Editors’ Introduction

Long grounded in (neo)colonial discourses, dominant academic worldviews and geo-historical frameworks impacting the Humanities have produced and relayed linear definitions of the world, of its geographies and temporalities that still pass for universal ones and that are yet to be questioned and challenged. Indeed, global linear thinking has mapped lands and waters, minds and imaginations (see Mignolo),² laying the foundations of a world order that derive from epistemic sovereigns homogenizing our understanding of time, space, and culture. As we strive to articulate decolonial vocabularies that would enable us to think intersectionally and beyond linear divides, we are thus constantly confronted with a series of methodological questions: how does one conceive of non-essentializing mental, geographical, and temporal networks that account for the overlapping of multiple histories and temporalities, and for the crisscrossing of cultural folds connecting heterogeneous and wide continental territories such as Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, or the Middle East, and oceanic systems, maritime regions, and archipelagoes often thought of as more fluid and permeable spaces? How do we envision alternative frameworks that encompass complex milieus, multiplicities of worlds, and decentered narratives of connections, silenced by Western colonial imagination? To what extent do our renewed conceptualizations successfully and ethically capture and empower singular voices and nuances originating from spaces of entanglement, while giving them due respect? Finally, how efficient are they in addressing the multidirectional intricacies and forms of exchanges that precisely challenge the supremacy of Western abstract knowledge and disembodied perspective?

Focusing on the multilingual, transcultural, and multidimensional dynamics of the Francophone world, this special issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies draws on such questions of knowledge production, interpretive methodologies, epistemic justice, and academic ethics in view of tackling some of the challenges which the persistent geographical and historical partitioning of the field has long kept invisible.

This timely volume is thus the result of the collaborative work and collective effort of several Francophone and Comparative Literature scholars working across a broad-range of geographies and temporalities. As we investigate the potentialities of resorting to what we call integrated multidimensional approaches—i.e. those boundary-crossing approaches that challenge the linear divisions of our field, while undoing the colonial taxonomies responsible for such divisions—we also call for a reassessment of our disciplinary tools and objects of study, whether literature, politics, history, translation, migration, or visual culture. On the one hand, we view comparative francophonies as an absorptive terrain that brings together “discreet” spaces, disciplines, entities, and epistemologies traditionally delineated and separated by theoretical paradigms and/or methods of classification deriving from both longstanding Western nomenclatures and entrenched institutional habitus. On the other hand, we also argue that the reconstructive assemblages which intellectual and transformative work of theoretical integration makes visible produce new visions and understandings of the very entities under scrutiny.

To this end, the various contributions of this special issue examine how the literary, visual, cinematographic, and linguistic engagement of border-crossing writers, artists, and filmmakers creatively re-imagines our world. We investigate, for instance, how “invisible” relations, unexpected circulations, and minor/marginalized expressions act as strong transnational components of a “worlding” or “world-forming” endeavor—what Françoise Lionnet calls “littérature mondialisante” (Lionnet 288)—that acknowledges pluralities, contradictions, and decentered-ness, rather than neutralizing differences.

Although this issue is not about travel literature, it thus seeks to explore the creative universes and dynamic positionalities that Francophone writers and texts articulate. As such, it acknowledges the evolution, paradoxes, and challenges of Francophone studies and the paradigm shift that redirects the focus from the vertical ties subjugating Francophone regions to France, to more horizontal links and heterogeneous spaces of mediation, that embody the “unscripted, multidirectional creativity of transnational sites of production” (Lionnet and Jean-François 1226). This shift is what enables us to move from what Lionnet describes as “extant notions of world literature toward a critical practice attentive both to the mobilities within the texts and to the circulation of these texts into contexts where some original meanings are inevitably untranslatable…, since the books encompass multiplicities that few readers are equipped to grasp in their entirety” (Lionnet 288).

