This collection of original essays challenges French-centered conceptions of francophonie as the shaping force of the production and study of the French language, literature, culture, film, and art both inside and outside mainland France. The traditional view of francophone cultural productions as offshoots of their hexagonal avatar is replaced by a pluricentric conception that reads interrelated aspects of francophonie as products of specific contexts, conditions, and local ecologies that emerged from post/colonial encounters with France and other colonizing powers. The twenty-one papers grouped into six thematic parts focus on distinctive literary, linguistic, musical, cinematographic, and visual forms of expression in geographical areas long defined as the peripheries of the French-speaking world: the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, Quebec, and hexagonal cities with a preponderance of immigrant populations. These contested sites of French collective identity offer a rich formulation of distinctly local, francophone identities that do not fit in with concepts of linguistic and ethnic exclusiveness, but are consistent with a pluralistic demographic shift and the true face of Frenchness that is, indeed, plural.

Questions of space, place and identity have become increasingly prominent throughout the arts and humanities in recent times. This study begins by investigating the reasons for this growth in interest and analyses the underlying assumptions on which interdisciplinary discussions about space are often based. After tracing back the history of contact between Geography and Literary Studies from both disciplinary perspectives, it goes on to discuss recent academic work in the field and seeks to forge a new conceptual framework through which contemporary discussions of space and literature can operate. The book then moves on to a thorough application of the interdisciplinary model that it has established. Having argued that the experience of contemporary space has rendered questions of home and belonging particularly pressing, it undertakes detailed analysis of how these phenomena are articulated in a selection of recent French life writing texts. The close, text-led readings reveal that whilst not often highlighted for their relevance to the analysis of space, these works do in fact narrate the impact of some of the most significant cultural experiences of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust and the AIDS crisis, upon geo-cultural senses of identity. Home is shown to be a deeply problematic, yet strongly desired, element of the contemporary world. The book concludes by addressing the underlying thesis that contemporary life writing might provide just the 'postmodern maps' that could help not only literary scholars, but also geographers, better understand the world today. Key names and concepts: Serge Doubrovsky - Hervé Guibert - Fredric Jameson - Philippe Lejeune - Régine Robin; Autofiction - Cultural Geography - Interdisciplinarity - Place and Identity - Postmodernism - Space - Postmodern Space - Literary Studies - Twentieth-Century Life Writing.

The dissolution of the French Empire and the ensuing rush of immigration have led to the formation of diasporas and immigrant cultures that have transformed French society and the immigrants themselves. Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World examines the impact of this postcolonial immigration on identity in France and in the Francophone world, which has encompassed parts of Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. Immigrants bear cultural traditions within themselves, transform “host” communities, and are, in turn, transformed. These migrations necessarily complicate ideals of national literature, culture, and history, forcing a reexamination and a rearticulation of these ideals. Exploring a variety of texts informed by these transnational conceptions of identity and space, the contributors to this volume reveal the vitality of Francophone studies within a broad range of disciplines, periods, and settings. They remind us that the idea and reality of Francophonie is not a late twentieth-century phenomenon but something that grows out of long-term interactions between colonizer and colonized and between peoples of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religions. Truly interdisciplinary, this collection engages conceptions of identity with respect to their physical, geographic, ethnic, and imagined realities.

A collection of studies of the experiences, portrayals and representations through the eyes of writers, dramatists, artists and policy makers based in French-speaking areas. The work covers: -- the French influence in the Francophone world -- cultural variation in Francophonia -- interdisciplinary (aesthetics, language, culture & identity, history, etc..). -- the 'cultural production' of Francophones. -- relations between metropolitan France and its former colonies.This is of interest to observers of the French language and seekers of information on culture, history and politics in francophone countries.

Migration is both a demographic and a cultural phenomenon. As such, it both reshapes the global village and subverts the all-encompassing vision of the city, a space split between the blending of all new cultures and the need felt by many migrants to maintain their traditions and thereby contribute to a multicultural mosaic. This series of essays explores how the concepts of the melting-pot and the mosaic have shaped the representation of Paris and Montreal in francophone literatures. Migrant movements to these cities from the Caribbean, the Maghreb, Sub-Saharan Africa, Quebec, Indochina, and the Indian Ocean have produced new groups of intersecting cultures. Under the dual influences of their native and host countries, migrants have produced an innovative and multifaceted literature that reflects their composite world-view. Their writing poses pressing questions of ethnicity, immigration, integration, and citizenship, and challenges longstanding notions both of the concept of the city and of how its spaces embody and articulate Frenchness in the face of ongoing change. Such shifts produce changes not only in the diasporic culture, but in the national culture as well, through creolization processes. These shifting identities increasingly destabilize current notions of national membership and social and cultural belonging, since we can no longer presume a direct correspondence between place, culture, language and identity. They also pose new questions of national identity and difference as the immigrant presence expands and inflects the cosmopolitan pluralism of today’s societies.

Pacifist Invasions is about what happens to the contemporary French lyric in the translingual Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics, it reveals three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into French in works by Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan).