International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009

L'anorexie, pathologie confine au registre des maladies mentales et relevant, par consquent, de la psychiatrie, est avant tout une tentative d'exister autrement. Il existe un rapport intime entre anorexie et criture, deux expriences de la limite. Les anorexiques retracent les contours de leur existence en se recrant au travers des mots. Le cas des crivaines algriennes apporte un clairage nouveau sur l'anorexie comme expression d'une violence hrite du colonialisme, mais galement stratgie de protestation et proclamation de libert. Au-del de la dmarche morbide, se profile une rvolte de la chair face l'absurdit de l'existence. L'anorexie destructrice est canalise en nergie cratrice, expression du dsir. Qu'elle incarne l'enfermement des femmes en Algrie (Nina Bouraoui), la difficult de vivre son hybridit (Sabrina Kherbiche), ou la ncessaire sparation familiale couple d'une faim dvorante d'instruction (Malika Mokeddem), l'anorexie figure par ces auteures permet de rvaluer une pathologie rduite au rang d'alination mentale. L'anorexie concerne une personne en dsquilibre, mais elle s'inscrit aussi dans un contexte socioculturel particulier. Vue sous cet angle, la faim volontaire s'interprte comme une revendication d'altrit, composante essentielle de l'identit. L'anorexie, folie furieuse tourne contre soi-mme, est l'amorce d'une transformation se prolongeant, chez ces auteures algriennes, par un geste crateur.

This article examines Nina Bouraoui's three autobiographical texts (Garon Manqu, 2000; Poupe Bella, 2004; Mes Mauvaises Penses, 2005), and the semi-autobiographical La Vie Heureuse (2002). It argues that despite an apparent desire to affirm and assert her alterity, Bouraoui frequently falls prey to the trappings of homogenous notions of sexual and cultural identity that she purports to subvert. By using two seminal texts which aim to expose and deconstruct such binary paradigms, Frantz Fanon's Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (1952) and Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxime Sexe (1949), the analysis suggests that in the first two of her autobiographical narratives Bouraoui often conforms to outmoded tropes of racial and sexual collusion with the norm and that, while initially appearing to carve out a new post-colonial identity, she frequently confirms existing stereotypes of racial and sexual otherness and/or inferiority complexes. The article then proposes that it is only in Mes Mauvaises Penses that Bouraoui begins to reclaim her sexual and cultural identity in the negotiation of a new alterity.

Based on research conducted at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs' African Cinmathque, this article explores the narrative and aesthetic manifestations of alienation in francophone West African films of the past five decades. Rather than examine immigration films, it focuses on francophone West African films that interrogate the concept of alienation from points of view firmly grounded within Africa, such as Sembene's Niaye (1964), La Noire de (1966), and Xala (1974), Samb-Makharam's Et La Neige N'tait Plus (1965), Mambety's Touki Bouki (1973), and Sissako's Waiting for Happiness (2002). The choice to centre Africa in this way within Francophone Studies has political value, and seeks to acknowledge the internal (psychological) as well as external (bodily) dimensions of exile. After a theoretical consideration of alienation in relation to contemporary Africa, the article identifies and analyses similarities that traverse specific films dealing with exilic experience, attempting to account for the prevalence of images of feet, the inscription of voices, and a palimpsestic aesthetic. Ultimately, the article acknowledges the painful and repetitive nature of exile while also arguing that alienation, in the context of francophone West African cinema, has become a source of creativity and psychological survival against hostility from both without and within.

In the context of Republican universalism, the perceived communitarianism of diasporic postcolonial communities in France is considered a threat to the unity and cohesion of the nation. Most films by minority film-makers stress their protagonists' hybrid identity and aspirations towards a form of integration which would recognize the multicultural nature of contemporary postcolonial French society. However, two recent films by minority women film-makers, Yasmina Yahiaoui's Rue des Figuiers and Karin Albou's La Petite Jrusalem, focus on the representation of particular, bounded, postcolonial communities in France, one of Arab/Berber Maghrebi origin, the other of Jewish Maghrebi (and other) origin. This article contrasts the films' representations of the various physical and mental, real and imagined borders which delimit the lives of the inhabitants of these communities, particularly those of the female protagonists, and investigates the extent to which they promote or assuage majority fears about the alterity of its citizens from postcolonial minorities. It suggests that, whereas the young women in La Petite Jrusalem can only negotiate their identities by either accepting or completely abandoning their family and community, the women in Rue des Figuiers are able to negotiate new gender roles and identities within the diasporic Maghrebi community itself. Yet this situation is only possible because the community is constructed as a secular rather than a religious community, indicating that there are still limits to the way in which the postcolonial immigrant community can be represented in French cinema.

