International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 21, Issue 1-2, 2018

In the post-war era, Europe relied on Caribbean migration to strengthen its work force, and France was no exception. From 1962 to 1983, 160,000 men and women migrated from Guadeloupe and Martinique to mainland France through the BUMIDOM (Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer). Technically speaking, these people were not immigrants because they remained in France despite undertaking a transatlantic voyage. However, the experiences of French Caribbeans in metropolitan France are almost always described as experiences of immigration. There is a distinct lack of Frenchlanguage literature that discusses this state-organized migration, in contrast to a relatively large corpus of texts by anglophone authors (such as Sam Selvon) that examines Caribbean migration to the United Kingdom. This article argues that bande dessinée fills the gap in representations of migration through an analysis of Péyi an nou, written by Jessica Oublié and illustrated by Marie-Ange Rousseau in 2017. Drawing on semiotic approaches to bande dessinée advocated by Laurence Grove, the article contends that Péyi an nou has successfully raised the visibility of migration from the French Caribbean, despite failing to make full advantage of the ways in which meaning is conveyed through the interaction of textual and visual layers.

Originally a nurse, Yolande Mukagasana became a survivor, author and playwright following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. La Mort ne veut pas de moi (Mukagasana and May 1997) and N’aie pas peur de savoir (Mukagasana and May 1999), her two autobiographical accounts written with Patrick May, articulate a breakdown in her physical, mental and emotional faculties, an inability to distinguish between self and other, and a death of self. Mukagasana gives an oral version of her testimony in Rwanda ’94. In this theatrical production, she conveys unspeakable elements of her experience – including a death of self – in a non-verbal manner, wherein her body language and position acquire their meaning in relation to others onstage. In Les Blessures du silence (Mukagasana and Kazinierakis 2001), Mukagasana’s experiences are also revealed and situated in relation to others through her interviews with ninety survivors and perpetrators in Rwanda. Overall, Mukagasana’s testimonies are interdependent, collaborative and dialogic. She employs other people’s voices and bodies to articulate her own experiences, and often communicates meaning through her position in relation to others. These ‘connective’ testimonies allow Mukagasana to compensate for a death of self and continue narrating even when she cannot speak in the first-person; they also allow her to rebuild social bonds and re-integrate into community.

Today, disability is a recognized issue globally, popular and quite widespread in various disciplines. A lot of work is done to highlight the difficulties and rights of disabled people. Literature reflects this reality by representing the sufferings, needs and progress of disabled people. Most discussions of disability have focused mainly on the physical aspect and little attention has been paid to other varieties of disability, such as social and legal. This article is an attempt to fill this gap. It analyses Fatou Diome’s Celles qui attendent and the other dimensions of disability that inspired the novelist. Using the legal approach proposed by Oladitan to explore literary texts and liberation literary principles also advocated by Oladitan, this study proposes to contextualize and categorize the characters of Diome as disabled people deprived from their fundamental rights and demonstrates the strategies of liberation adopted by disabled people.

Through the contemporary story of two Syrian brothers, whose tragic destinies lead one to death and the other to a mental institution, Eddé’s 2012 novel is not only prophetic in foreseeing the decomposition of the Syrian regime, but it is also a compelling reflection on what cosmopolitanism means for Middle Easterners today. This article examines how the Jann brothers can be interpreted as the two flips of the same coin, called capitalist imperialism: a brilliant lawyer working in Manhattan, Kamal, the older one, is the perfect cosmopolitan, in the modern European sense of the term, while his brother, Mourad, has become a jihadist fundamentalist who is about to commit a terrorist attack in Paris. The novel deconstructs the modern ideal of cosmopolitanism, based on Kant’s philosophy, and fleshed out through postmodern and postcolonial discourses, while suggesting that globalization has, in fact, not produced a new cosmos but rather that it renews colonial divisions in new ways: on the one hand, there are ‘recyclable men’ (like Kamal, the useful – or, in the capitalist rhetoric, ‘successful’ – Arab), and on the other hand, there are ‘disposable men’ (like Mourad, who wants to destroy his life himself), who, after having been exploited and then rejected by the system become ‘perishable’ tools for the advance of a competing cosmopolitanism (as another form of imperialism), grounded in the Islamic fundamentalist ideology and made possible by global capitalism.

This article analyses the methods that Rachid Boudjedra uses to deconstruct some common myths surrounding the making of the ‘Algerian national identity’. It examines the burgeoning, in the background of the author’s very first novels, of a maleficent fundamentalist ideology seen as the product of a surreptitious alliance and undertakings between the ‘Membres Secrets du Clan’ represented by the Algerian regime and the ‘faux dévots’ represented by the Islamic fundamentalists to rule over Algeria. The article also points to the motives that led Rachid Boudjedra to use classical Arabic in his commitment to win over sympathy and support of a hostile Arab-speaking critical reception. Finally, it addresses Boudjedra’s various techniques of demythifiying nostalgia for a fairy-tale Algerian past.