Several key concepts illustrating similar relationalities were discussed and explored both during a seminar which was held last year at the ACLA and in the texts published here. These include notions such as: re-symbolization (Boutaghou); postcolonial affinity (Treacy); re-worlding trajectories (Jean-François); new phenomenology (Bessière); exile and “ex-île” (Russo); minor transnationalism (Lionnet); extraterritorial geographies (Sahely); or even “crab-metaphor” (Segeral). In their own distinct ways, each of these concepts puts into a productive dialogue decentered and heterogeneous experiences that speak back to those legacies of Empires still active in discursive practices and sites of knowledge transmission. They attest that francophonie—as an essentially diverse, hybrid, and creolized space—generates new meanings and phenomenologies that are specifically rendered in literary and artistic practices. In an interview published here, Jean Bessière rightly points out that literature archives rituals that are otherwise lost from the memories of their performers. With regard to the overarching theme of integrated and multidimensional approaches, this triggers at least two considerations. The first relates to literature as a discourse—whose material is language and whose form is text—that provides the written archival space to phenomena whose accuracy and performativity are morphing. The second is the invisible hybrid or “creolized” French³ in which these literatures are always written.⁴ Due to their global extension, Francophone areas are by definition translinguistic and transcultural. As such, we do not think it is a provincialism to approach francophonie as a space that produces new phenomenologies and from which one can deconstruct obsessive structures of knowledge production (such as the linearity of historical discourse).⁵

As rightfully recalled by Anne Donadey during the seminar, Gender and Women's Studies scholars have, since the 80s, theorized intersectional approaches examining the imbrication of such categories as “race, ethnicity, gender, and class,” thus complicating the positionalities described by concepts such as “minor, dominant, center and margins.”⁶ These were pioneer works that demonstrated how minor perspectives called for more inclusive and complex theoretical frameworks.

The multiplicities and original meanings encompassed by Francophone literatures and cultural artifacts constantly invite readers, viewers, and critics to be attentive to the circulation of representations, ideas, and symbols that lie beyond their external façade. As such, they train our minds to think transnationally and intersectionally. Rachid Bouchareb's Hors-la-loi (2010)⁷, for instance, may not be properly analyzed without an awareness of the back and forth movement between France and Algeria through the Mediterranean. The presence of the sea is therefore not just a theme coming to the fore when the characters of the movie travel; it is at the very heart of their transformation. It is the space through which languages (from Arabic/Berber to French/Arabic/Berber), gestures, cultural artifacts, and political positioning are reassembled and reinvested.

Several contributions to this volume draw from the fluidity of seas and oceans to articulate relational discourses and border-crossing itineraries. Adelaide Russo's critical engagement with the expression “effet d'ex-île”—to reflect on the renewed understanding of “exile” in the works of Haitian writers—strongly resonates with Nathalie Segeral's use of the “crab metaphor” that speaks to the trans-insular and transcolonial echos in the works of three women writers from the marginalized Francophone Pacific. While Nadia Sahely evokes, from a Mediterranean perspective, the innovative and extraterritorial strategies used by transnational Lebanese Francophone writers for “re-locating” Lebanon, Treacy Corbin redefines the contours of Maghrebi literature by investigating postcolonial affinities and forgotten ties between post-independence Algeria and Ireland, namely through the study of Salim Bachi's Le Chien d'Ulysse.

Focusing on Indian Ocean narratives, Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François and Benjamin Ireland map out how the presence of (South-)Asia in the dynamics of creolization is represented in Mauritian and Reunionese literatures respectively. While Jean-François investigates the correlation and reciprocal impact which novelist Amal Sewtohul envisions between Hinduism and Creolization, Ireland examines how poems of Daniel Honoré re-imagine the figure of the maroon slave by overlapping the racialized Afrasian body and that of the animal. As such, both critics explore unchartered cartographies and “re-worlding trajectories” that recalibrate our understanding of creolization.

Topographic notions of insularity or exile are yet not the only ones to infer comparative oceanic perspectives. The permanent circulation of ideas, representations, and languages as well as their subsequent transformation also induce relational geographies, dynamic positionalities, and deterritorialized meanings (see Deleuze and Guattari)⁸. In her article on Bengali Francophone writer and translator Toru Dutt, Maya Boutaghou demonstrates how her anthology of French poetry translated in English expresses an intimate cartography of reading that becomes the creative terrain for hybridization and re-symbolization. Indeed, the mapping of movement, appropriation, and transformation of knowledge, texts, and cultural productions gives greater visibility to processes of othering and adaptation, of creolization and entanglement. In their article on Rachid Bouchareb's Hors la loi, Anne Donadey and Wissem Brinis precisely describe the complex intertwining of French and Arabic languages in an Algerian accented cinema that displays both regional and transnational reach. In her contribution on French artist Kader Attia, Megan MacDonald also explores how his installation entitled “Ghost” engages with broader questions of bricolage, memory, and violence in transnational contexts.

By investigating the generic, linguistic, and epistemological distanciation inherent to the hermeneutics of cultural production, our goal as scholars of Francophone transnationalisms is to insist on the relationality that border-crossing agents—both creators and intellectuals—nurture and imagine, while they navigate the “interpenetrating dynamics of ever-multiplying contact zones” (Lionnet and Jean-François 1228). As this special issue also includes interviews with writers Maryse Condé, Ananda Devi, and Raphaël Confiant (although Confiant mentions in his interview his hesitation regarding the label “écrivain,” a caveat that may well apply to all three), as well as Humanities scholars Françoise Lionnet and Jean Bessière—who speak to the challenges of engaging with the relationalities at work in the Francophone world—they all underscore how this peculiar aspect of francophonie has become a “landmark” or “repère”⁹ of both postcolonial or transcolonial studies.

It is fitting that this special issue, addressing as it does epistemologies, limits, and border-crossings, concludes with an essay by Patrick Chamoiseau and Édouard Glissant entitled Quand les murs tombent (published here for the first time in an English translation) and with a short story by Raphaël Confiant which may well illustrate what one might mean by “beyond Créolité,” or beyond categories tout court.

Maya Boutaghou           Roger Célestin

and Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François   and Eliane DalMolin

Guest Co-Editors           Editors

Notes on Contributors

Roger Célestin is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Eliane DalMolin is a Professor of French and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Maya Boutaghou is an Assistant Professor of French and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia and Andrew Mellon Fellow (Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures). She is the author of Occidentalismes, romans historiques postcoloniaux et identités nationales au XIX^e siècle (Honoré Champion, 2016) that offers a new approach to the fields of comparative literature and postcolonial studies in the nineteenth century. She guest-edited a special issue for l'Esprit créateur, “The Algerian War of Independence and its Legacy in Algeria, France and Beyond,” Winter 2014, and a forthcoming book, Représentations de la guerre d'indépendance algérienne (Classiques Garnier). Her articles are published in Expressions Maghrébines, French Studies, International Journal of Francophone Studies, and Dalhousie French Studies.

Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François is the Marian Trygve Freed Early Career Professor in the department of French and Francophone Studies, and an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Poétiques de la violence et récits francophones contemporains (Brill, 2017) and has published numerous articles in scholarly journals such as the PMLA, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Nouvelles études francophones and Lettres romanes. He is currently at work on a second book project that focuses primarily on contemporary Indian Ocean literary and cultural studies and on the creolization models from this region.

Notes

1. This journal issue is the result of a three-day seminar hosted by the ACLA annual meeting at the University of Utrecht (July 6–9, 2017) and organized by Maya Boutaghou and Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François.

2. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham & London: Duke UP, 2011.

3. About the invisible “creolized French” see Abdelkebir Khatibi (1983): “Tant que la théorie de la traduction, de la bi-langue et de la pluri-langue n'aura pas avancé, certains textes maghrébins resteront imprenables selon une approche formelle et fonctionnelle. La langue maternelle est à l’œuvre dans la langue étrangère. De l'une à l'autre se déroule une traduction permanente et un entretien en abyme, extrêmement difficile à mettre à jour … Où se dessine la violence du texte, sinon dans ce chiasme, cette intersection, à vrai dire irréconciliable ? Encore faut-il en prendre acte, dans le texte même : assumer la langue française, oui pour y nommer cette faille et cette jouissance de l’étranger qui doit continuellement travailler à la marge, c'est-à-dire pour son seul compte, solitairement” (179).

4. Boutaghou, Maya. “Writing in Bi-langue.” Approaches to Teaching the Works of Assia Djebar. Ed. Anne Donadey. New York: Modern Language Association, 2017. 138–149.

5. See Arvind Sharma (2003): “Although the claim that Hindus lack a sense of history gained the virtual status of an Indological axiom in modern times, the view can also be traced back to medieval times, and to a certain extent even to ancient times. The explicit or tacit assessment that Hindus lack a sense of history is likely to come from a people who, by comparison, possess it. One therefore thinks naturally of the encounter of the Greeks with India, for ‘what is remarkable about the Greeks is not the fact that their historical thought combined a residue of elements which we would call non-historical but the fact that side by side with these it contained elements of what we call history’” (2).

6. Amireh, Amal, and Lisa Suhair Maja. Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000; Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

7. Bouchareb, Rachid. Hors la loi. Palisades Tartan, 2010. DVD.

8. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. L'Anti-Œdipe. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1972.

9. It is the word attributed (mot attribué) by the Académie française to the Algerian writer Assia Djebar (1936–2015) as a member of this Institution.