News Archive

Veiled Assumptons or How France Chafes at its Identity Crisis
Farid Laroussi is Associate Professor of 20th century French and Francophone Maghreban Literatures at Yale University. Professor Laroussi has published on questions pertaining to cultural representations and literary constructions and on issues regarding identity and identification and is currently working on the place and function of contemporary French Orientalism and its dynamics with Maghreban culture.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005 at 4:30 pm in Cunniff Hall, Science Center 199. More information.

What about the postcolonial condition in France, or how it wound itself around historical denial down to a political issue? What does it mean to be French today ? Why the change in the citizenship laws did not affect the socio-cultural reality on the ground? Does the conflict about the Islamic headscarf underscore a crisis of communities or rather a crisis of monotheisms?

It has become a intellectual task as well as a survival matter for some to try to tackle questions pertaining to the transformation of tenets and facts that seem to be set once and for all in the matrix of the French republic: identity, citizenship, “exception culturelle”, secularism, so forth. We shall begin with what preceded the “foulard” affair i.e., a failed policy of social integration of French born to Maghreban parents and contempt for historical responsibilities with regard to the French colonial period. A sense of oddity, if not foreignness, has descended upon France’s political and cultural spheres. The situation can be tackled along three lines of analysis: one that consists of keeping the Other at bay (differences of religion and ethnic backgrounds, work and housing discriminations), another angle is that of the so-called citizens of French stock (Français de souche) who have withdrawn into an idealized perception of their identity (the challenge of European integration, the threat of economic globalization, the need for immigration), lastly the unlikelihood to face history while the colonial past remained unaddressed by both the political power and the institutions.

Yet, and for the reason that Islam has been instrumentalized in a worldwide ideological wave, France has come to face its own challenges, if only because it counts the largest Muslim population in Europe. One of the driving forces in the tensions are the archetypes between the Christian and Muslim worlds that can be dated back to the Crusades. However, what is not recognizable as democracy today is that the concept of Otherness stands out as a new idea that cannot be split up from the comfort of the sense of community. We will discuss to what extent the much vaulted word of “communautarisme” (derived from the headscarf issue) has in fact become a totem for exclusive discourses on either side of the debate.

Reality in today’s France tends to demonstrate that identity and citizenship, as constructions built along the Enlightenment, have ceased to bear much meaning. It is, in our opinion, through a thorough evaluation on the relation between citizenship and nationality that the identity crisis will be solved, by way of truly integrating masses who so far feel excluded.

Parcours d'enfances
Public Reading in French

Date: Monday, April 10, 2006
Time: 4:30PM
Place: Kohlberg Hall, Scheuer Room

"Parcours d'enfances" is a dramatic reading in French, of selected coming of age
stories of authors from the Caribbean, France and the Maghreb: Emile Ollivier,
Nathalie Sarraute, Daniel Maximin, Nina Bouraoui.

Sponsoring Organizations:
The Kenneth Wynn fund and the French and Francophone section of the
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

For more information, contact Professor Rice-Maximin at mricema1@swarthmore.edu

 

Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer by Maryse Condé

Date: Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Time: 7:00PM
Place: Lang Hall, LPAC

"Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer" is a stage adaptation of seven selected moments
from Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé's autobiographical text Le Cœur à rire
et à pleurer, Contes vrais de mon enfance,

The French text and its English translation, Tales From the Heart, True
Stories From My Childhood, will be available at the campus bookstore.

For more information, contact Professor Rice-Maximin at mricema1@swarthmore.edu

 

La Marge de Manoeuvre
By Nicole Brossard

Monday, April 10, 2006
Lecture: 2:00 p.m. - Kohlberg 330
Poetry Readings: 6:00 p.m. - Scheuer Room

Born in Montreal (Quebec), poet, novelist and essayist Nicole Brossard published her first book in 1965. In 1965 she cofounded the influential literary magazine La Barre du Jour and in 1976 she codirected the film Some American Femnists. She has published eight novels including Picture Theory, Mauve Desert, Baroque at Dawn, an essay "The Aerial Letter" and many books of poetry including Daydream Mechanics, Lovhers, Typhon dru, Installations, Musee de l'os et de l'eau. She has won the Governor General award twice for her poetry (1974, 1984) and Le Grand Prix de Poesie de la Foundation les Forges in 1989 and 1999. Le Prix Athanase-David, which is for a lifetime of literary acheivement, was attributed to her in 1991. That same year she received the The Harbourfront Festival Prize. In 1994, she was made a member of L'Academie des Lettres du Quebec. Her work has been widely translated and anthologized. Mauve Desert and Baroque at Dawn have been translated into Spanish. In 1998 she published a bilingual edition of an autofiction essay titled She would be the first sentence of my new novel/Elle serait la premiere phrase de mon prochain roman(1998). In 1989, a book of her poetry in translation, Installations, was released, translated by Erin Moure and Robert Majzels. Nicole Brossard lives in Montreal.