Eliane DalMolin

Haiti in a Globalized Frame

I have just returned from Florida State University, Tallahassee, where I had co-organized an international conference, ‘Haiti in a Globalized Frame’. The main organizer was Martin Munro, who has recently been appointed as Director of FSUs Winthrop King Institute. Martin is one of the leading international specialists on Francophone Caribbean literature, and this was the first of what is likely to be a number of major Caribbean events at the Winthrop King under his directorship, as the Instit...

Editors' Introduction: Interrogating Scandal

‘Scandale’ was the theme of a series of 2017 plays staged by the “Paris des Femmes” troupe. Anne Rotenborg, the troupe’s director, invited nine female playwrights to compose short pieces with a limited number of actors based upon this theme. Playwrights included Le€ıla Slimani, Marie Nimier, Christine Angot, Sylvie Germain, and Nancy Huston. As Carole Fr echette notes in her introduction to the published volume of the plays, the playwrights were initially confused over the meaning and parameters of the word ‘scandale.’ Some looked for a dictionary definition of “scandale,” she writes, and found “grave affaire malhonnête, honteuse, qui a un grand retentissement dans le public... querelle bruyante... fait qui heurte la conscience, le bon sens, la morale, suscite l’ emotion, la r evolte” (9–10). The playwrights slowly began to appropriate this slippery concept, “ a le retourner dans tous les sens.” The plays that resulted from this experimentation took different approaches to the notion of scandal, ranging from intimate affairs, to relationships undergoing dishonesty or betrayal, to representations of public shame and personal offence. Fr echette claims that scandal constitutes “l’app etit de notre monde” (11) and perceives a thirst for scandal in contemporary public and private life. She argues that scandals can range from “grandes affaires d’ Etat” to “affaires intimes.” Indeed, at the same time as the plays were being performed, presidential favorite François Fillon saw his campaign irreparably damaged by a scandal involving misuse of public funds regarding payments to his wife and children for allegedly fake jobs as his political assistants. “Penelopegate,” a perfect example of Fr echette’s scandalous “grande affaire d’ Etat” recalls the financial scandal that derailed Nicolas Sarkozy’s political campaign one year before. Fr echette writes that a Google search for “scandale” will generate around 20,200,000 results that range from private to public scandals and contain, beyond references to Donald Trump’s latest comments, references to controversial bra collections, athletes’ artificially inflated muscles, technical

Reorienting Cultural Flows

In his essay entitled: “France-Japan: The Coral Writers,” Micha€el Ferrier proposes a major rethinking of intellectual strategies in dealing with Japan. For him what is needed is a “genuine epistemological overhaul of approaches.” This refocusing will also involve a reexamination of “Europe’s relationship to the ‘other’” since the biggest obstacle hindering a more accurate appreciation of Japanese culture and society is “the persistence and ... predominance in France and elsewhere of a traditionally uniform representation of Japanese society.” Characteristic of this misrepresentation are worn-out clich es proclaiming in various ways that Japan is “a mysterious blend of tradition and modernity.” With this criticism, Ferrier is consciously challenging the positions of some of France’s most celebrated commentators on Japan, notably Pierre Loti, Claude L evi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Henri Michaux. What Ferrier finds unhelpful and even misleading in these writers’ approaches is their tendency to be ahistorical and essentialist, to ignore Japanese history, and glorify the putative superiority of Japanese country life, which supposedly remains, unlike the nation’s urban centers, untouched by the stain of modernity. Ferrier draws attention to a Eurocentric bias which permits such distinguished writers to implicitly measure Japanese culture and society from the perspective of Western superiority. Ultimately, the idea is that while Japan might have much to admire, it nevertheless remains subtly inferior to its European counterparts. In order to move scholarship in more challenging directions which will lead to more complex, even if tentative conclusions, Ferrier argues for an end to simplistic dichotomies such as “East/West, Us/Them, Japan/France.” He wishes to replace such categories by what he terms “the triangulation of cultures” where “no culture can be considered the gauge of another.” To

Literature and Criticism: Taking Stock

In the U.S. as well as abroad, Jonathan Culler has long been a practitioner and representative of literary criticism, more particularly of “theory.” In fact, he played a significant role in the transmission of “French theory” to American campuses, and witnessed both the enthusiasm it inspired and, sometimes, what he perceived as the abuse of theory. Bemoaning what we might call theory’s “colonization” of literature, he astutely questioned: “Where is the literary in theory?” In addition, Culler’s words point to the necessary limits of the “purely” literary, that is, of the inevitable blurring of the frontiers that would separate it from other disciplines, other practices. This question and these considerations are at the heart of this double issue of CF&FS on the theme of “Literature and Criticism: Taking Stock,” the theme that gathered participants at the International Colloquium in 20and 21-Century French and Francophone Studies held at Louisiana State University in March 2015. Taking stock of what?—one might ask: the short version, which will be developed below is this: taking stock of the mutations of our discipline, faire le point on its evolution this past century and the new one we have just entered. The collaboration between CF&FS and the annual colloquium is particularly fitting in this case. CF&FS has been at the forefront and crossroads of these mutations for the past twenty years, if we judge not only by the journal’s stated objectives: “CF&FS provides a forum, not only for academics, but for novelists, poets, artists, journalists, and filmmakers as