The francophone organization is at a turning point in its history in a perspective of a global context that is undergoing changes in geopolitical, socio-economic and climatic conditions. Since the second Intergovernmental Conference of Frenchspeaking Countries in March 1970 in Niamey, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) has never faced so many complex challenges. This concurrent circumstances require the OIF to consider radical restructuring to redefine its long-term objectives and, of course, a reassessment of its mission in order to bring it into synergy with the expectations of more than 220 million individuals in the large francophone family. This article is meant to be considered as a suggestion to the authorities of the Francophonie, to assess the extent of the gaps that need eliminating in order to measure up with the Commonwealth, as an important step forward.

This article is a contribution to the debate on the relevance and actuality of the use of the term ‘black diaspora’ to refer to black populations scattered throughout the world. Limited to the African American population and that of the African diaspora in Europe, the analysis aims to examine the concept of ‘black diaspora’ through a comparative reading of African and African American fictional texts. The fundamental question is whether the term diaspora, supposing ‘the maintenance of a community consciousness beyond dispersal’, can gather Africans and African Americans, knowing that the link of these one with Africa goes back several centuries. The hypothesis developed in this reflection is that this filiation, rather than being analysed with regard to the upholding and maintenance of african origins, could be sought in the current living conditions of these two populations.

The purpose of this study is to re-examine the stories of francophone Vietnamese authors in an interdisciplinary perspective. It will be a question of putting them back in their writing conditions to release their social and historical functions as well as their role in the reconstruction of the personal identity. Thus, this study will focus on two main dimensions of the narratives: on the one hand, as narrative discourse, the stories of these authors participate in the testimonial writing, in which the subject appears as a witness, an observer of his life and society, and on the other hand, this testimonial writing inevitably implies a way of designating and reassessing existence, so it is a process of re-configuring individual identity in the narrative.

Figures de la révolution africaine: De Kenyatta à Sankara, Saïd Bouamama (2017) Paris: La Découverte, 320 pp., ISBN: 9782707194077, poche, 12.50€

Poétiques de la violence et récits francophones contemporains, Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François (2017) Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 300 pp., ISBN: 9789004336735, h/bk, €110

Translating the Postcolonial in Multilingual Contexts, Judith Misrahi-Barak and Srilata Ravi (eds) (2017) Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 279 pp., ISBN: 9782367812410, 24€

Nationalist African Cinema: Legacy and Transformations, Sada Niang (2014) Lanham: Lexington Books, 152 pp., ISBN: 9780739149072, h/bk, £65.00

Thiaroye 1944: Histoire et mémoire d’un massacre colonial, Martin Mourre (2017) Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 239 pp., ISBN: 9782753553453, 20€

Algeria. Nation, Culture and Transnationalism: 1988–2015, Patrick Crowley (ed.) (2017) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 285 pp., ISBN: 9781786940216, h/bk, £85

Étrangers au Maghreb. Maghrébins à l’étranger (XVIIe–XXIe siècles), Riadh Ben Khalifa (ed.) (2017) Paris: Karthala & Tunis: IRMC, 266 pp., ISBN: 9782811118938, 25€

La Littérature mauricienne contemporaine: Un espace de création postcolonial entre revendications identitaires et ouvertures interculturelles, Markus Arnold (2017) Berlin: LIT, 562 pp., ISBN: 9783643131935, 39.90€

Postcolonial Fiction and Sacred Scripture: Rewriting the Divine?, Sura Qadiri (2014) London: Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 134 pp., ISBN: 9781907975813, h/bk, £75

Women’s Lives in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature, Florence Ramond Jurney and Karen McPherson (eds) (2016) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 169 pp., ISBN: 9783319408491, h/bk, $99,99

Queer Maghrebi French: Languages, Temporalities, Transfiliations, Denis M. Provencher (2017) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 314 pp., ISBN: 9781781382790, p/bk, £20

Masculinités maghrébines: Nouvelles perspectives sur la culture, la littérature et le cinéma, Claudia Gronemann and Michael Gebhard (eds) (2018) Leiden and Boston: Brill and Rodopi, 279 pp., ISBN: 9789004341562, h/bk, $138

Corps des femmes et espaces genrés arabo-musulmans, Corinne Fortier and Safaa Monqid (eds) (2017) Paris: Karthala, 265 pp., ISBN: 9782811118075, 24€