Unfamiliar Worlds

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-219
Author(s):  
Nicholas Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Colonial Education ◽  
Albert Memmi ◽  
Mohammed Dib ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
French Republicanism ◽  
French Education ◽  
Islamic Veil ◽  
The Relationship

Drawing more deeply than previous chapters on literary texts, including novels by Mouloud Feraoun, Albert Memmi, Mohammed Dib and above all Assia Djebar, this chapter explores some of the experiences offered to ‘colonized’ students in colonial schools. It emphasizes the unfamiliarity of French culture to many Algerians and other colonized populations, and the tendency of French/colonial schools to discriminate against their ‘colonial’ students and to leave them with feelings of deracination and alienation. Through Djebar it examines in detail a particular example of how a French/colonial education alienated – and politicized – female students from a Muslim background. That example, I suggest, raises wider questions about the relationship between lat瞼‎(secularism, especially in education), Islam and French Republicanism, an issue that is repeatedly invoked in debates today around gender equality and the Islamic veil in French education, and is also pertinent to post-independence Algeria. [142]

scholarly journals In the Father’s House: Language and Violence in the Work of Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Annedith Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Colonial Education ◽  
Leila Sebbar ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Fathers And Daughters ◽  
Personal Value ◽  
Simple Tool ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Relationship

This essay examines autobiographical writing by two women who grew up in colonial Algeria; it considers how the relationship between fathers and daughters is marked by linguistic conflict. For each of these writers, language is not a simple tool, but instead a problematic inheritance that shapes her world and her relationship with her father. Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar, who were children in colonial Algeria of the late 1940s and early 1950s, examine their relationships to Arabic and French in terms of their relationships with their families and in particular with their schoolteacher fathers. The fathers, who benefitted from French colonial education, fail to understand the different risks inherent for their daughters in transgressing conservative community and linguistic boundaries. Each writer, even as she acknowledges the benefits of the colonizer’s language, also describes the language as a scene of violent trauma for which she holds her father responsible. With language and paternal love so tightly entwined, this essay argues that even in highly politicized colonial contexts, the national value of a language can only be understood if the familial and personal value of the language is also taken into account.

French Lessons

2019 ◽  
pp. 220-284
Author(s):  
Nicholas Harrison
Keyword(s):  
French Literature ◽  
Educational Experiences ◽  
Assia Djebar ◽  
French Language ◽  
Albert Memmi ◽  
Success Stories ◽  
Mohammed Dib ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Colonial Schooling ◽  
The Impact

This chapter extends Chapter 4’s examination of the impact of colonial schooling on Assia Djebar, Mohammed Dib, Albert Memmi and other writers. It reflects on what went on inside the classroom, and speculates on what it was, even in a colonial education, that made it fruitful, at least in some respects, for some students. It begins by considering the dynamics – inadvertent and perverse from a colonial perspective – that sometimes made French schooling positively politicizing for colonized students, notably in relation to notions of nationalism, national identity and language politics. It then focuses on writers’ accounts of studying the French language and French literature, evidently a key part of the process, educational and psychological, that brought into being their ‘francophone’ works, which duly reflect back on their colonial/literary/educational experiences. In these ways the chapter explores how some of the children subjected to colonial schooling became some of its most astute critics, as well as its greatest success stories; and how French/colonial schooling helped shape the forms and fictions of self-reinvention for which many of the writers are known. [177]

scholarly journals Dancing with Myriam: Creating and Staging a New Metaphor for the Process of Translation

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Paula Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
African Women ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
North African ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Oral Interpretation ◽  
Doctoral Work ◽  
As Relationship ◽  
The Relationship

This article tells the story, and analyzes the development, of a “staged metaphor” for the translation process, from its chance inception over ten years ago, to the more recent revision and staging of the script. In 2005, I was teaching world literature at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, while also researching the writing of Irish and North African women. I chose to focus on those women writing in Irish, Tachelhit, Arabic, or French, whose work had been translated into English. I was initially inspired by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poem, “The Language Issue,” which compares the "sending forth" of her writing to a potential reader, to the story of Moses being discovered by Pharoah’s daughter. My ultimate goal was to produce a chamber theatre play, based on the Irish and North African texts, which would dramatize a metaphor for the translation process. This was an outgrowth of my doctoral work, in which I had drawn on oral interpretation theorists, who see the performance of literary texts as an accepted means of doing literary criticism. Accordingly, I also expanded the project to include the observations of translation theorists, and I incorporated these into the creation of the script for a chamber theatre performance. After directing a staging of the script in Morocco in 2007, I realized that I needed to add more choreographed movement, and to incorporate the character of Moses’s and Myriam’s mother into the metaphor. The addition of dance, and the foregrounding of the relationship between Myriam and her mother, draws unapologetically on female relationships. It is my conclusion that the revised metaphor, with the addition of these elements, is validated by Yves Bonnefoy’s and Henri Meschonnic's depictions of “translation as relationship with an author,” and that, the metaphor does indeed “provide . . . fresh insights.”

