Francophone Cultures And Geographies Of Identity

This collection of original essays challenges French-centered conceptions of francophonie as the shaping force of the production and study of the French language, literature, culture, film, and art both inside and outside mainland France. The traditional view of francophone cultural productions as offshoots of their hexagonal avatar is replaced by a pluricentric conception that reads interrelated aspects of francophonie as products of specific contexts, conditions, and local ecologies that emerged from post/colonial encounters with France and other colonizing powers. The twenty-one papers grouped into six thematic parts focus on distinctive literary, linguistic, musical, cinematographic, and visual forms of expression in geographical areas long defined as the peripheries of the French-speaking world: the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, Quebec, and hexagonal cities with a preponderance of immigrant populations. These contested sites of French collective identity offer a rich formulation of distinctly local, francophone identities that do not fit in with concepts of linguistic and ethnic exclusiveness, but are consistent with a pluralistic demographic shift and the true face of Frenchness that is, indeed, plural.

The dissolution of the French Empire and the ensuing rush of immigration have led to the formation of diasporas and immigrant cultures that have transformed French society and the immigrants themselves. Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World examines the impact of this postcolonial immigration on identity in France and in the Francophone world, which has encompassed parts of Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. Immigrants bear cultural traditions within themselves, transform “host” communities, and are, in turn, transformed. These migrations necessarily complicate ideals of national literature, culture, and history, forcing a reexamination and a rearticulation of these ideals. Exploring a variety of texts informed by these transnational conceptions of identity and space, the contributors to this volume reveal the vitality of Francophone studies within a broad range of disciplines, periods, and settings. They remind us that the idea and reality of Francophonie is not a late twentieth-century phenomenon but something that grows out of long-term interactions between colonizer and colonized and between peoples of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religions. Truly interdisciplinary, this collection engages conceptions of identity with respect to their physical, geographic, ethnic, and imagined realities.

Questions of space, place and identity have become increasingly prominent throughout the arts and humanities in recent times. This study begins by investigating the reasons for this growth in interest and analyses the underlying assumptions on which interdisciplinary discussions about space are often based. After tracing back the history of contact between Geography and Literary Studies from both disciplinary perspectives, it goes on to discuss recent academic work in the field and seeks to forge a new conceptual framework through which contemporary discussions of space and literature can operate. The book then moves on to a thorough application of the interdisciplinary model that it has established. Having argued that the experience of contemporary space has rendered questions of home and belonging particularly pressing, it undertakes detailed analysis of how these phenomena are articulated in a selection of recent French life writing texts. The close, text-led readings reveal that whilst not often highlighted for their relevance to the analysis of space, these works do in fact narrate the impact of some of the most significant cultural experiences of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust and the AIDS crisis, upon geo-cultural senses of identity. Home is shown to be a deeply problematic, yet strongly desired, element of the contemporary world. The book concludes by addressing the underlying thesis that contemporary life writing might provide just the 'postmodern maps' that could help not only literary scholars, but also geographers, better understand the world today. Key names and concepts: Serge Doubrovsky - Hervé Guibert - Fredric Jameson - Philippe Lejeune - Régine Robin; Autofiction - Cultural Geography - Interdisciplinarity - Place and Identity - Postmodernism - Space - Postmodern Space - Literary Studies - Twentieth-Century Life Writing.

A collection of studies of the experiences, portrayals and representations through the eyes of writers, dramatists, artists and policy makers based in French-speaking areas. The work covers: -- the French influence in the Francophone world -- cultural variation in Francophonia -- interdisciplinary (aesthetics, language, culture & identity, history, etc..). -- the 'cultural production' of Francophones. -- relations between metropolitan France and its former colonies.This is of interest to observers of the French language and seekers of information on culture, history and politics in francophone countries.

Although considerable scholarly attention has been paid to some of the largest of the francophone groups - particularly those in Quebec and Louisiana - this collection represents an impressive attempt to include many of the other centers of French language and culture in a single coherent historical and geographical perspective. The essays also consider the variety and similarities at these centers as minority islands within an aggressive and alien anglophonic sea. The volume's contributors offer a sophisticated analysis of the many aspects of the New World French experience, which began in the early seventeenth century and extends to the present day. Most of them address the history of a population, its interaction with the surrounding anglophone culture, and the measure and pattern of assimilation to it.

Our choice of linguistic code is one of the most fundamental ways open to us of establishing our membership of some groups and our distance from others. This symbolic value of language may often leave it open to exploitation, especially by the state. The present volume demonstrates how the multi-faceted nature of the concept of identity makes its relationship with language both complex and unpredictable. Because of its particular historical and social characteristics, the French language provides especially fertile territory for the exploration of this theme. Four main axes stand out in the French context: 'institutionalised' identity, regional identity, social identity and competing identities. These themes are explored from different perspectives by leading experts from Britain, Europe and North America: Roger Baines, Kate Beeching, Danielle Bouverot, David Cowling, Edith Esch, François Gadet, Penelope Gardner-Chloros, David Hornsby, John E. Joseph, Dominique Lagorgette, Jacques Landrecies, Dawn Marley, Nicolas Pepin, Tim Pooley, Gilles Siouffi, Albert Valdman, Barbara von Gemmingen and Chantal Wionet.

The present collection of essays follows in the wake of recent work in cultural geography challenging the idea that maps are scientifically neutral entities, or that space, unlike time, is immobile. In defining space, place and geography as forms of textuality, the essays collected in this volume examine the ways in which postcolonial and metropolitan literary and filmic texts in French can at once inscribe and produce place and space, and thereby participate in forms of “discursive geographies.” Contributors: François Bon; Alexandre Dauge-Roth; Habiba Deming; Zakaria Fatih; Jeanne Garane; Patricia Geesey; Greg Hainge; Sirène Harb; Jean-Luc Joly; Chantal Kalisa; Michel Laronde; Valérie Loichot; Mary McCullough; Michael O’Riley; Pascale Perraudin; Walter Putnam; Antoine Stéphani; Abdourahman A. Waberi.