Empire lost

With global promotion of la Francophonie, the relation between the different constituencies of the world's French-speaking regions needs to be reexamined and debated. This book questions ingrained assumptions, pointing out the complexity of a never-ending relationship between francophone communities after the Empire.

Despite the loss of the French Empire, France and its former colonies are still bound by a common historical past. With the new global promotion of la Francophonie, the relation between the various constituencies of the French-speaking regions of the world is reexamined and debated in this book, through the conversation between scholars dealing with diverse texts and contexts that present the colonial contact and its imprint. The book illustrates how, in France and in its other worlds, that contact, its repercussions, and its memory are lived and expressed today in a variety of textual representations. The historical contact between France and its other worlds has given birth to new kinds of cross-cultural expressions in the arts, in literature, and in aesthetics, establishing interrelations and generating appropriations from both sides of the Hexagon frontier, highlighting the fluidity and the permeability of its cultural borders. The book subtext tells that the frontier between France and its other worlds is no more an unshakable geographical, political, and cultural limit, but rather a line that has become mobile, fluctuating, and permeable, and across which currents, ideas, sensitivities, and creativity are expressed, bearing testimony to vitality and diversity but also to a cross-fertilization of cultures and societies (re) crossing or meeting at that line. Seen from this latter perspective, the book comes also as an interrogation of the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of the words francophone and Francophonie, and, at an academic level, a mutual exclusion of French and Francophone Studies.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Ouverture
Chapter 3 Homogeneity Subverted
Chapter 4 Laïcité in the French School Public System: In the Name of the Law
Chapter 5 Muslims in France: History under the Carpet
Chapter 6 No Refuge: The African-Americanization of France
Chapter 7 L'Esprit de Corps: French Civilization and the Death of the Colonial Soldier
Chapter 8 Beyond Post-Colonialism: Globalization and Post-Colonial Minorities in France
Chapter 9 Cross-Textual Encounters
Chapter 10 A Poetics of Relationality: Victor Segalen's Stèles
Chapter 11 Whose Other?: The Centrality of Language to Identity and Representation in Roumain's Gouverneurs de la Rosée
Chapter 12 Shadowing Assia Djebar
Chapter 13 Franco-African Artist and Cultural Cooperation
Chapter 14 We, the Virtual Francophone Multitudes: Neo-Barbarisms and Micro-Encounters
Chapter 15 Closure: My Mother Tongue, My Paternal Languages