scholarly journals The Values of Versatility: Pharmacists, Plants, and Place in the French (Post)Colonial World

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 432-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Monnais ◽  
Noémi Tousignant
Keyword(s):  
Medicinal Plant ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Public Health Care ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Plant Medicine ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Simple Equations ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractColonial pharmacists bio-prospected, acclimatized, chemically screened, and tinkered with plants and their parts, hoping to create products to supply colonial public health care, metropolitan industries, and imperial markets. This article's approach is to examine the trajectories of expertise of two French colonial pharmacists, Franck Guichard and Joseph Kerharo, to illuminate the history of modern medicinal plant research. Both men studied medicinal plants as part of their colonial duties, yet their interests in indigenous therapies exceeded and outlived colonial projects. We take this “overflow” as our point of departure to explore how science transformed medicinal plant values in French colonial and postcolonial contexts. Our focus is on the relationship between value and space—on the processes of conceptual and material (de-/re-)localization through which plant value is calculated, intensified, and distributed. We study and compare these processes in French Indochina and French West Africa where Guichard and Kerharo, respectively, engaged in them most intensively. We show that their engagements with matter, value, knowledge, and mobility defy easy categorizations of medicinal plant science as either extractive or neo-traditionalist. By eschewing simple equations of scientists' motivations with political projects and knowledge-production, we argue that approaching plant medicine through trajectories of expertise opens up grounds for finer analyses of how colonial power and projects, and their legacies, shaped scientific activity.

scholarly journals To write or not to write: censorship in "The Woman in the Photo" by Tia Șerbănescu and "A Censor’s Notebook" by Liliana Corobca

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-27
Author(s):  
Monica Manolachi
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Psychological Process ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Compare And Contrast

Censorship as a literary subject has sometimes been necessary in times of change, as it may show how the flaws in power relations influence, sometimes very dramatically, the access to and the production of knowledge. The Woman in the Photo: a Diary, 1987-1989 by Tia Șerbănescu and A Censor’s Notebook by Liliana Corobca are two books that deal with the issue of censorship in the 1980s (the former) and the 1970s (the latter). Both writers tackle the problem from inside the ruling system, aiming at authenticity in different ways. On the one hand, instead of writing a novel, Tia Șerbănescu kept a diary in which she contemplated the oppression and the corruption of the time and their consequences on the freedom of thought, of expression and of speech. She thoroughly described what she felt and thought about her relatives, friends and other people she met, about books and their authors, in a time when keeping a diary was hard and often perilous. On the other hand, using the technique of the mise en abyme, Liliana Corobca begins from a fictitious exchange of emails to eventually enter and explore the mind of a censor and reveal what she thought and felt about the system, her co-workers, her boss, the books she proofread, their authors and her own identity. Detailed examinations and performances of the relationship between writing and censorship, the two novels provide engaging, often tragi-comical, insights into the psychological process of producing literary texts. The intention of this article is to compare and contrast the two author’s perspectives on the act of writing and some of its functions from four points of view: literary, cultural, social and political.

scholarly journals CRITICAL STUDY OF IRANIAN MOVIE »NASSEREDIN SHAH, ACTOR OF CINEMA «ON THE BASIS OF THEORIES OF THE POSTMODERN NOVELS

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirzad Tayefi ◽  
Mohammad Hossein Ramezani Fookulaee
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Postmodern Literature ◽  
Visual Texts ◽  
French School ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Visual Text ◽  
The Relationship

Contrary to the French school of comparative literature, according to which it is merely possible to compare the two written texts in terms of conditions, in the American approach, the adaptation of literary texts to various arts, including cinema, is possible, which leads to a better understanding of literature. Since novels and films have many similarities, they are in many respects similar to each other, and two genres are considered analogous.These commons provide a good ground for discussing a movie from the perspective of a new literary theory and critique, and allow us to use the concepts and terminology we normally know as a tool for discussing the novel to critically explore the structure and art and the themes of the film. On the other hand, in recent years, the term "postmodernism" has been widely criticized about the novel in our country, and many new fiction writers also have a fascination with postmodern style fiction. Therefore, in this research, first, reviewing the views of some of the most important postmodern literature scholars, nineteen techniques used in postmodern novels are explored, and their qualitative method of applying them to Naser al-Dinshah film actor have been investigated.The results of the study show the relationship between literature and cinema (as a visual text) and the ability to compare the two written and visual texts; as many techniques used in the writing of postmodern novels are also with a high frequency have been used in the studied film

scholarly journals “The Jesuit mission proves we were here”: The Case of Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Missions Aiding Twenty-First Century Tribal Recognition

