International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 12, Issue 4, 2009

The chief motivation behind this article is to investigate the spiritual context behind the second French expansion in the latter part of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth as reflected in painted representations of the colonized East. It arises from a simple curiosity regarding the impact if any of the new and by then politically dominant concept of Lacit on French representations of colonized territories. This context ought to set the second French expansion apart from other colonial ventures, such as the first French expansion, under the staunchly Catholic rule of the absolute monarchy, but also from the moral justifications for empire invoked by other expansionist Western (Christian) powers. The investigation is conducted here through the study and contextualization of painted representations of the time, some of which are usually labelled Orientalist, whilst others have been recognized as forming part of the French aesthetic canon. The outcome is shown to be a clash between an aestheticism inspired by the mystical East in painters of exotic themes and the increasingly secularist mentality of the time. This clash stands to reason, but has rarely been emphasized in studies of French colonialism. The article highlights a number of complexities, tensions and paradoxes prompted by examples drawn from the painted work of the time, from J.-L. Grme to Etienne Dinet.

In La femme sans spulture, Assia Djebar relates the story of a communal obsession shared by Algerian women of her native city: the narration and overdue inscription of Zoulikha's story, a heroine of the Algerian War of Independence who was tortured, killed, and abandoned without a burial place. This article analyzes this obsession in terms of a desire for memory, an archive fever articulated by the voices of possessed women or meskounates. The women who tell the story of this member of the resistance are inhabited by her spectral voice, a narrative voice without a locus of enunciation. A voice coming from a different place, from the Other who speaks through them and emerges into the text in monologue form allows the re-inscription of Zoulikha's story in a new discursive space of feminine knowledge. This knowledge inaugurates a postcolonial discourse within which the desire for memory articulated as archive fever is a spectral intruder, a space beyond the text confined within the text that transgresses the official discourse on the Algerian War of Independence.

Shot in a distinctively lyrical, experimental style, Laurent Chevallier's documentary Circus Baobab (2001) chronicled the pioneering tour of le premier cirque acrobatique arien d'Afrique across the Republic of Guinea. The film evinced a reverence for Guinea's cultural patrimonies, the sociological and environmental attributes of its interior regions and the spellbinding dance and acrobatic talents of the local youths who were the stars of the travelling spectacle. Despite these romantic elements, Chevallier's venture proved in significant respects a complicated reflection of colonial and postcolonial cultural politics and conflicts. This article explores some of the complex dynamics that shaped Chevallier's multifaceted project, as well as the disjunctive meanings and values ascribed to it by metropolitan and Guinean spectators. In its emphasis on the political volatility of Guinean youth performance arts over time, it hopes to expand the domains of interest and interpretive frameworks shaping cultural studies of Francophone West Africa.

This article examines the importance of the natural environment in Francis Bebey's novels. Using environmental concepts to study the city/countryside opposition, considered respectively as anthropogenic and autogenic spaces, it illustrates the interactions between the two spaces as well as between humans and nature. It comes to the conclusion that in Bebey's works, ecological beliefs are important constituents of the postcolonial discourse from which the novels derive a significant political meaning.

Who am I is a question often asked in African, African American and Afro-Caribbean literatures. Lonora Miano answers this question of identity crisis in Tels des astres teints by exploring the intricacies of naming and identity of Diasporic Sub-Saharan Africans within the French space. Naming becomes a performative act, which defines the script of existence. The onomastics at work in Tels des astres teints operates as a poetic of identity (de) construction transforming the dichotomization of collective history and personal history into a transcendental mode of reasoning that attemps to negotiate historical tragedy and breakages of the self. This study offers an approach of self-knowing through naming. The act of naming gives birth to a concrete and abstract reality that operates from a psychological fracture. A productive tension dwells within this fracture that it is necessary to understand. Structuring her story through free adaptation of jazz themes, Miano displays a dissonant and resilient narrative polyphony through which identity belongs to the realm of becoming.

This article aims to elucidate a baroque aesthetic practice in the political and literary spheres of postcolonial Francophone Africa, which extends beyond the binary oppositions of power and powerlessness in a relational dynamic of subversive complicity. The baroque character and correlative baroque practices in the politics of the Postcolony identified by Achille Mbembe are depicted, embodied and transmitted in the literary production of postcolonial African writers. This baroque reorientation opens new ways of reading stylistic innovations and political encoding in a framework that blurs the line between reality and representation, which is exemplified in the novelistic practice of Henri Lopes and Sony Labou Tansi, among others. Accordingly, the baroque as a theoretical approach to reading postcolonial Francophone literature and its socio-political context engenders an understanding of how art and literature can represent and embody, in a certain sense, different forms of what douard Glissant depicts as baroque: being-in-the-world.

Rachid O and Abdellah Taa are Moroccan authors whose works and lives have much in common. Their texts often identified as novels on the title page are autobiographical, and recount their sexual awakening, first under the influence of a member of their family, and then with Europeans. This awakening to love goes hand in hand with their initiation to European culture. Though both authors have warm memories of their childhood, they cannot complete their sexual awakening in Morocco. While Europe is indispensable to the affirmation of their sexual identity, their day-to-day relationship with their new environment is sometimes difficult.

Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed, Martin Evans and John Phillips (2007) New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, xv + 352 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-10881-1 (hbk), US$ 35.00/19.99

Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas, Michelle Keown, David Murphy and James Procter (eds) (2009) London: Palgrave Macmillan, 227+3 pp., ISBN 978-0-230-54708-7 (hbk), 50

Contemporary Matriarchies in Cameroonian Francophone Literature: On est ensemble, Cheryl Toman (2008) Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, 187 pp., ISBN 978-1-883479-60-2 (hbk), $45.95

Deux littratures francophones en dialogue: du Qubec et de la Suisse romande, Martin Dor and Doris Jakubec (eds) (2004) Quebec: Presses de l'Universit Laval, 378 pp., ISBN 2-7637-8095-4 (pbk), $35

Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth Century French Fiction, Jennifer Yee (2008) Oxford: Legenda, 136 pp., ISBN 978-1-905981-51-9 (hbk), 40 ($75 US).

Les langages de la mmoire: Littrature, mdias et gnocide au Rwanda, Pierre Halen and Jacques Walter (eds) (2008) Metz: Universit Paul Verlaine-Metz Centre de Recherches critures, 403 pp., ISBN 978-2-917403-00-6 (pbk), 22

Questions de communication. Mdias, mdiations, immigrations, FLEURY Batrice et Jacques WALTER (dirs) (2007) Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, Srie actes, N^o 4, 200 pp., ISSN 1633-5961 (pbk), 20.00

The Other Hybrid Archipelago: Introduction to the Literatures and Cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean, Peter Hawkins (2007) Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 207 pp., ISBN 978-0-7391-1676-0 (hbk), 43