International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2003

Michel Leiris’s ongoing fascination with jazz music is instructive for several reasons. His initial encounters with jazz played an important catalytic role for his ethnographic project, sparking the interest in ‘l’art nègre’ that would eventually lead him to Africa, and setting him on a search for an Archimedean vantage point: one able to gain insight into different forms of cultural production by attempting to place itself outside of all existing cultures. This Archimedean ideal enabled him to apply lessons learned from jazz to his own literary project - not by engaging in merely imitative practices, but by rethinking the surrealist theories of inspiration, subjectivity, and expression in terms of improvisation and vocal performance. Accordingly, this essay attempts to show how jazz influenced Leiris’s literary and anthropological projects by looking below the surface, emphasizing the music’s influence on the semiotic functioning of his autobiographical texts.

This article looks at the recent approaches taken vis-à-vis the sentence structure of English and French. It looks at the different movements operating at D-structure and the possible reasons that lead to the verb in French raising to T and the English verb remaining in [spec, VP] triggering the lowering of T. These movements, we explain convincingly we hope, by arguing that they are triggered by AGR. In French AGR is strong and allows verb movements from V to T and to C. In English, on the other hand, AGR is weak and as a result, the verb remains unable to raise to T. This inability to move leads to the lowering of T to V level for support. This reasoning is backed up by evidence which demonstrates that English AGR weakness is observed in its reliance on the ‘do-support’ for its interrogatives. Further evidence is also supplied through the study of modal and auxiliary verbs.

This study explores recent discussions surrounding the concept of métissage as a term which, though it may no longer be appropriate to describe the cultural hybridity of the postmodern or postmodern context, still carries significant traces of historical practices of oppression, psychological disturbances, sexual exploitation and struggles for the survival of cultural identities. An examination of some of the ideological, mythical and symbolic structures of métissage allows us to envisage ways in which these traces may translate into literary forms. Two novels of Henri Lopes - Le Chercheur d’Afriques and Le Lys et le Flamboyant - are themselves explorations of métissage that playfully interrupt our perceptions of racial and cultural identity without ever giving up on their métis characters’ desire for cultural belonging. The results are both aesthetically challenging and suggestive of a continuing malaise in postcolonial African literatures.

The Ninth Summit of Heads of State and Government of countries having the French language en partage took place in Beirut, Lebanon, last October, with 40 heads of state and representatives of 16 other members of la Francophonie in attendance. Originally scheduled for October 2001, the gathering had to be postponed for a year, following the attacks of September 11 (i.e. the previous month). The theme chosen for the Summit, ‘le dialogue des cultures’, promoted as one of the francophone movement’s goals in the first article of its charter, thus took on a much greater significance in Beirut than it might have otherwise done, particularly given the fact that this was the first francophone summit to be held on Arab soil.