International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 19, Issue 3-4, 2016

This study examines youth dystopia and fractured silences in the theatrical writings of Maïssa Bey. These silences are a narrative strategy to represent the ambivalent experiences that dominate and circumscribe the lives of Algerian youth – clandestine migration, child suicide, and intellectual confinement in the prison system. These fractures are located in the liminal spaces between speech and silence, life and death, hope and despair, resistance and surrender to provide alter-narratives articulated from the margins of society. The characters’ painful silences are nonetheless reconfigured into a fragmented and introverted language of thwarted words as a means to give voice to silence and social dispossession. Bey’s writings represent a form of testimonial writing and a denunciation of Algeria’s postcolonial malaise.

This article examines the poems collected in Ferrements (1960) – the last collection of poems that Aimé Césaire would publish for another two decades – against the Cold War context of Césaire’s 1956 separation from Soviet communism. Critics tend to view this collection as either a reflection of Césaire’s disillusionment with radical politics or a turn away from avant-garde poetry. This article makes the case that the poems of Ferrements are in fact crucial to the development of Césaire’s political thought in this period of ideological rupture. As this article demonstrates, Césaire uses the conceptual tools of poetry towards a systematic analysis of the changed geopolitical situation of the global Cold War. The article focuses especially on Césaire’s extensive use of geographic imagery, his elegies for insurrectionary figures, and congruities between the poetics of Ferrements and the geopolitical stance of non-alignment.

This article explores the way literature informs and is informed by the perception of urban postcolonial space. Chroniques De La Mauvaise Herbe, the first novel of Vincent Vuibert (2013), marks a new threshold in the Francophone oceanian literary field, at first by the influences claimed by the author and then by the representation renewed of Noumea. Among these influences is the contemporary U.S. thriller in which Vuibert renews an aesthetics of the marginality to stack them in the colonial and postcolonial segmentarities. His characters seem to evolve along borders established from regimes of political, historic and economic powers, which they undergo or also try to thwart. On the other hand, this novel joins in a discursive tradition centred on the city inaugurated by the first Kanak political militancy of the 1970s and which was strengthened in the literary field with the signature of the political agreements of 1988 and 1998. It is a question here of showing how the novel draws routes in Noumea who are so many ways to describe oppositions and encounters.

This article examines the role of urban space in two novels: Nedjma by Kateb Yacine and Le chien d’Ulysse by Salim Bachi. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s observations about the colonial city in Les damnés de la terre and Michel de Certeau’s ideas on subversive practices of city dwellers in his L’invention du quotidien, this article explores the protagonists’ experiences in the colonial or postcolonial city and the way they remap the cities with their personal narratives. It demonstrates that in the face of urban transformation brought about by colonial or postcolonial violence the mythical dimension of the city – its legends, memories and myths harking back to a supposedly pristine Algerian past – is irretrievable. With particular reference to Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory and Max Silverman’s idea of palimpsestic memory, this article argues that violent nature of the cities’ past and present, along with their vanished cultural memory, prohibits the protagonists from creating a coherent historical narrative around the city, and in a wider sense from developing and sustaining the future character of Algerian cultural and national identity.

Third World feminists have long worked to bring to postcolonial studies a more nuanced reading of women’s lives in formerly colonized spaces. Postcolonial drama provides a fitting venue for such Third World feminists desiring to represent the realities of postcolonial African women. This article brings into conversation the post-colonial dramatists, the francophone playwrights, Kangni Alemdjrodo and Gustave Akapko, who have heretofore been unmentioned for their work as a catalyst for social change or as commentators on Third World feminism. Alemdjrodo and Akapko, both Togolese playwrights, are significant for their efforts to create space for debates over the complicated social expectations and identity negotiations of contemporary African women. In particular, Almedjrodo’s play Chemin de Croix (2005) and Akakpo’s play Catharsis (2006) deserve further analysis for their exploration through drama of the dilemmas many African women face when choosing between ‘traditional’ views of African femininity and western feminism as part of a personal struggle for autonomy and empowerment.

We Are Imazighen: The Development of Algerian Berber Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture, Fazia Aitel (2014) Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 324 pp., ISBN-10: 0813049393, h/bk, $74.95

La Transmission littéraire et cinématographique du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda, Virginie Brinker (2015) Paris: Classiques Garnier, 481 pp., ISBN: 9782812432545, p/bk, £44.48

Littératures québécoise et acadienne contemporaines au prisme de la ville, Anne-Yvonne Julien and André Magord (2014) Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 528 pp., ISBN: 9782753532892, p/bk, 24 €

A Practical Guide to French Harki Literature, Keith Moser (ed.) (2014) Lanham: Lexington Books, xv + 256 pp., ISBN: 9780739190098, h/bk, $90.00 (£60.00)

Francographies: Identité et altérité dans les espaces francophones européens, Bainbrigge Susan, Joy Charnley et Caroline Verdier (éd.) (2010) New York: Peter lang Publishing, 418 pp., ISBN: 9781433103483, h/bk

Aimé Césaire à l’oeuvre, Cheymol Marc et Philippe Ollé-Laprune (2010) Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), 270 pp., ISBN: 9782813000408, p/bk, €34.00