to show that, since the eighties, the francophone novel has been experimenting with textual devices typical of this type of writing. Indeed, the themes and devices of mtissage and hybridisation that are characteristic of francophone literature today have strong echoes of the postmodern principles of heterogeneity, rhizome-reality and chaos-world. While it is true that, in the first instance, the mtissage of the francophone text is generic through the production of hybrid narratives, it is nonetheless also linguistic in nature. This is the aspect that this study hopes to emphasise here, with the aim of demonstrating how, within the French language, the friction between languages in the francophone space provides a fine illustration of the globalisation process.

Orientalism is still an influence to reckon with even in the twenty-first century. As far as Maghrebi literatu re in French is concerned, western humanities play a great role in reshaping both issues of production and reception. The literature appears both to be a voice of liberation and to be entrapped in a dominant culture paradigm. The challenge to Orientalism not only lies in attempts to recover history but to give the people their own voice beyond the veil of francophonie. Orientalism re-enacts its own critique that ends up within the fold of postcolonial studies, for instance. Furthermore, the exilic condition of Maghrebi writers cancels out the responses of the subaltern discourse. This situation stems from the conflation of belated Orientalism and Humanism. While the literary positions have been less than convincing, the overall solution probably lies in fostering a spirit of communion between histories and cultures, rather than in a hopeless wish to break away from each other.

Lieux propices, dir. Adelaide Russo et Simon Harel, (2005) Qubec: Presses de l'Universit Laval, 355 pp., ISBN 2-7637-8250-7 (pbk), 35The Transparent Girl and Other Stories, S. Corinna Bille, selected and translated by Monika Giacoppe and Christiane P. Makward (2006) Lanham: Lexington Books, xxii, 183 pp., ISBN 0-7391-1295-3 (pbk), 19.95Roman africain et idologie: Tchicaya U tam'si et la rcriture de l'histoire, Lat Lawson Hellu, (2004) Qubec: Les presses de l'Universit de Laval, 244 pp., ISBN 2-7637-8125-X (pbk), 30Der maghrebinische Roman. Eine Einfhrung, Susanne Heiler (2005) Tbingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 284 pp., ISBN 3-8233-6121-X (pbk), 23.90V.Y. Mudimbe et la r-invention de l'Afrique. Potique et politique de la dcolonisation des sciences humaines, Kasereka Kavwahirehi (2006) Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, coll. Francopolyphonies, 421 pp., ISBN 90-420-1839-9 (pbk), 85 110Le mtissage dans la literature des Antilles franaises: Le complexe d'Ariel, Chantal Maignan-Claverie (2005) Paris: Karthala, 444 pp., ISBN 2-84586-711-5 (pbk), 28French-Speaking Doumentarians. A Guide, Janis L. Pallister and Ruth A. Hottell, (2005) New York: Pete Lang, 279 pp., ISBN 0-8204-7614-5, hardback