Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature

Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature PDF Author: ?tienne Achille
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198893175
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Contemporary French writers have embarked on various quests for new sources of thematic and formal inspiration which are increasingly tied to issues of postcolonial legacies. However, French literature has never been consistently examined through the lens of race, ethnicity, and its relation to (post)coloniality. Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature is the first scholarly study to engage with the figure of the White writer and explore the White literary gaze in contemporary France. The book highlights the inherent postcoloniality of White Hexagonal literature in a context marked by institutionalized colour-blindness, and offers a reflection on responsible writing in and about postcolonial France. The book identifies a set of formal features, functions, and aesthetic dispositions which reveal the ways in which White writers grapple with postcolonial subjects. It focuses on seven case studies featuring texts by Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Nicolas Fargues, Pierre Lemaitre, ?douard Louis, and Nicolas Mathieu. Achille and Pana?t? argue that it is imperative to recast the enduring boundedness of race and empire as a matter of equal concern to White and non-White writers.

Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature

Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature PDF Author: ?tienne Achille
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198893175
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contemporary French writers have embarked on various quests for new sources of thematic and formal inspiration which are increasingly tied to issues of postcolonial legacies. However, French literature has never been consistently examined through the lens of race, ethnicity, and its relation to (post)coloniality. Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature is the first scholarly study to engage with the figure of the White writer and explore the White literary gaze in contemporary France. The book highlights the inherent postcoloniality of White Hexagonal literature in a context marked by institutionalized colour-blindness, and offers a reflection on responsible writing in and about postcolonial France. The book identifies a set of formal features, functions, and aesthetic dispositions which reveal the ways in which White writers grapple with postcolonial subjects. It focuses on seven case studies featuring texts by Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Nicolas Fargues, Pierre Lemaitre, ?douard Louis, and Nicolas Mathieu. Achille and Pana?t? argue that it is imperative to recast the enduring boundedness of race and empire as a matter of equal concern to White and non-White writers.

Vénus Noire

Vénus Noire PDF Author: Robin Mitchell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820354333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

The Color of Liberty

The Color of Liberty PDF Author: Sue Peabody
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822384701
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
France has long defined itself as a color-blind nation where racial bias has no place. Even today, the French universal curriculum for secondary students makes no mention of race or slavery, and many French scholars still resist addressing racial questions. Yet, as this groundbreaking volume shows, color and other racial markers have been major factors in French national life for more than three hundred years. The sixteen essays in The Color of Liberty offer a wealth of innovative research on the neglected history of race in France, ranging from the early modern period to the present. The Color of Liberty addresses four major themes: the evolution of race as an idea in France; representations of "the other" in French literature, art, government, and trade; the international dimensions of French racial thinking, particularly in relation to colonialism; and the impact of racial differences on the shaping of the modern French city. The many permutations of race in French history—as assigned identity, consumer product icon, scientific discourse, philosophical problem, by-product of migration, or tool in empire building—here receive nuanced treatments confronting the malleability of ideas about race and the uses to which they have been put. Contributors. Leora Auslander, Claude Blanckaert, Alice Conklin, Fred Constant, Laurent Dubois, Yaël Simpson Fletcher, Richard Fogarty, John Garrigus, Dana Hale, Thomas C. Holt, Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Dennis McEnnerney, Michael A. Osborne, Lynn Palermo, Sue Peabody, Pierre H. Boulle, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Tyler Stovall, Michael G. Vann, Gary Wilder

Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France

Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France PDF Author: Susan Ireland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031307464X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
The first comprehensive survey of its kind in English, this book examines the experience of immigration as represented by authors who moved to France from the Caribbean, the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia after World War II. Essays by expert contributors address the literary productions of different ethnic groups while taking into account generational differences and the effects of class and gender. The focus on immigration, a subject which has moved to the center of many sensitive social and political debates, raises questions related to cultural hybridity, identity politics, border writing, and the status of minority literature within the traditional literary canon, all of which constitute vital areas of research in literary, cultural, and historical studies today. Included are broad socio-historical chapters on general topics related to immigration, along with chapters providing detailed readings of specific texts and authors. A key objective of the book is to consider the ways in which literary texts by authors of immigrant origin explore what it means to be French, and how these works shape debates about French national and cultural identity. The contributors discuss such issues as cultural hybridity, linguistic identity, and the textualization and theorization of otherness.

