This book examines the way in which France has failed to come to terms with the end of its empire, and is now haunted by the legacy of its colonial relationship with North Africa. It examines the form assumed by the ghosts of the past in fiction from a range of genres (travel writing, detective fiction, life writing, historical fiction, women's writing) produced within metropolitan France, and assesses whether moments of haunting may in fact open up possibilities for a renewed relational structure of cultural memory. By viewing metropolitan France through the prism of its relationship with its former colonies in North Africa, the book maps the complexities of contemporary France, demonstrating an emerging postcoloniality within France itself.

This book is the first major study of French Caribbean literature in light of the concept of postcoloniality. Postcolonial theory debates have developed in the anglophone domain, and have not as yet referred prominently to francophone literature. Jeannie Suk investigates how the literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe provides a kaleidescopic view of the paradoxes at the heart of postcoloniality. Through subtle and provocative readings of Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Baudelaire, Freud, and others, she illuminates how the development of French Caribbean literature and debates about négritude, antillanité, and creolité contribute to theories of in-betweenness and incompleteness central to postcolonial modes. In each chapter, lively and detailed analyses of literary and critical texts reveal connections between key thematic, conceptual, rhetorical, and psychic issues that form the interface of Caribbean and postcolonial concerns. The first part paves theoretical ground, focusing on readings of two seminal texts, Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Glissant's Discours antillais; the second part concentrates on Maryse Condé's exemplary work. Lucidly articulating the overlap and interplay of the distance of oceanic crossing, the discontinuities of allegorical signification, and the gap at the heart of trauma, Suk probes the paradoxical dynamic of impossible yet inevitable returns in space, time, and the psyche. She shows how literal and metaphorical "crossings" both produce and impede history and representation. The result is a new framework for understanding the intersection of postcolonial, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and French Caribbean problems in a language attentive to improbable recurrences across theories and registers. Postcolonial Paradoxes is a major contribution to criticism and theory, of interest to scholars and students of postcolonialism, Caribbean and African diaspora literature, French literature, and psychoanalysis.

Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France offers a critical assessment of the ways in which French writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists descended from immigrants from former colonial territories bring their specificity to bear on the bounds and applicability of French republicanism, Frenchness and national identity, and contemporary cultural production in France. In mobilizing a range of approaches and methodologies pertinent to their specialist fields of inquiry, contributors to this volume share in the common objective of elucidating the cultural productions of what we are calling post-migratory (second- and third-generation) postcolonial minorities. The volume provides a lens through which to query the dimensions of postcoloniality and transnationalism in relation to post-migratory postcolonial minorities in France and identifies points of convergence and conversation among them in the range of their cultural production. The cultural practitioners considered query traditional French high culture and its pathways and institutions; some emerge as autodidacts, introducing new forms of authorship and activism; they inflect French cultural production with different 'accents', some experimental and even avant-garde in nature. As the volume contributors show, though post-migratory postcolonial minorities sometimes express dis-settlement, they also provide an incisive view of social identities in France today and their own compelling visions for the future.

Contemporary French writers have embarked on various quests for new sources of thematic and formal inspiration which are increasingly tied to issues of postcolonial legacies. However, French literature has never been consistently examined through the lens of race, ethnicity, and its relation to (post)coloniality. Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature is the first scholarly study to engage with the figure of the White writer and explore the White literary gaze in contemporary France. The book highlights the inherent postcoloniality of White Hexagonal literature in a context marked by institutionalized colour-blindness, and offers a reflection on responsible writing in and about postcolonial France. The book identifies a set of formal features, functions, and aesthetic dispositions which reveal the ways in which White writers grapple with postcolonial subjects. It focuses on seven case studies featuring texts by Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Nicolas Fargues, Pierre Lemaitre, ?douard Louis, and Nicolas Mathieu. Achille and Pana?t? argue that it is imperative to recast the enduring boundedness of race and empire as a matter of equal concern to White and non-White writers.

In the late 1990’s, Postcolonial Studies risked imploding as a credible area of academic enquiry. Repeated anthologization and an overemphasis on the English-language literatures led to sustained critiques of the field and to an active search for alternative approaches to the globalized and transnational formations of the post-colonial world. In the early twenty-first century, however, postcolonial began to reveal a new openness to its comparative dimensions. French-language contributors to postcolonial debate (such as Edouard Glissant and Abdelkebir Khatibi) have recently risen to greater prominence in the English-speaking world, and there have also appeared an increasing number of important critical and theoretical texts on postcolonial issues, written by scholars working principally on French-language material. It is to such a context that this book responds. Acknowledging these shifts, this volume provides an essential tool for students and scholars outside French departments seeking a way into the study of Francophone colonial postcolonial debates. At the same time, it supplies scholars in French with a comprehensive overview of essential ideas and key intellectuals in this area.

Colonized by the French in 1830, Algeria was an important French settler colony that, unlike its neighbors, endured a lengthy and brutal war for independence from 1954 to 1962. The nearly one million Pieds-Noirs (literally "black-feet") were former French citizens of Algeria who suffered a traumatic departure from their homes and discrimination upon arrival in France. In response, the once heterogeneous group unified as a community as it struggled to maintain an identity and keep the memory of colonial Algeria alive. Remembering French Algeria examines the written and visual re-creation of Algeria by the former French citizens of Algeria from 1962 to the present. By detailing the preservation and transmission of memory prompted by this traumatic experience, Amy L. Hubbell demonstrates how colonial identity is encountered, reworked, and sustained in Pied-Noir literature and film, with the device of repetition functioning in these literary and visual texts to create a unified and nostalgic version of the past. At the same time, however, the Pieds-Noirs' compulsion to return compromises these efforts. Taking Albert Camus's Le Mythe de Sisyphe and his subsequent essays on ruins as a metaphor for Pied-Noir identity, this book studies autobiographical accounts by Marie Cardinal, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Leïla Sebbar, as well as lesser-known Algerian-born French citizens, to analyze movement as a destabilizing and productive approach to the past.

New Soundings in Postcolonial Writing is a collection of critical and creative writing in honour of the postcolonial critic, editor and anthologist Bruce King. There are essays on topics relating to Caribbean authors (Derek Walcott, Simone and Andre Schwarz-Bart); diaspora writers in England (Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, Michael Ondaatje), South East Asian writing in English (Arun Kolatkar, recent Pakistani fiction, Anita Desai) and New Zealand, Canadian and Pacific writers (Albert Wendt, Patricia Grace, Bill Manhire, Joseph Boyden, Greg O’Brien). The creative writing section features new work by David Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar, Arvind Mehrotra, Jeet Thayil, Meena Alexander, Keki Daruwalla, Adil Jussawalla, Tabish Khair, Susan Visvanathan and others, reflecting King’s pioneering work on Indian poetry in English, and his many friendships.

Organized by region, boasting an international roster of contributors, and including summaries of selected creative and critical works and a guide to selected terms and figures, Salhi's volume is an ideal introduction to French studies beyond the canon.

The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies is a major reference work, which aims to provide informed insights into the possible future of postcolonial studies as well as a comparative overview of the latest developments in the field.

This study interrogates how the French empire was imagined in three literary representations of French colonialism: the conquest of Tahiti, and the established colonial systems in Martinique and in India. The study is the first in either English or French to demonstrate that representations of power relations, as well as the broader discourses with which they were linked, were as closely concerned with probing the similarities and differences of rival European colonial systems as they were with reinforcing their imagined superiority over the colonized, and that such power relations should not be conceptualized as a dualistic categorization of ‘colonizer’ versus ‘colonized’. In doing so, it aims to go beyond examining the interaction between colonized and colonizer, or between colonial centre and periphery, and to interrogate instead the circulation of ideas and practices across different sites of European colonialism, drawing attention to a historical complexity which has been neglected in the necessary race to recover voices previously occluded from academic analysis. In exploring how the notion of the French empire overseas was construed and how it was infused with meaning at three different historical moments, 1784, 1835 and 1938, it demonstrates how precarious the French empire was perceived to be, in terms of both European rivalry and resistance from the colonized, and how the rhetoric of a French colonisation douce was pitted against the inscribed excesses of the more powerful British empire. Rather than employing the sorts of recuperative agenda which focus on how the colonized were elided (viz., Subaltern Studies) or on the writings of the formerly colonized (viz., Francophone Studies), the study concerns itself specifically with how French colonialism and imperialism were perceived, and thus offers a further corrective to any generalizations about European colonialism and imperialism. More particularly, by examining how the representational strategy of nostalgia is used in these texts, the study demonstrates how perceived loss, and nostalgia for an imperial past, played a role in dynamically shaping the French colonial enterprise across its various manifestations.