J.M.G. le Clézio or the Challenges of the Intercultural

J.M.G. Le Cl ezio’s body of work offers us a glimpse of a world animated by multiple cultures, inhabited by nomads, and frequently permeated by spiritual and mystical dimensions such as Buddhism, Sufism, or Native American Shamanism. This rich work—whose secret cartography must be invented and can only be glimpsed through the potentiality of its landscapes, wandering, cultural otherness, and the questioning of founding myths—is puzzling and resists interpretation. While the Caribbean and the Mediterranean offer Glissant the most eloquent examples of The Relation, J.M.G. Le Cl ezio’s Relation is woven together from a borderless, transnational universe that reflects another place, with its own possibilities. This conception of the world and its multiple cultures in movement gives rise to a previously unseen esthetic of crossing, displacement, and the migration of identity, drawing as much on the notion of the intercultural as on that of the transcultural. For J.M.G. Le Cl ezio, narrative spaces, and the successive crossings of cultural particularities they create, deliberately overturn notions of space, territory, and territorial belonging. A true spider’s web, this universe extends its “tenuous, nearly invisible threads.” Moreover, the landmarks and traces emerging from this innovative, scripted geography also remain ephemeral, and are destined, for the most part, to be inexpressible. It is through this complex window on a world marked by the moving and meeting of worlds, the mixing or even the crossing of cultures, and in response to the era of globalization, that J.M.G. Le Cl ezio positions literature and its justification as a founding and liberating agent in the world. Through literature, he revives the question of engagement

Money/L'argent II

It appears that a nation’s traditions, Greece in this case, its value system, mythology, and philosophy—its very identity, one might say—can easily be cast aside, or at least made abstract by bankers, financiers, economists, international bureaucrats, and accountants. Of course one may argue: what does this have to do with having spent beyond one’s means and accumulated an enormous debt and deficit? And the response may be: well those who continued lending money to a borrower who clearly did not have the means to reimburse are equally guilty. As another editorialist put it: a drug addict is responsible for his condition, but the supplier-pusher bears a part of the responsibility. And so on. We understand that there are (at least) two sides to the so-called “Grexit” story that started this summer and is continuing to unfold. However, and at the very least, the string of events leads one to wonder what the world’s “leaders” actually do and who is really in charge. Are we watching a Greek tragedy wherein the “actors” holding the purse strings or the reins of government (who are sometimes one and the same) have the power to make determinations—perhaps based on erroneous factors or on a kind of updated hubris of unbending righteousness—that cause individuals and the public to suffer in the throes of a supposedly all-curing austerity? Whatever our perception or, even, ideological standpoint, we can all sense that something is wrong, that there’s a curse on the land, that something’s rotten in the state of the planet. “Grexit” and all it implies have brought to the fore yet again another instance of a generalized, global condition. The contributors to this volume explore how novelists, poets, translators, and playwrights in the French-speaking world imagine and fictionalize the deep undertow of financial perturbations, of which the “Grexit” story is thus but one of many. From Qu ebec to the Congo, from the mid-twentieth century to the future—if we restrict ourselves to the areas and the time span covered in this issue—money implicitly and explicitly crosses national and cultural borders, reshapes the land and modifies expression and representation. The analysis of how fictionalized characters luxuriate in, submit to or resist the impact of what

Trace(s), Fragment(s), Remain(s)Trace(s), Fragment(s), Reste(s)Pascal Quignard

The question of fragments is by nature one of enigmas. In the work of many contemporary writers, fragments, remains, or traces are what guides our understanding of a discontinuous and fragmentary world, bringing about writing and haunting the literary space. Is not every narrative also, and a priori, a montage of fragments? Writing would therefore be a thinking of forgetting, of interruption, of broken orders, of misunderstandings, of dislocations, of that which has come undone, of what the author remembers, the dream of the original and unique trace, which (s)he would seek to bring back, despite the trace’s resistance. This issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies aims to question the notions of traces, fragments, and remains, as well as the relationships they maintain with the imaginary. Such was the theme of the Twentiethand Twenty-FirstCentury French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium held at the Georgia Institute of Technology in March 2013. The contributors of this volume propose to reflect upon the originary trace, the unique and enigmatic trace that

War, Memory, Amnesia: Postwar Lebanon

Documenting, fictionalizing, photographing, and archiving are all current aesthetic practices being undertaken in response to the aftermath (and afterlives) of the long and bloody civil conflicts that beset Lebanon from 1975 until the early 1990s. Interrogating this cultural field from its francophone perspectives and beyond permits the dual opportunity both to give coverage of a broad range of emerging academic work and to showcase the rich diversity of cultural production in contemporary Lebanon. Articles here explore literature, film, photography, and the plastic arts that work to articulate responses to long years of war—a period which bore witness to invasion, massacres, hostage taking, and the unresolved disappearance of citizens as power was brokered according to perpetually shifting loyalties. Such cultural production can be additionally contextualized as a response to the amnesty legislated in 1991, which pardoned almost all activity undertaken in the name of this war. Instead of freeing up discourses of remembering, it seems that memories of the war were effectively silenced, giving rise to an overdetermined collective amnesia informed by political and commercial expediency. The immediateness of the conflict unsettled the very structures of daily life in Lebanon. Beirut was divided, as were its families, by shifting sectarian loyalties. Indeed, as Michael Gilsenan described it, “Beirut ha[d] become almost unimaginable—an icon of chaos, anarchy, meaninglessness—an image saturated in signs lacking all sense; a kind of grotesque unreality surpassing the imagination and language” (Gilsenan 20). It is within this unimaginable cityscape that the most profound struggles for meaning have taken place. A desire to write

French Theory Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow in France, The U.S., and China. Volume 1: France

At a time when human migration holds our attention, when it seems that mass migratory movements disrupt the economic and political makeup of societies that were relatively sedentary up until now, it is surprising to see the extent to which the migration of ideas goes generally unnoticed. Perhaps we had grown accustomed to consider that thinking itself had also become global. The fact that signs tend to move quicker and more massively than bodies definitively globalized the exchanges from language to language. An equation solved in Sydney can be instantaneously understood in San Francisco; a theory elaborated in Tokyo can be discussed or taught without delay in Berlin. Ultimately, the whole planet has become the forum for a vast conversation. Under these conditions, is the notion of the locality of a thought, that is, what it retains from the place where it was conceived, the ties that attach it to a limited historicity in space still meaningful? Is it then pertinent to speak of a territorial essence of ideas, in the same sense that ethnology analyzes beliefs, myths, and local legends? Perhaps these questions are fairly impudent as they vaguely evoke types of analyses that dominated the Nineteenth Century when the “genius of a nation” could be recognized by way of its concepts. From Madame de Sta€el to Heidegger, we know the destiny of these models. However, no matter how clever and refined their articulations may be, these models emerge beaten down by the History of the past century, which made them in turn, the tatters of a historical situation and of a local contingency. It appears that the geniuses of the nineteenth century have been replaced by the Stars of French Theory, and nations themselves by communities, while the intensity of their respective claims did not change. It is peculiar, in such circumstances, that a concept such as French Theory would see the light at the start of the 1980s. Even more peculiar is that, on the one hand, Frenchness, that is, a marker of nationality is displayed as a mark of

Trace(s), Fragment(s), Remain(s) Trace(s), Fragment(s), Reste(s)

As a prelude to the contents of this second installment of CF&FS: SITES dedicated to “Trace(s), Fragment(s), Remain(s),” the theme of the “Twentieth and Twenty-First Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium” held in Atlanta in spring 2013, we would like to once again briefly summarize in just about the same words what is at stake in this title. The question of the fragment is by nature one of enigma. For many contemporary writers, the remains and traces of what once existed guide our perception of the world, inspire writing, and eventually haunt our literary space. Of course, the discontinuous and fragmented Real leads us to hermeneutics. But isn’t any storytelling also, a priori, a montage of fragments whose interruption the writer wanted to interrupt, whose boundaries s/he desired to erase? Writing would then be thinking oblivion, interruption, brokenness, ambiguity, dislocation, that of which the writer keeps the memory, dreams the original and unique trace, and tries to resurrect beyond its resistance. The thrust of the colloquium was therefore to examine the question of traces, fragments, remains, and their relationship to the imaginary. This reflection focused on the unique and enigmatic traces that motivate the act of writing. In our own century and in these first decades of the millennium, when these traces remain irreducible and unspeakable, what drives the artist to write, paint, film, and attempt to retrieve the invisible? Is literature a crossing over remains? In what way might the text be conceived of as a passageway, itself a trace, a vessel for something that has already passed or is already in the process of passing? Might every text necessarily be a march of specters? From what position does one write? Is the writing of fragments also a writing of loss, of the intangible? What might be the heuristic value of the trace, of remains, of the fragment, and