International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2002

Starting from a discussion of the modalities commonly used in narrating and plotting the political changes arisen during the first half of the last decade in Cameroon, the paper explores two of the most recurrent tendencies in the researches: on the one hand, the idea of the non-property of the cameroonian case in the light of an objectivistic definition of the notion of 'transition to democracy'; on the other, the idea of a 'passive democratization', which make use, in a short-sighted way, of the classical hypothesis of the critical threshold of governability. The paper, by this comparative bias examines some of the problems on which the analysis of democratic processes ordinarily stumble, and signals along the discussion, the interesting character of an interpretation of the changes in terms of a causality of the probable, showing a closer attention to the importance of structural uncertainty in the conjunctures involved.

Both the British (1608–1947) and the French (1664–1954) states have a long history of involvement in India and both created an equality of oppression, applying the same type of orientalistic interpretation to women as they did to men. However, on occasions, the Hindu woman becomes an important vector in the colonizers' attempts to change cultural practices such as suttee (widow burning). This article uses Francophone sources (drama, novels and letters from missionaries) to track and analyse the male representations of the Hindu woman in (and outside) suttee. It concludes (applying Spivak) that the lack of self-representation for the indigenous woman meant her representation by others was a key colonial battlefield. Due to the failure of dreams of empire, Francophone writers display a fantasizing discourse about the French établissements, their inhabitants and also their women. With increasing British pan-Indian dominance after 1761, these writers used the colonised woman – colonized by the British – to implicitly criticize British rule (Jules Verne) and to elaborate a universal feminine voice and to interrogate gender in history (Hélène Cixous).

This article presents some aspects of the life of an emigrant Protestant Pied-Noir family in Algeria. Jacques Pichot and Eulalie Depussey were deported to Algeria following their participation in the June 1848 Paris riots because of the National Workshops closure by the Second Republic. In 1886, their son Alphonse married Henriette Orciere, a Waldensian from the Freissinieres valley in the French Alps who was part of the 1881 convoy to Algeria. After obtaining a free land grant in 1890 from the French government, the Pichot family settled in the village of Guiard 90 kilometres south-west of Oran. Their life provides fresh insight into the social history of the Pieds-Noirs within the broader political context of the Third Republic in colonial Algeria.

This paper has two complementary aims. The first is to examine the charges levelled at the way in which the francophone Algerian Malek Haddad wrote and to bring both 'that style', and those criticisms, into perspective, given both the undeniable influences on the writer and his own idiosyncratic views on 'le propre du conteur'. The second is to set Je t'offrirai une gazelle in a wider context of war literature and to show why its tangential approach to the Franco-Algerian conflict is arguably comparable not only to Mohammed Dib's Qui se souvient de la mer but also to, for example, Kurt Vonnegut's universally applauded indictment of the bombing of Dresden, Slaughterhouse Five. This illustrates that Haddad's novel is in fact one of the more honest of artistic reactions, and one of the more eloquent, to 'his' war, and indeed to the fact of war itself.

The renowned feminist theorist, Luce Irigaray, in her writings on feminine genealogies, states that the question for the Western philosopher is how to recover a buried feminine darkness, how to 'remember the forgotten mother'. In a number of works by Djura, a North-African Kabyle singer and storyteller known by her first name alone, and those of Maryse Condé, celebrated novelist, playwright and prolific writer from Guadeloupe, we find in the minds of the protagonists this desire to recover the 'forgotten mother' intimately linked to a quest to return to a homeland. The object of this study is to consider this quest for a 'mère-patrie' in texts that treat the theme of motherhood from vastly different cultural perspectives. Both of these authors explore diverse manifestations of this quest and treat such themes as imposed geographic exile, the postcolonial condition, selfactualization, and the recovery of a lost cultural and linguistic identity.