To rethink human rights when they have become little more than hollow ideology in the hands not only of nation-states but of the UN as well requires a radical change in perspective. This article will thus look back to one of the key moments in the history of human emancipation the Haitian Revolution to ask whether it might hold, in its unfulfilled potential, implications for overcoming the contemporary impasse of human rights discourse. Unlike the earlier French and US revolutions, which extended putatively universal rights only to limited categories of citizens (typically white, adult, male property-holders) Haiti was alone in the early-modern world in its implementation of an unqualified, immediate ban on human slavery. For all its daring originality, however, the Haitian intervention never lived up to its historical promise. Both internal political divisions and the international pressure of contemporary slave-holding states such as France and the United States consistently undermined the Haitian initiative throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the second part of this article, analysis of this historical process will lead me to consider the ways in which the works of Edwidge Danticat and Peter Hallward stand as contemporary interventions that remain faithful to this unfulfilled legacy of 1804.

This paper considers some of the psychic and cultural implications of identity disintegration in works by French writers Marie NDiaye (born 1967) and Herv Guibert (19551991). In Guibert's Le Paradis (1992), the unravelling narrative (part-detective story, part postcolonial travelogue set in West Africa and the Caribbean) forces the European narrator's fantasy subjectivity apart, yanking him out of a zone of solidly racialised and sexualized privilege, and into a deathly exposure to blistering, sickly, post-white heat. In NDiaye's Rosie Carpe (2001), the eponymous French heroine, suddenly adrift with her provincial family in Guadeloupe, swings in NDiaye's bizarre narrative between exalted and desirable white-pink woman, and epically humiliated, liquidized, greyish mess. The ethnically inflected privilege of Guibert's and NDiaye's protagonists, seemingly so secure at the novels' outsets, comes apart at the seams in these narrative spaces of exception and singularity. The aesthetic and ethical implications of becoming-other and of shifting from crisply French (and human) to messily francophone (and barely human) are, in Guibert's and NDiaye's neo-colonial travellers' tales, anything but easily digestible, but nevertheless demand our rigorous critical interrogation.

Colons, Croles et Coolies: L'immigration runionnaise en Nouvelle-Caldonie (XIXe sicle) et le tayo de Saint-Louis, Karin Speedy (2007) Paris: L'Harmattan, 218 pp., ISBN 978-2-296-03575-1 (pbk), 19.50

The Living, Pascale Kramer, translated by Tamsin Black (2007) Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 136 pp., ISBN 978-0-8032-7823-3 (pbk), $19.95

criture en transhumance entre Maghreb et Afrique subsaharienne. Littrature, oralit, arts visuels, Hlne Tissires (2007) Paris: L'Harmattan, 293 pp., ISBN 978-2-296-02794-7 (pbk), 27,50

La Belgique entre deux sicles: laboratoire de la modernit, 18801914, Nathalie Aubert, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, Patrick McGuinness (eds) (2007) Bern: Peter Lang, 272 pp, ISBN 3-03910-528-0 (pbk), 52.20, 39.20

French in Canada: Language Issues, Maeve Conrick and Vera Regan (2007) Bern: Peter Lang, 186 pp, ISBN 978-3-03910-142-9 (pbk), 40, 26

L'autobiographie dans l'espace francophone. II. L'Afrique, Diaz Narbona Inmaculada (d.), (2005) Cadiz: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cadiz (srie Estudios de Francofonia), 175 pp., ISBN 84-9828-003-6 (pbk), 11.54

Les fruits du cyclone. Une gopotique de la Carabe, Daniel Maximin, (2006) Paris: Seuil, 223 pp., ISBN 2-02-063095-8 (pbk), 22

Migrance compare Comparing Migration: Les littratures du Canada et du Qubec: The literatures of Canada and Qubec, Marie Carrire & Catherine Khordoc (eds), (2008) Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt on Main, New York, Vienna: Peter Lang, 358 pp., ISBN 978-3-03911-317-0 (pbk), 45.30