Discursive Geographies / Géographies discursives

Discursive Geographies / Géographies discursives
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004501371

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.

Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity

Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity
Author: Zsuzsanna Fagyal
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2014-07-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443863440

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.

Writing the Heavenly Frontier

Writing the Heavenly Frontier
Author: Denice Turner
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2011-03-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9042032979

Writing the Heavenly Frontier celebrates the early voices of the air as it examines the sky as a metaphorical and political landscape. While flight histories usually focus on the physical dangers of early aviation, this book introduces the figurative liabilities of ascension. Early pilot-writers not only grappled with an unwieldy machine; they also grappled with poetics that were extremely selective. Tropes that cast Charles Lindbergh as the transcendent hero of the new millennium were the same ones that kept women, black Americans, and indigenous peoples imaginatively tethered to the ground. The most popular flight autobiographies in the United States posited a hero who rose from the mundane to the miraculous; and yet the most startling autobiographies point out the social factors that limited or forbade vertical movement—both literally and figuratively. A survey of pilot writing, the book will appeal to flight enthusiasts and people interested in American autobiography and culture. But it will also appeal strongly to readers interested in the poetics and politics of place.

Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Literature

Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Literature
Author: Chantal Kalisa
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0803226888

Chantal Kalisa examines the ways in which women writers lift taboos imposed on them by their society and culture and challenge readers with their unique perspectives on violence. Comparing women from different places and times, Kalisa treats types of violence such as colonial, familial, linguistic, and war-related, specifically linked to dictatorship and genocide. She examines Caribbean writers Michele Lacrosil, Simone Schwartz-Bart, Gisèle Pineau, and Edwidge Danticat, and Africans Ken Begul, Calixthe Beyala, Nadine Bar, and Monique Ilboudo. She also includes Sembène Ousmane and Frantz Fanon.

Reimagining Resistance in Gisèle Pineau’s Works

Reimagining Resistance in Gisèle Pineau’s Works
Author: Lisa Connell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2022-10-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1666911003

As one of the most prominent voices from and about the French Caribbean, Gisèle Pineau has garnered significant scholarly attention; however, this interest has culminated in precious few volumes devoted entirely to the author and her work. In response to this lack of in-depth critical attention, Reimagining Resistance in Gisèle Pineau’s Works brings together a range of perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic and across the Pacific to explore the unique ways in which Gisèle Pineau’s works redefine the concept of resistance, particularly as it relates to gender, race, history, and Antillean identity. As this volume ultimately demonstrates, resistance holds up a mirror to the political, economic, and cultural forces that have shaped the past, construct the present, and build the future. It argues that Pineau’s characters open the narrative frame for reading them and move us beyond the categories of the wholly defiant or the inherently complicit. Above all, as they invite us to reimagine resistance, they expose our expectations and hopefully shift our understanding about what it means to rise and to fall in a world we seek to call our own.

Writing Worlds

Writing Worlds
Author: Trevor J. Barnes
Publisher: London ; New York : Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 1992
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780415054997

The purpose of this book is to explore issues of geographical description from a poststructuralist sensibility. Focusing on landscape representation, the authors organize their discussion of geographical writings around the three themes of discourse, text and metaphor.

Native Tongue, Stranger Talk

Native Tongue, Stranger Talk
Author: Michelle Hartman
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2014-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0815652690

Can a reality lived in Arabic be expressed in French? Can a French-language literary work speak Arabic? In Native Tongue, Stranger Talk Hartman shows how Lebanese women authors use spoken Arabic to disrupt literary French, with sometimes surprising results. Challenging the common claim that these writers express a Francophile or “colonized” consciousness, this book demonstrates how Lebanese women writers actively question the political and cultural meaning of writing in French in Lebanon. Hartman argues that their innovative language inscribes messages about society into their novels by disrupting class-status hierarchies, narrow ethno-religious identities, and rigid gender roles. Because the languages of these texts reflect the crucial issues of their times, Native Tongue, Stranger Talk guides the reader through three key periods of Lebanese history: the French Mandate and Early Independence, the Civil War, and the postwar period. Three novels are discussed in each time period, exposing the contours of how the authors “write Arabic in French” to invent new literary languages.

Transnational French Studies

Transnational French Studies
Author: Alec G. Hargreaves
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1846318106

The 2007 manifesto in favour of a "Litterature-monde en francais" has generated new debates in both "francophone" and "postcolonial" studies. Praised by some for breaking down the hierarchical division between "French" and "Francophone" literatures, the manifesto has been criticized by othersfor recreating that division through an exoticizing vision that continues to privilege the publishing industry of the former colonial metropole. Does the manifesto signal the advent of a new critical paradigm destined to render obsolescent those of "francophone" and/or "postcolonial" studies? Or isit simply a passing fad, a glitzy but ephemeral publicity stunt generated and promoted by writers and publishing executives vis-a-vis whom scholars and critics should maintain a skeptical distance? Does it offer an all-embracing transnational vista leading beyond the confines of postcolonialism orreintroduce an incipient form of neocolonialism even while proclaiming the end of the centre/periphery divide? In addressing these questions, leading scholars of "French", "Francophone" and "postcolonial" studies from around the globe help to assess the wider question of the evolving status ofFrench Studies as a transnational field of study amid the challenges of globalization.