The Mauritian Novel: Fictions of Belonging, Julia Waters (2018)

Review of: The Mauritian Novel: Fictions of Belonging, Julia Waters (2018) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 236 pp., ISBN 978-1-78694-149-7, h/bk, £25

Aperçu du champ intellectuel sud-vietnamien postcolonial

This article aims to present the South Vietnamese intellectual field in the aftermath of decolonization. It is a question of examining the agents and instances in a postcolonial social space from a chronological and relational point of view: philosophers, professors, journals, universities… These sets often consist of a system of sharing and relationships in ‘position raking’ and construction of symbolic capital. We will particularly observe the ways in which South Vietnamese intellectuals treat western philosophical thoughts as a privileged object to structure the intellectual field and to establish their power and vision in this space. This questioning thus aims to reregister the Vietnamese intellectual field in a perspective of western cultural transfers.

A History of Algeria, James McDougall (2017)

Review of: A History of Algeria, James McDougall (2017) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 448 pp., ISBN 978-0-52161-730-7, p/bk, $29.99

Lecture empathique et trauma de la guerre d’Algérie chez Assia Djebar, Boualem Sansal et Leila Sebbar

This article analyses the narrative processes and literary strategies that seek to engender the reader’s empathy for the main characters in three Francophone texts that depict the trauma of the Algerian War of independence. Each text starts from a real event by intertwining historical facts and the present with fiction, allowing for a better understanding of the postcolonial situation. These expectations are reinforced by Djebar’s and Sansal’s paratexts. Drawing on the theories of Suzanne Keen and Fritz Breithaupt empathy can especially be favoured by internal focalization, the characters’ empathic interpersonal relationships as well as polyphony. The imaginative construction of the other is emphasized as necessary, while the detailed description of historical facts may rather provoke feelings of pity. A fortiori, empathy can decline or be blocked in the passages, which go against the moral convictions of the reader. This imaginative resistance is due to the fact that these passages concern reality and not fiction

Reconstructed and neo-slave narratives in French: Filling the gap through literature and archives

This article examines Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard’s Freedom Papers and Marie-Célie Agnant’s novel Le livre d’Emma as two important contributions geared towards filling the lacunae that exist in the historical record given the lack of slave narratives in French. This study argues that these narratives are important because they approach slavery in the French empire from a fresh angle. Freedom Papers reconstructs the existence of a woman named Rosalie from her entry into the slave trade through her life in Haiti. Such a biographical approach allows researchers to put an individual face on what has mostly been studied as an abstract institution. Similarly, Agnant traces the family history of Emma back to her first ancestor to make the transatlantic journey. Although Agnant’s contribution is fictional, Emma’s story captures a perspective similar to the experience of many whose ancestors were enslaved. Both stories stress the importance of writing – veritable ink on paper. It was through writing that biased historical narrative was created by former empires. It is therefore through writing that Rosalie succeeded in injecting herself into the historical record, and through writing that Emma ensures her ancestors’ story is never forgotten.

Playing to the West only? Representations of Picasso, the gendered body and Islamism in Kamel Daoud’s Le peintre dévorant la femme

This research explores Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s 2018 non-fictional text, Le peintre dévorant la femme. The text addresses questions relating to religious extremism, the meaning of art, death and eroticism, and the relationship between l’Occident and l’Orient through the visual aid of Picasso’s 1932 Année érotique. Central to this research is the notion of the hybridized public intellectual (Daoud) entering hybridized public spheres (Franco-Algerian and beyond). The consequences of operating within a plural readership suggest that Daoud, subconsciously or not, speaks to particular sectors of his western-French audience more so than the Muslim-Algerian ones, risking an imbalance. This research unpicks how Daoud negotiates the relationship between aesthetics and politics in his non-fictional writing, showing how his public move to an essai in 2018 can be read as facilitating a conversation with more a bourgeois, and potentially more republican, French audience. It also analyses Daoud’s representations of Picasso, Paris, the museum, and the gendered body in western and Muslim societies. By doing so, it attempts to highlight how although Daoud appears to offer a ‘double-edged’ critique of Algeria since independence and French neo-colonialism, his tendency to make generalizations about Islam sometimes unwittingly plays to French (and more widely, western) Islamophobic assumptions.

Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal, Rosalind Fredericks (2018)

Review of: Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal, Rosalind Fredericks (2018) Durham: Duke University Press, 216 pp., ISBN 978-1-47800-141-6, p/bk, $23.95

Cheikh Khaled Bentounès: l’ouverture, la solidarité, le partage – vers une culture de paix

Since 1975 Cheikh Bentounès has been the spiritual guide of the Alawiyya tariqa, founded in 1909 in Mostaganem, Algeria, by Cheikh Ahmed Al-Alawi, whose values of tolerance, peace and interreligious dialogue are known internationally. Living in Europe, the Cheikh navigates complex spaces and borders (Morocco, Algeria and France), advocating for a more harmonious relation to our environment. This article examines the concepts and projects he puts forward through his writings and the International Day of Living Together in Peace that he obtained from the United Nations in 2017. It evokes as well the views of rapper and writer Abd Al Malik on the importance of his approach (he refers to his personal experience growing up in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in France), and draws a parallel to the concepts of Senghor, first president of Senegal, on the interweaving of cultures – explained by the work of Soulemane Bachir Diagne through the influences of Bergson and Iqbal. Khalid Zekri’s analyses shed light on the historical, social and cultural context. In a world where consumerism (excessive notion of commodification) and divisions play an important role, Cheikh Bentounès reminds us of the need to shift our rapport to the world to better face problems that have arisen, including ecological disasters, before it is too late. We are reminded through the clarity of his words (power of orality) that humanism is an urgent necessity for our survival.

Chronique d’une écologie décoloniale dans C’est ma terre de Fabrice Bouckat

The documentary film C’est ma terre by Fabrice Bouckat screened during the 2019 edition of Terrafestival is one of the first large-scale films produced locally on the crisis of the chlordecone molecule. This article will examine from a decolonial perspective, how its director, a Martinican with Gabonese origins who lives and works in Guadeloupe, develops a synthetic and universal vision of environmental crises, and thus demonstrates that destruction of ecosystems crosses time and space, cultures and lands, languages and peoples by bringing ecological crisis in the West Indies closer to the one experienced by the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.

Filming Mother Nature’s slow death: Representational pitfalls in African ecodocumentaries

This article uses ecocriticism and postcolonial theories to investigate the documentary topographies and politics of African ecosystem. Anger in the Wind (Weira), Breaking the Silence: Cleaning the Liquid Waste (Niyel) and The Day of the Great Blaze (Kadry Kodo) illustrate how African documentarians shape their narratives to interrogate some pressing environmental challenges. This article looks at the ways in which the advent of global capitalism has transformed African ecosystems into sites for violent and irreversible destruction and exploitation, leaving postcolonial subjects in situations of deplorable precarity.