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Beaupré
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Connecticut River ◽  
Jesuit Missions ◽  
Federal Recognition ◽  
Tribal Governments ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Tribal Recognition ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Difficult Road ◽  
Descendant Communities

Abstract Records indicate that during the French colonial period, Jesuits established four mission congregations within the territory now known as Vermont. These missions were established to preach to both French colonists and Native converts on Isle La Motte, on the Missisquoi River in Swanton, at Fort Saint-Frédéric on Lake Champlain, and in the area known as the Koas on the Connecticut River. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Abenaki peoples of Vermont have had a long and difficult road to gain state and federal recognition. These descendant communities have invoked the existence of Jesuit missions to the Abenaki as proof of the current tribal governments’ legitimacy. This is intriguing considering the blame for cultural destruction is often laid at the feet of Jesuit missionaries. This paper examines the relationship between historical and archaeological evidence of French Jesuits and the legal legitimization of the Abenaki of Vermont.

Cultivating Science

2018 ◽  
pp. 59-91
Author(s):  
Michitake Aso
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Rubber Industry ◽  
Agricultural Improvement ◽  
Rubber Plantations ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Plantation Agriculture ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
The Relationship

Plantation regimes encouraged knowledge production about plant and disease ecologies and the relationship among organisms and their environments more generally. More detailed knowledge about newly introduced plant species, plant and human diseases, and their shared environments was a key ingredient of better, more profitable management of rubber plantations. Chapter 2 explores the process by which agronomy came to support the burgeoning rubber industry after rubber arrived in Indochina in 1897. The French colonial government was not the first to encourage agricultural improvement on the Indochinese peninsula, but the qualitative and quantitative investment that it made in these projects set it apart from previous states. Encouraged by the success of their British and Dutch neighbors, French planters envisioned turning biologically and culturally diverse landscapes into neat rows of hevea. Plantation agriculture also played an important role in defining the political and intellectual scope of the science of ecology in Indochina, encouraging agronomists to direct their energies toward transnational businesses and the colonial project. The process of integrating the efforts of scientists, officials, and planters was not always smooth, however, and this chapter highlights the conflicts and tensions generated by a political economy of plantation agriculture.

Phan Chu Trinh's Democratic Confucianism

2019 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-620
Author(s):  
Kevin D. Pham
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Exclusive Property ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Foreign Ideas

AbstractA consensus on three claims has emerged in literature that explores the relationship between Confucianism and democracy: democracy is not the exclusive property of Western liberalism, Confucianism and liberalism are opposed, and democracy in East Asia would be best buttressed by Confucianism, not liberalism. Why, then, does Phan Chu Trinh (1872–1926), Vietnam's celebrated nationalist of the French colonial period, argue that liberalism and democracy are Western creations that cannot be decoupled, and, if adopted by the Vietnamese, will allow Confucianism to find its fullest expression? The answer is that Trinh ignores liberalism's individualism while celebrating other aspects of liberalism and Western civilization. Trinh's interpretation of Western ideas, although naive, is a creative one that offers political theorists a lesson: it may be useful to view foreign ideas as foreign, to interpret them generously, and to import the creative distortion to revive our own cherished, yet faltering, traditions.

Representations of Greek Tragedy in Ancient Pottery: a Theatrical Perspective

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-245
Author(s):  
Christian M. Billing
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Extensive Experience ◽  
Ancient Pottery ◽  
South Italy ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

In this article, Christian M. Billing considers the relationship between representations of mythic narratives found on ancient pottery (primarily found at sites relating to the Greek colonies of south Italy in the fourth century BC, but also to certain vases found in Attica) and the tragic theatre of the fifth century BC. The author argues against the current resurgence in critical accounts that seek to connect such ceramics directly to performance of tragedies by the major tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Using five significant examples of what he considers to be errors of method in recent philologically inspired accounts of ancient pottery, Billing argues for a more nuanced approach to the interpretation of such artefacts – one that moves beyond an understanding of literary texts and art history towards a more performance-conscious approach, while also acknowledging that a multiplicity of spheres of artistic influence, drawn from a variety of artistic media, operated in the production and reception of such artefacts. Christian M. Billing is an academic and theatre practitioner working in the fields of ancient Athenian and early modern English and European drama. He has extensive experience as a director, designer, and actor, and has taught at a number of universities in the UK and the USA. He is currently Lecturer in Drama at the University of Hull.

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