Charles Forsdick

Interpreting 2004: Politics, Memory, Scholarship

This article reflects on the presence (and absence) of references to Haiti in the events surrounding the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Great Britain. It suggests that a growing public awareness of and media attention to Haiti is associated with an increased interest among academic researchers. The article concludes with a reflection on the impact and the implications of the intensive scholarly engagement with Haiti since 2004, outlining reservations and suggesting elements of a future research agenda.

'Direction les oubliettes de l'histoire': witnessing the past in the contemporary French polar

* Address for correspondence: School of Modern Languages, University of Liverpool, L69 3BX. e-mail: c.forsdick@liverpool.ac.uk At the end of this century it has for the first time become possible to see what a world may be like in which the past, including the past in the present, has lost its role, in which the old maps and charts which guided human beings, singly or collectively, through life no longer represent the landscape through which we move, the sea on which we sail. In which we do not know where our journey is taking us, or even ought to take us.’

Victor Segalen and the aesthetics of diversity : journeys between cultures

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS INTRODUCTION: VICTOR SEGALEN AND THE AESTHETICS OF DIVERSITY 1. Defining the Exotic: Exotcism as an Approach to Radical Diversity 2. Exoticism and Empire: Colonial Literature and Post-Colonial Critique 3. Polynesia and Difference 4. China and Alterity 5. Towards a New Practice of Exoticism CONCLUSION SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

The Rise of the Francophone Postcolonial Intellectual: The Emergence of a Tradition

Although discussions of the French intellectual often address engagement with anti-colonialism and the decolonisation process more generally, most notably in relation to the Algerian War of Independence, critical attention is rarely directed at the existence of a wider yet related intellectual culture that may connect the disparate parts of the French-speaking world. This article explores the rise of the postcolonial intellectual in this politico-cultural and linguistic space, and asks whether such a figure may be seen as part of a coherent tradition. Foregrounding the interdependency and regular overlap of ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’ intellectual cultures, the study creates connections between thinkers in metropolitan France and its former colonies, placed here in a dialectical, conjunctive rather than in a binary, disjunctive relationship. The article explores three case studies – those of Victor Segalen (central to the work of such key postcolonial thinkers as Edouard Glissant and Abdelkebir Khatibi), Léopold Sédar Senghor and Frantz Fanon – in order to underline the complex genealogies of the emergent tradition it identifies. It concludes with a consideration of the definitive role of the postcolonial intellectual in debates regarding the legacy of colonialism in contemporary France.

Translation in the Caribbean, the Caribbean in Translation

Those working on the Caribbean have regularly adopted the figures and practices of translation in their work and also have devoted attention to the study of various translational processes. The presence of the Caribbean in translation studies remains, however, considerably less evident. This essay reflects on this missed cross-disciplinary rendezvous, foregrounding the importance of questions of cultural translation in a Caribbean context but at the same time considering the practical intralinguistic and interlinguistic underpinnings of any analysis of translation in the Caribbean (and of the Caribbean in translation). Drawing on a number of examples, ranging from the relief effort following the Haitian earthquake in 2010 to current CARIFORUM and CARICOM language policy, the discussion focuses on the region as a translation zone. The essay concludes that although the Caribbean may be usefully defined in terms of translation, it is also essential—in reciprocal terms—that wider discussion of translation should itself be actively “Caribbeanized.”

Travel, slavery, memory: thanatourism in the French Atlantic

In one of the inaugural studies of thanatourism and slave heritage, Tony Seaton and Graham Dann claim that there are suggestive overlaps between, on the one hand, Atlantic slavery and its afterlives, and, on the other, contemporary tourism, not least because each of these phenomena may be seen to perpetuate asymmetries of power and the persistent domination of one group by another. This is a connection evoked elsewhere, notably by DerekWalcott in his recent collection of poems,White Egrets (2010), where he includes an elegy to a beach that will, he fears, soon be altered irremediably by the construction of a new hotel. He compares this development to earlier, more openly violent, forms of expropriation and exploitation:

Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart in China: travel writing as stereoscopic and polygraphic form

This article studies the competing accounts of a 1935 journey undertaken by Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart, News from Tartary (1936) and Forbidden Journey/Oasis interdites (1937). It explores the ways in which these multiple textualisations permit reflection on the nature of such a stereoscopic rewriting of a shared journey, addressing the gendered comparatism to which this emphasis often lends itself, whilst outlining the potential pitfalls of reducing such comparison to questions of gender; at the same time, the study investigates also alternative approaches to Maillarts multiple re-textualisations of this journey in her own work, associating this with the concept of ‘polygraphy’.

Madison Smartt Bell's Toussaint at the Crossroads: The Haitian Revolutionary between History and Fiction

Central to Madison Smartt Bells trilogy of novels on the Haitian Revolution is the character of Toussaint Louverture. The article considers how Bells Toussaint fits into two centuries of representations of the revolutionary leader, exploring in particular the ways in which his character is to be situated between historiography and fiction. It addresses the extensive documentary foundations of Bells fictional account, while highlighting the imagined interpretations essential to this refiguring of the revolutionary.

I TRAVEL, THEREFORE I AM: THE “NOMAD MIND AND THE SPIRIT OF TRAVEL?

It quickly became obvious that it is impossible to translate these expressions in terms of any absolute understanding of distance, according to which ‘close to’ is supposed to refer to shorter distances than ‘far from’. The following two sentences are enough to disperse any remaining doubt about this: 1. Jupiter is close to Saturn 2. the electron is far from its nucleus The expression ‘close to’ in the first sentence actually describes a much greater distance between A and B than the ‘far from’ in the second sentence.

Science and Languages

This chapter recognises the need for a lingua franca in scientific research, in order to enable collaborative working and the circulation of knowledge. However, it challenges the monolingual assumptions that the acceptance of such a lingua franca often implies. The contemporary cultural dominance of English as a lingua franca often eclipses any awareness of the diversity of languages on which the development of science has historically depended. It disguises the ways in which the development of knowledge depends on complex processes of translation—of concepts, terms and ideas—which reveal the inherently multilingual nature of scientific research. The chapter considers the interdependency of science and languages, underlining the extent to which scientific research as a fundamentally human endeavour relies on, and is enhanced by, a recognition of linguistic diversity.