Jill Jarvis – författare

Number 149/150 of Yale French Studies investigates landscape relationally, as a way of being, vernacular improvisation, gathering of textures, terrain of extraction and resistanceDouble issue Number 149/150 of Yale French Studies examines the vistas that emerge when we set aside familiar aesthetic conceptions of “nature” (forests, mountains, gardens) and consider instead a variety of stranger landscapes—spaces forgotten or unexplored, deserts, littoral edges, industrial and postindustrial terrain, matter made radiant by nuclear toxicity, and wastes. Contributors to this collection engage landscape as something other than a mere view, backdrop, or container for a person. Their contributions reflect the strange uses to which lands, waters, and skies have been put throughout and beyond the former French empire. Temporally, geographically, and methodologically, the issue is wide-ranging and diverse: it spans topics as varied as the poetics of medieval tree grafting, the desolation and resistance of sixteenth-century New World mines, the ghostly “elephant-landscapes” of French modernist fiction, and the “broiling favelas” of a Caribbean post-humanist near-future. Likewise, the articles gathered here consider richly divergent genres and objects, including travel narratives, novels, multimedia installations, sculpture, photography, architectural ruins, postapocalyptic cinema, and documentary film.

The magnitude of the legal violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria (1830–1962) is such that only aesthetic works have been able to register its enduring effects. In Decolonizing Memory Jill Jarvis examines the power of literature to provide what demographic data, historical facts, and legal trials have not in terms of attesting to and accounting for this destruction. Taking up the unfinished work of decolonization since 1962, Algerian writers have played a crucial role in forging historical memory and nurturing political resistance-their work helps to make possible what state violence has rendered almost unthinkable. Drawing together readings of multilingual texts by Yamina Mechakra, Waciny Laredj, Zahia Rahmani, Fadhma AÏth Mansour Amrouche, Assia Djebar, and Samira Negrouche alongside theoretical, juridical, visual, and activist texts from both Algeria’s national liberation war (1954–1962) and war on civilians (1988–1999), this book challenges temporal and geographical frameworks that have implicitly organized studies of cultural memory around Euro-American reference points. Jarvis shows how this literature rewrites history, disputes state authority to arbitrate justice, and cultivates a multilingual archive for imagining decolonized futures.