February 7, 2018
“Fragmented Memories of a Haunting War: Anamnesis and the Francophone Cultural Production of the New Millennium” a talk by Carla Calargé
3 pm, Pugh Hall 210
Carla Calargé is Associate Professor of French and Francophone studies at the Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. She is a specialist of the Francophone novel of the Arab World and has published numerous articles about the cultural production of North Africa and Lebanon. She has co-directed a special issue of the Cincinnati Romance Review dedicated to the work of Assia Djebar, co-edited a collective about Haiti entitled Haiti and the Americas, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2013 and has been the Secretary-Treasurer of the Conseil International d’Etudes Francophones since 2012.
Her last publication, Liban. Mémoires fragmentées d’une guerre obsédante (Brill Academic Publishers, 2017) examines the ways in which Lebanese writers, artists, and filmmakers have revived the collective memory of the (un)civil war that ravaged their country between 1975 and 1990. Their works both defy and critique the politics of forgetting that was actively pursued by the country’s postwar leadership. Her central argument is that the pictures and literary representations of the war that emerge from the cultural sphere between 2000 and 2015 attempt to fill a gaping void in Lebanon’s national historical narrative. Nonetheless, such efforts are limited by both the persistent feeling that the war is not (yet) over and by the limits of personal narratives in the absence of a national project that ensures and facilitates a collective memorialization of the war. The mnemonic effort is thus condemned to circle iteratively, unable to explain the causes of the war or to connect with the memory/memories of the Other whom the war placed in enemy camps.
This event is free, in English and open to the public.
With the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States
For more information, please contact Alioune Sow (sow@ufl.edu) or Sarah Pugliese (sarahpugliese@ufl.edu)
February 8-10, 2018
Didier Viodé and Fiston Mwanza Mujila visit UF to participate in the Center for African Studies annual Carter Conference
To learn more: africa.ulf.edu/carter-conference/
March 1, 2018
French in Contact Series: Two lectures by Dr. Mireille Tremblay and Dr. Raymond Mougeon
1:55 pm – 3:50 pm, Dauer Hall 215
1:55 pm (period 7) Dr. Mireille Tremblay: Marquer la conséquence à Montréal: que de changements en 40 ans!
Mireille Tremblay is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Translation at the University of Montréal. She specializes in Language Change Theory, Morphosyntactic Variation and History of the French Language. Her most recent research focusses on the new language practices of Montrealers and documents the changes in progress in the community. She has received numerous research grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. Mireille Tremblay was a co-investigator in four Major Collaborative Research Initiatives, such as the project “Modelling Change: The Paths of French (2005-2010)”, as well as “French in North America: A shared heritage (2005-2010)”. Her current research project funded by SSHRC is entitled « Variation and Diglossia in Québec French: corpora, theories and modelling».
3:00 pm (period 8) Dr. Raymond Mougeon: Impact du contact linguistique sur les contraintes extra-linguistique de la variation : les connecteurs (ça) fait (que), so, alors et donc dans le français parlé à Welland (Ontario).
Raymond Mougeon is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of French Studies of Glendon College, York University. He earned a PhD in linguistics from McGill University. He received research grants from the Social Science and the Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Education. He has written extensively on topics such as the diachrony of variation in European French, variation in the spoken French of Franco-Ontarian students and immersion students and aspects of the ethno-linguistic vitality of Ontario’s francophone community. He is a co-investigator on the Major Collaborative Research Investigation Le français à la mesure d’un continent : un patrimoine en partage (Principal Investigator France Martineau).
The lectures are in French, free and open to the public.
March 21, 2018
French in Contact Series: « Rumeurs de faille. Fictions politiques d’Haïti et de l’océan Indien : fenêtres d’un monde réellement possible » a talk by Yolaine Parisot
3:00 pm, Pugh Hall 210
Yolaine Parisot is Professor of Francophone and Comparative Literature at the University Paris-Est Créteil. Past-President of the International Council of Francophone Studies (CIÉF), she is the author of Regards littéraires haïtiens. Cristallisations de la fiction-monde, (Classiques Garnier, 2018). She has edited or co-edited several books or special issues such as Caraïbe, océan Indien. Questions d’histoire, Itinéraires. Littérature, textes, cultures, n°2, 2009 with V. Bonnet and G. Bridet; Genre et migrations postcoloniales : lectures croisées de la norme, with N. Ouabdelmoumen (P. Univ. de Rennes, 2013); Pour un récit transnational. La fiction au défi de l’histoire immédiate with C. Pluvinet (P. Univ. Rennes, 2015) ; Dany Laferrière : énergie du roman, mythologies de l’écrivain, Interculturel Francophonies, n°30, nov.-déc. 2016, Discours artistiques du contemporain au prisme de l’océan Indien : fictions, critique et politiques, TROPICS, n°4-2017 with V. Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo and G. Armand and Pouvoir, puissance, force de la littérature. De l’energeia à l’empowerment, with E. Bouju et C. Pluvinet (forthcoming). Her next book project, tentatively entitled La fiction peut-elle être (encore) postcoloniale ? Essai sur les littératures contemporaines des Amériques, des Afriques et de l’océan Indien, will be published by Classiques Garnier.
The talk is in French, free and open to the public.
April 16, 2018
Yvan Alagbé: Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures
3pm, Grinter Hall 471
Biography: “Yvan Alagbé was born in Paris and spent three years of his youth in West Africa. He returned to study mathematics and physics at the Université de Paris-Sud, where he met Olivier Marboeuf. Alagbé and Marboeuf founded a contemporary visual arts review called L’oeil carnivore and the magazine Le Chéval sans tête (“The Headless Horse”), which gained a cult following for its publication of innovative graphic art and comics. Labeling these artistic collaborations as “Dissidence Art Work,” Alagbé and Marboeuf soon founded their own publishing house, Amok, drawing from the material serialized in Le Chéval, including the first version of Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures. In 2001, Amok partnered with the publishing group Fréon to establish the Franco-Belgian collaboration Frémok, now a major European graphic novels publisher. Alagbé lives in Paris.”
The talk is in English and open to the public.
This event is organized by the France Florida Research Institute and The Texts and Images Group of the Center for African Studies.
About Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures (forthcoming New York Review Comics)
Yvan Alagbé is one of the most innovative and provocative artists in the world of comics. In the stories gathered in Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures—drawn between 1994 and 2011, and never before available in English—he uses stark, endlessly inventive black-and-white brushwork to explore love and race, oppression and escape. It is both an extraordinary experiment in visual storytelling and an essential, deeply personal political statement.
With unsettling power, the title story depicts the lives of undocumented migrant workers in Paris. Alain, a Beninese immigrant, struggles to protect his family and his white girlfriend, Claire, while engaged in a strange, tragic dance of obsession and repulsion with Mario, a retired French Algerian policeman. It is already a classic of alternative comics, and, like the other stories in this collection, becomes more urgent every day.
For more on Alagbé see
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/25/books/comic-book-artist-yvan-alagbe.html