Yale French Studies – serie

Part 1Pierre Mertens, Perasma: A Novel (excerpt) Antoon Van den Braembussche, The Silenced Past: Trauma and Taboo in Belgian MemoriesLuc de Heusch, Ceci n’est pas la BelgiquePiet Van de Craen, What, if Anything, Is a Belgian?Jacques Dubois, Wallonia: The Will to RememberPart 2Marc Quaghebeur, The Sixteenth Century: A Decisive MythSophie de Schaepdrijver, Death Is Elsewhere: The Shifting Locus of Tragedy in Belgian Great War LiteratureAntoine Tshitungu Kongolo, Colonial Memories in Belgian and Congolese LiteraturePart 3Serge Tisseron, Family Secrets and Social Memory in Les Aventures de TintinPhilip Mosley, Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian CinemaFrançoise Aubry, Victor Horta: Vicissitudes of a WorkAlexander Murphy, Landscapes for Whom? The Twentieth-Century Remaking of Brussels

Time for Baudelaire suggests it’s time that Yale French Studies devote an issue to the poet who more than any other inaugurated the unfinished epoch of modernity. It also urges that we take or make time for thinking about the specific ways in which poetry—and perhaps poetry alone—allows a historical concept like modernity to become accessible in the first place. Finally, it asks what time means when it comes to reading the relation between Baudelaire’s writings and the moment, the event, the era—and our capacity to experience them together or in isolation from one another.

The first Yale French Studies issue on photography, examining French photography's place in art, identity, and society through a lens of diversity and interdisciplinary investigation In its first issue on photography, this volume of Yale French Studies presents multiple avenues of interdisciplinary investigation designed to intersect and open up new areas of inquiry in the twenty-first century. These intersections push beyond traditional geographic and gender boundaries, exploring women’s photography, new cultural contexts, trans orientalism, and minority and marginalized bodies. As they do so, they ask us to reconsider the way that we conceive of photography’s place in the past and in our lives today.

Yale French Studies 142 explores the contemporary relevance of an alternative strand of feminism as theorized by Monique Wittig  This volume of Yale French Studies foregrounds Monique Wittig (1935–2003), a writer who left France to live and teach in the United States, in a diverse range of multidisciplinary conversations—in literary studies, history, and gender and sexuality studies—to demonstrate how Wittig’s theoretical and literary work remains an indispensable resource for thinking and creating in the twenty-first century.  Editors Morgane Cadieu and Annabel L. Kim flip the “materialist lesbianism” that Wittig’s collection of essays, The Straight Mind, centers and describes as being the core of Wittig’s work to deal instead with “lesbian materialism,” thereby making "lesbian" the method and "materialism" the object and allowing Wittig’s work to realize its full range. The volume reinterrogates the official historiography of French materialist feminism; expands the intellectual framework within which Wittig’s work is usually considered; insists on the language-centric materialism that emerges from Wittig’s writing as a way of joining the political with the literary; and attends to the way this literary material inspires material responses and creations within the plastic arts. Underlying the entire volume is a keen sense of the materiality of Wittig’s archives, housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, as a site of lesbian thought in Wittig’s radical sense of the term: a fugitive positionality.

An examination of interrelatedness, influence, and intention in the works of Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau  In this issue of Yale French Studies, editors Thomas Trezise and Charly Verstraet assemble essays exploring the work of Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau. As a public intellectual concerned with affairs both local and global, Chamoiseau has crafted a body of work that reaches beyond the traditional borders of the Caribbean while maintaining the interrelatedness of the islands with the rest of the world. Contributors to the volume, including Chamoiseau himself, examine his novels, memoirs, poetics, and depictions of trauma, darkness, animals, and more to reveal the way his words cannot be contained within traditional boundaries (literary, political, or cultural). The collection touches on Chamoiseau’s techniques of borrowing, mixing, and subverting European literary genres; his implicit or explicit dialogue with other writers; his engagement with different media; and the connections he draws between historical trauma and natural disaster.

A collection of interdisciplinary critical essays examining the political and aesthetic practices of Martinican French author, filmmaker, and journalist Fabienne Kanor  In this volume of Yale French Studies, editor Gladys M. Francis assembles the first collection of essays focused on the work of award-winning author, filmmaker, and journalist Fabienne Kanor. The volume examines the transgressive aesthetics of Kanor’s films, literature, performances, and journalism through critical essays, film illustrations, personal travel and working notes, original photos, and a heretofore unpublished essay by Kanor herself.  Broken into three sections, the volume first analyzes Kanor’s central aesthetic—the painful corporeal experiences through which her Black characters push limitations and transform themselves—then turns to her critical and contemporary construction of feminism and concludes with her signature trope: embodied movement across the West, Africa, and the Americas. The collection demonstrates Kanor’s feminist politics and explores how her artistic productions disrupt traditional phallocentric, imperialist discourse and commemoration and offer challenging aesthetics and representations of the Black body, trauma, migration, (neo-)colonization, gender, and sexual minorities. In a moving coda, Kanor’s original essay asks readers to reach into their invisible and untold history, to recover themselves and manifest the power of their individual and collective memory.