Chloé Chaudet, Philippe Mesnard & Jean-Marc Moura Présentation
Chloé Chaudet Des divergences aux dialogues entre A. Assmann, H. K. Bhabha & J. Butler
Commitment oscillates between denunciation and proposal. The article examines the main features of this dynamic in the work of three major thinkers in memory, postcolonial and gender studies : Aleida Assmann, Homi K. Bhabha, Judith Butler. It questions the subversive vocation of postcolonial and gender studies and relates it to a more « institutionalized » memory field, before investigating the constructive criticism that connects the three authors, beyond their differences.
Jean-Marc Moura L’Orientalisme d’Edward W. Said : histoire ignorée, mémoire interdite
Edward Said’s Orientalism is a foundational essay for postcolonial studies. The article revisits the main features of the theme of memory in this major and sometimes controversial work. This study allows us to consider a few aspects of the relationship between the postcolonial field (at least, in its beginnings) and memory studies, in order to initiate a dialogue, in the wake of the notion of “multidirectional memory” presented by Michael Rothberg in 2009, in his essay recently translated in French by Luba Jurgenson.
Philippe Mesnard Les témoins, entre nous et je. À propos des conditions d’énonciation testimoniale
This paper examines two kinds of relationship between witness and testimony. The first one is based on the possibility of a collective voice which bears witness to a history or an event experienced by a group. We can identify different forms of expression such as anthologies, collections, narratives, plays. The second configuration is very recent. It focuses on the individual and evokes the witness in terms of their particular, individualized experience, which is brought to the fore by new technological ways of framing memory.
Cyril Vettorato Réflexions sur la victime comme personnage théorique
The supposed existence and growing impact of a “victimhood culture” in France has recently been the focus of numerous publications, fuelling something like a local brand of the better-known American “Culture Wars”. By going back to the figure of Frantz Fanon, who has been pointed to by many of these anti-victimary intellectuals as one of the main thinkers to blame for the alleged “reign of the victim”, this article attempts to demonstrate that the figure of the victim can carry much more than the absolutist version of it advertised by these polemical essays.
Stef Craps Tracing Transnational Memory: From Celebration to Critique
Récemment, la recherche sur la mémoire transnationale ou transculturelle est devenue plus lucide quant aux limites de la mémoire au-delà des frontières nationales ou culturelles. L’euphorie initiale s’est estompée : de nos jours, les critiques sont plus susceptibles d’attirer l’attention sur les facteurs qui entravent les flux de mémoire que de célébrer naïvement la mobilité mémorielle. Toutefois, la recherche contemporaine sur la mémoire conserve le potentiel éthique des paradigmes mémoriels transnationaux et transculturels.
Max Silverman Impure Memory: Palimpsests Poetics and Politics
Cet article vise à défendre une poétique de la mémoire impure, dans la perspective de contrer les guerres des mémoires et les politiques préjudiciables liées à la victimologie comparée. Il montre que la nature hybride de la mémoire peut s’articuler à une approche intersectionnelle des études mémorielles, postcoloniales et de genre qui, à l’ère des politiques identitaires, sont souvent abordées de manière cloisonnée. À partir du roman L’Empreinte de l’ange (1998) de Nancy Huston et du film Je Veux voir (2008) de Joana Hadjithomas et Khalil Joreige, il présente ainsi quelques figures et enjeux d’une poétique et politique palimpsestes.
Assia Mohssine Scènes de construction du féminisme du tiers monde états-unien
In the 70s and 80s, racialised feminists were dissenting figures in the field of American feminist studies. They are at the origin of the social feminist movement of the Third World in the United States, that sought to introduce the paradigm of difference(s) in order to put an end to “epistemic violence”. This article presents the theoretical framework of the Third World in the United States feminism, which simultaneously confirms and challenges feminist and postcolonial studies. It discusses its deconstruction project of oppression theory and of the universal category of “woman”, before examining its reformulation of a different subject, both colonised and racialised.
