Empire Lost

France and its other worlds

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2009
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216282020
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Despite the loss of the French Empire, France and its former colonies are still bound by a common historical past. With the new global promotion of la Francophonie, the relation between the various constituencies of the French-speaking regions of the world is reexamined and debated in this book, through the conversation between scholars dealing with diverse texts and contexts that present the colonial contact and its imprint. The book illustrates how, in France and in its other worlds, that contact, its repercussions, and its memory are lived and expressed today in a variety of textual representations.
The historical contact between France and its other worlds has given birth to new kinds of cross-cultural expressions in the arts, in literature, and in aesthetics, establishing interrelations and generating appropriations from both sides of the Hexagon frontier, highlighting the fluidity and the permeability of its cultural borders. The book subtext tells that the frontier between France and its other worlds is no more an unshakable geographical, political, and cultural limit, but rather a line that has become mobile, fluctuating, and permeable, and across which currents, ideas, sensitivities, and creativity are expressed, bearing testimony to vitality and diversity but also to a cross-fertilization of cultures and societies (re) crossing or meeting at that line.
Seen from this latter perspective, the book comes also as an interrogation of the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of the words francophone and Francophonie, and, at an academic level, a mutual exclusion of French and Francophone Studies.

Table of contents

• Content
• Acknowledgments for Permission
• Introduction
• Ouverture: Writing Loss—Indochina, Algeria—Voices Entwined
• PART ONE: HOMOGENEITY SUBVERTED
• Chapter 01. Laïcité in the French Public School System: In the Name of the Law!
• Chapter 02. Muslims in France: History under the Carpet
• Chapter 03. Beyond Postcolonialism: Globalization and Postcolonial Minorities in France
• Chapter 04. We, the Virtual Francophone Multitudes?: Neobarbarisms and Microencounters
• Chapter 05. “No Green Pastures”: The African Americanization of France
• Part TWO: CROSS-TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS
• Chapter 06. A Poetics of Relationality: Victor Segalen’s Stèles
• Chapter 07. Whose Other?: The Centrality of Language to Identity and Representation in Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée
• Chapter 08. Shadowing Assia Djebar
• Chapter 09. L’Esprit de Corps: French Civilization and the Death of the Colonized Soldier
• Chapter 10. Franco-African Artistic and Cultural Cooperation
• Conclusion: My Mother Tongue, My Paternal Languages
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors