This guide will help you find library resources on French-speaking regions of the world (primarily outside of continental Europe). See the French Language and Literature guide for additional resources.
LITAF: Littératures Africaine FrancophoneLITAF : une référence générale sur les littératures de l'Afrique noire francophone.
La base de données bibliographique LITAF donne des informations complètes sur la production littéraire en langue française de l'Afrique subsaharienne.LITAF est à l'origine un projet du groupe de recherche "Littératures d'Afrique noire" (groupe aujourd'hui dissous) dirigé par Alain Ricard†, directeur de recherches émerite au Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. LITAF bénéficie du statut de projet associé au laboratoire "Les Afriques dans le Monde" - LAM (Unité mixte de recherche 5115 CNRS / SciencesPo Bordeaux) dirigé par Céline Thiriot.
LITAF a reçu le soutien du Conseil Régional d'Aquitaine du 1997 à 2000 et de l'Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) pour l'année 2008. Le site de LITAF est hébérgé par LAM. Remerciements à LAM et à l'APELA (Association pour l'étude des littératures africaines) dont l'aide précieux a rendu possible l'amélioration de la grille de recherche et sa remise en ligne après une intérruption en août et septembre 2016.
PerséeOpen access digital library of French-language scholarly journals grouped by discipline.
IsidoreSearch engine for research in the Humanities and Social Sciences
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Les Cultural Studies Dans Les Mondes Francophones by Boulou Ebanda De B'Béri; Boulou Ebanda de B'béri; Boulou Ebanda De B'BériDepuis trois décennies le monde anglo-saxon a considéré sérieusement les Cultural Studies comme une analyse des pratiques quotidiennes et de la production de sens. Mais la production analytique en français dans cette discipline est restée presque absente. Les mondes francophones ont déjà vécu plusieurs événements qui auraient intéressé les Cultural Studies au XXIe siècle : les manifestations sociales de l'hiver 2006 et de l'automne 2007 en France, les mouvements migratoires d'Africains vers l'Europe et le débat sur « les accommodements raisonnables » au Québec entre autres. Pour tous ces événements, nous avions entendu s'élever plusieurs voix qui offraient des articulations généralistes de différentiation de nous à l'autre et des idiomes comme « ces gens-là », « les enfants issus d'immigration », « nous ne voulons pas accueillir la misère du monde » et bien d'autres. Nous n'avions pas entendu s'élever des perspectives provenant des Cultural Studies dans leur compréhension particulière d'événements politiques, ni en France, ni en Belgique, ni en Suisse, encore moins au Québec. Ces perspectives nous invitent à tenir compte des rapports entre discours et représentations, de placer les contextes politiques des pratiques quotidiennes comme prémisses de nos analyses, d'ouvrir les identités aux pratiques de production de sens et de revoir les groupes et formations identitaires. Cet ouvrage a pour but de souligner les repères utiles des Cultural Studies pour mieux comprendre les milieux politiques et culturels de la francophonie au XXIe siècle.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2010
Writing Through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean by Oussiena Alidou (Editor)Writing Through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean interrogates conventional notions of writing. The contributors--whose disciplines include anthropology, art history, education, film, history, linguistics, literature, performance studies, philosophy, sociology, translation, and visual arts--examine the complex interplay between language/literature/arts and the visual and virtual domains of expressive culture. The twenty-five essays explore various patterns of writing practices arising from contemporary and historical forces that have impacted the literatures and cultures of Benin, Cameroon, C te d'Ivoire, Egypt, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Morocco, Niger, Reunion Island, and Senegal. Special attention is paid to how scripts, though appearing to be merely decorative in function, are often used by artists and performers in the production of material and non-material culture to tell "stories" of great significance, co-mingling words and images in a way that leads to a creative synthesis that links the local and the global, the "classical" and the "popular" in new ways.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2015
At the Limits of Memory: Legacies of Slavery in the Francophone World by Nicola Frith (Editor); Kate Hodgson (Editor)Recent years have seen a growing body of literature dedicated to memories of slavery in the Anglophone world, yet little has been done to approach this subject from Francophone perspectives. This collection responds to the urgent need to contribute to current research on slavery and memory studies by focusing specifically on the Francophone world. Featuring the scholarship of leading academics in France, Britain, the United States and Canada, the collection reflects upon contemporary commemorative practices that relate to the history of slavery and the slave trade, and questions how they function in relationship to other, less memorialized histories of exploitation, such as indentured and forced labour. The volume is set against the context of France's growing body of memory legislation, as well as its close cultural and political connections to its former empire, all of which make it an influential player in how slavery continues to be memorialized and conceptualized in the public sphere. Contributors retrace and redraw the narrative map of slavery and its legacies in the Francophone world through a comparative understanding of how these different, but interconnected forms of labour exploitation have been remembered and/or forgotten from European, West African, Indian Ocean and Caribbean perspectives.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2015
Francophonie and the Orient: French-Asian Transcultural Crossings, 1840-1940 by Mathilde KangBased on transnational France-Asia approaches, this book studies Asian cultures once steeped in French civilisation but free of a colonial mode in order to highlight the transliterary examples of cultural transfer. This book is a pioneering study of the Francophone phenomenon within the context of cultures categorised as non-Francophone. Espousing a transcultural approach, Francophonie and the Orient examines the emergence of French heritage in the Far-East, the various forms of its manifestation, and the modes of its identification.Several thematic signposts guide the diverse pathways of the research. Firstly, the question is posed as to whether colonisation is the ultimate coat of arms for entry into Francophonie? Secondly, the book raises issues relative to Asian Francophone works: the emergence of literatures with French expression from Asian countries historically free of French domination. Finally, the study reconfigures the Asian Francophone heritage with new paradigms (transnational/global studies), which redefine the frontiers of Francophonie in Asia.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2018
An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 by J. P. DaughtonBetween 1880 and 1914, tens of thousands of men and women left France for distant religious missions, driven by the desire to spread the word of Jesus Christ, combat Satan, and convert the world's pagans to Catholicism. But they were not the only ones with eyes fixed on foreign shores. Justas the Catholic missionary movement reached its apex, the young, staunchly secular Third Republic launched the most aggressive campaign of colonial expansion in French history. Missionaries and republicans abroad knew they had much to gain from working together, but their starkly differentmotivations regularly led them to view one another with resentment, distrust, and even fear.In An Empire Divided, J.P. Daughton tells the story of how troubled relations between Catholic missionaries and a host of republican critics shaped colonial policies, Catholic perspectives, and domestic French politics in the tumultuous decades before the First World War. With case studies onIndochina, Polynesia, and Madagascar, An Empire Divided--the first book to examine the role of religious missionaries in shaping French colonialism--challenges the long-held view that French colonizing and "civilizing" goals were shaped by a distinctly secular republican ideology built onEnlightenment ideals. By exploring the experiences of Catholic missionaries, one of the largest groups of French men and women working abroad, Daughton argues that colonial policies were regularly wrought in the fires of religious discord--discord that indigenous communities exploited in respondingto colonial rule.After decades of conflict, Catholics and republicans in the empire ultimately buried many of their disagreements by embracing a notion of French civilization that awkwardly melded both Catholic and republican ideals. But their entente came at a price, with both sides compromising long-held andmuch-cherished traditions for the benefit of establishing and maintaining authority. Focusing on the much-neglected intersection of politics, religion, and imperialism, Daughton offers a new understanding of both the nature of French culture and politics at the fin de siecle, as well as the power ofthe colonial experience to reshape European's most profound beliefs.
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2006
Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity by H. Adlai Murdoch; Zsuzsanna Fagyal"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."
Location: Online
Publication Date: 2013
Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism by Alec G. Hargreaves (Editor)Long repressed following the collapse of empire, memories of the French colonial experience have recently gained unprecedented visibility. This interdisciplinary volume explores the multiple forms of this upsurge and the forces driving it in popular culture, scholarly research, and public commemorations.
Location: Mugar Stacks PQ3897 .M46 2005
Publication Date: 2005
Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean by Christopher M. Church2017 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize Winner Over a span of thirty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe endured natural catastrophes from all the elements--earth, wind, fire, and water--as well as a collapsing sugar industry, civil unrest, and political intrigue. These disasters thrust a long history of societal and economic inequities into the public sphere as officials and citizens weighed the importance of social welfare, exploitative economic practices, citizenship rights, racism, and governmental responsibility. Paradise Destroyed explores the impact of natural and man-made disasters in the turn-of-the-century French Caribbean, examining the social, economic, and political implications of shared citizenship in times of civil unrest. French nationalists projected a fantasy of assimilation onto the Caribbean, where the predominately nonwhite population received full French citizenship and governmental representation. When disaster struck in the faraway French West Indies--whether the whirlwinds of a hurricane or a vast workers' strike--France faced a tempest at home as politicians, journalists, and economists, along with the general population, debated the role of the French state not only in the Antilles but in their own lives as well. Environmental disasters brought to the fore existing racial and social tensions and held to the fire France's ideological convictions of assimilation and citizenship. Christopher M. Church shows how France's "old colonies" laid claim to a definition of tropical French-ness amid the sociopolitical and cultural struggles of a fin de siècle France riddled with social unrest and political divisions.