Daniel Rodrigues La création littéraire des femmes comme héritage de résistances
The literary creation of many women updates the transmission of a feminine legacy, which is the resistance against patriarchy, but also the legacy that rebuilds the society in which it is inserted. This feminine legacy has often been described as a void or as the absence of a feminine script, inviting contemporary creators to reinvent tradition through creation itself.
Mateusz Chmurski La mémoire polonaise face aux études postcoloniales et de genre
The text questions the evolution and potential crossings of postcolonial and gender studies in Poland since 1989, as well as the development of their local form of “postdependence studies”. Observing their role in deconstructing and/or perpetrating the national-catholic dominant discourse, the author claims their application serves sociocultural and political emancipatory goals: from academia to the women’s strikes, a r/evolution is obvious in the Polish society.
Anne Castaing Quelles sources pour une histoire des femmes dans la Partition de l’Inde ?
This article aims to reconstruct the different issues raised by the reconstruction of a history of women and gendered violence during the Partition of India (1947). It notably focuses on the issue of historical sources, which has been crucial for the historians of the Subaltern Studies, by examining the pitfalls of both personal narrative and fiction, which both have been widely mobilized.
Anne Tomiche Genre & mémoire de l’esclavage. La Mulâtresse Solitude d’André Schwarz-Bart
After winning the Goncourt in 1959 for Le Dernier des Justes, a novel that retraces the Jewish history up to the genocide, André Schwarz-Bart published La Mulâtresse Solitude in 1972, a narrative that retraces the history of colonisation in Guadeloupe up to the defeat of the slaves’ insurrection in 1802. This article analyses, in La MulâtresseSolitude, the gendered implications of what Schwarz-Bart himself called the “contiguities” between the memory of slavery on the one hand and the memory of the Jewish genocide on the other.
Charles Forsdick Dark Heritage of Empire & the Taxonomies of Postcolonial Tourism
L’article s’intéresse à l’« héritage sombre » du colonialisme français dans le contexte plus large des débats autour du passé impérial. La réflexion se concentre sur la convergence entre le Dark Tourism et le postcolonialisme avec, pour exemple central, l’archipel carcéral des bagnes français. Explorant la manière dont le patrimoine carcéral de la Guyane française, de la Nouvelle-Calédonie et du Vietnam deviennent progressivement des objets d’intérêt pour le regard touristique, l’article montre que si ces sites peuvent être considérés comme autant de lieux de mémoire postcoloniaux et de destinations pour le Dark Tourism, il importe également d’examiner non seulement les enjeux transcoloniaux cachés qu’ils comportent souvent mais aussi les pratiques de visites, particulières et même divergentes, qu’ils appellent.
Margarida Calafate Ribeiro La guerre coloniale portugaise & les générations suivantes
The article discusses the Portuguese Colonial Wars in Africa (1961-1974) from the point of view of the second generation, the children of the Colonial Wars. Drawing on the results of two research projects carried out at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, different aspects of the production of postmemory are analyzed. The concept of postmemory demonstrates its productivity through a study of the memorialization of the Colonial War in the contemporary Portuguese context.
Anne Roche Les écritures algériennes de la guerre civile
The symposium program seems to assume there is no dialogue between History and Literature, before arguing about the possible encounter between postcolonial studies, memory studies and gender studies. Actually, one could find many such encounters, but rarely theorized. I intend to question these disciplinary partitions, which I often bypass in my research, on Algeria (bordering on postcolonial studies, history, literature, and so-called « oral history ») or on the thirties, on which on which I am especially inspired by Walter Benjamin’s theory.
Luba Jurgenson Les goulags, des « oasis » coloniales ?
This article considers the question of the colonization of the Far North and Far East of the Soviet Union through the establishment of forced labour camps or special deportee villages. Although Russian and Soviet imperialism on the one hand, and the Soviet concentration camp institution on the other, have been the subject of numerous studies within different disciplines, it is clear that the two issues are struggling to meet. This paper aims to outline some avenues for reflection in order to understand why this colonisation has been so little taken into account by postcolonial studies and what are the epistemological obstacles to a crossover with memory studies on this issue.