Roger Célestin

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

Entretien avec Raphaël Confiant : Au delà de la Créolité ?

ABSTRACT Raphaël Confiant answers questions about the relevance of Créolité today and the future of Caribbean literature.

Entretien avec Maryse Condé : Quelques acquis et manques de la littérature francophone des Antilles

ABSTRACT Maryse Condé answers questions about the past and future of francophone literature from the Caribbean, as well as the ways literature in general can face the challenges of globalization.

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

Interview with Ammiel Alcalay

Roger C elestin: Thank you, Ammiel, for doing this interview with Contemporary French & Francophone Studies for this special issue on the theme of “Arts/Literature/Bearing Witness.” We’ve known each other a long time; our friendship goes back to our days as graduate students in New York and I know, to a certain extent anyway, what we might call your relationship to what you call the “country that once was Yugoslavia” in your introduction to Miljenko Jerkovic’s Sarajevo Malboro; but I wonder whether we might start this interview by giving our readers an idea of what this relationship is, before proceeding any further. Biographical, historical background, as it were, which, I’m sure you will agree is particularly important in the context of this issue. Or maybe you don’t?

Entretien avec Jacques Kébadian

Premier g enocide du XXe si ecle, l’extermination des Arm eniens en 1915 ne fut pas un accident de guerre mais un crime soigneusement pr epar e. Pour se soustraire aux r eformes exig ees en Arm enie occidentale par les puissances signataires du Trait e de Berlin en 1878, le sultan Abdûlhamid avait provoqu e les massacres de 1894-1896, qui caus erent la mort de 300.000 Arm eniens. La Guerre Mondiale laissait les mains libres au gouvernement Jeune-Turc pour eradiquer tout un peuple de son territoire national. Du 22 d ecembre 1914 au 20 janvier 1915, la sanglante d efaite turque de Sarikamich, dans le Caucase, devant l’arm ee russe, permet d’accuser les Arm eniens de trahison. Les soldats arm eniens de l’arm ee ottomane sont elimin es. Les populations civiles de l’est anatolien, d eport ees a pied vers les d eserts de Syrie, meurent de faim et d’ epuisement ou sont assassin ees en cours de route par « l’organisation sp eciale » cr e ee a cet effet. Le 24 avril 1915, une rafle effectu ee a Constantinople envoie discr etement a la mort l’ elite de la capitale. En juillet, les Arm eniens de l’ouest anatolien sont d eport es par chemin de fer jusque dans le Taurus. Beaucoup d’entre eux p erissent dans la montagne. Depuis Alep, les rescap es sont dirig es vers des camps d’extermination, comme celui de De€ır es-Zor. Rares exceptions : les insurg es de Van sont sauv es par l’avanc ee des Russes ; ceux du Musa Dagh par le navire Jeanne d’Arc ; a Smyrne, la fermet e du g en eral allemand, Liman von Sanders, dissuade les assassins. D es le 24 mai 1915, les alli es d enoncent un « crime de la Turquie contre l’Humanit e ». Le bilan est evalu e entre 1.300.000 et 1.500.000 victimes. En 1947, quand le juriste Rapha€el Lemkin cr ee le terme de g enocide pour qualifier la Shoah, il se r ef ere aussi a l’extermination des Arm eniens. Le g enocide arm enien a et e reconnu par le Parlement Europ een en 1987 et par la France, le 29 janvier 2001.

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