Palimpsestic Memory

Palimpsestic Memory PDF Author: Max Silverman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857458841
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book. It proposes a new model of ‘palimpsestic memory’, which the author defines as the condensation of different spatio-temporal traces, to describe these interconnections and defines the poetics and the politics of this composite form. In doing so it is argued that a poetics dependent on tropes and techniques, such as metaphor, allegory and montage, establishes connections across space and time which oblige us to perceive cultural memory not in terms of its singular attachment to a particular event or bound to specific ethno-cultural or national communities but as a dynamic process of transfer between different moments of racialized violence and between different cultural communities. The structure of the book allows for both the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm for cultural memory and individual case-studies of novels and films.

The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French

The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French PDF Author: Oana Panaïté
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1786948141
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This book explores the 'colonial fortune' in light of contemporary concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt and the persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation.

Postmodern Literature and Race

Postmodern Literature and Race PDF Author: Len Platt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107042488
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Postmodernism and Race explores the question of how dramatic shifts in conceptions of race in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been addressed by writers at the cutting edge of equally dramatic transformations of literary form. An opening section engages with the broad question of how the geographical and political positioning of experimental writing informs its contribution to racial discourses, while later segments focus on central critical domains within this field: race and performativity, race and the contemporary nation, and postracial futures. With essays on a wide range of contemporary writers, including Bernadine Evaristo, Alasdair Gray, Jhumpa Lahiri, Andrea Levy, and Don DeLillo, this volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of the politics and aesthetics of contemporary writing.

Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction PDF Author: Anne Grydehøj
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786837196
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This book offers a study of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and French crime fictions covering a fifty-year period. From 1965 to the present, both Scandinavian and French societies have undergone significant transformations. Twelve literary case studies examine how crime fictions in the respective contexts have responded to shifting social realities, which have in turn played a part in transforming the generic codes and conventions of the crime novel. At the centre of the book’s analysis is crime fiction’s negotiation of the French model of Republican universalism and the Scandinavian welfare state, both of which were routinely characterised as being in a state of crisis at the end of the twentieth century. Adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book investigates the interplay between contemporary Scandinavian and French crime narratives, considering their engagement with the relationship of the state and the citizen, and notably with identity issues (class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity in particular).

Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race PDF Author: Thomas Chatterton Williams
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393608875
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
A meditation on race and identity from one of our most provocative cultural critics. A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family’s multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a “black” father from the segregated South and a “white” mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of “black blood” makes a person black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he’d never rigorously reflected on its foundations—but the shock of his experience as the black father of two extremely white-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions. It is not that he has come to believe that he is no longer black or that his kids are white, Williams notes. It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of them—or anyone else, for that matter. Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.

Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels

Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels PDF Author: Emmanuel Buzay
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031166280
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book sheds a new light on the metafictional aspects of futuristic and science fiction novels, at the crossroads of information and media studies, possible worlds theories applied to cognitive narratology, questions related to the criticism of post-humanity, and, more broadly, contemporary French and Francophone literature. It examines the fictional minds of characters and their conceptions of resistance to the anticipated worlds they inhabit, particularly in novels by Pierre Bordage, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Houellebecq, Amin Maalouf, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Antoine Volodine, and Élisabeth Vonarburg. It also explores how corporal postures serve as a matrix for philosophical quests in novels by Amélie Nothomb, Alain Damasio, and Romain Lucazeau. More specifically, from the fictional readers’ points of view, it provides a critical approach to the mythologies of writing, in the wake of the French philosophical tales by authors including Cyrano de Bergerac and Voltaire, to question the traditionally expressed formulations of the mythologies of writing, that is, of the metaphors of the book (the book of life, nature, and the world), to rethink the idea of a humanity within its limits.