ABSTRACTS

Remapping Geography in Postcolonial Novels and Films

Dana Strand
(Carleton College)

Searching for a definition of la francophonie (in a 2006 article posted on the website of the Bureau international de l'édition francaise), Chritiane Chaulet Achour draws upon a familiar set of metaphors that have been commonly used to underscore the spatial and geographic dimension of the distinctions between hexagonal and other writers of French expression. For example, in briefly outlining the contributions of so-called francophone writers to the French champs littéraire, Achour claims that they fulfill what Proust argued was the principal task of the writer: to serve as a translator or 'passeur' who helps readers to 'cross borders.' Achour thus supports her defense and illustration of the merits of francophonie by relying upon spatial metaphors that affirm the importance conventionally accorded to space and geography (imaginative or otherwise) in shaping the debate about what qualifies as French literature.



For his part, Alain Mabanckou, in his essay included in the collection Pour une littérature-monde (Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, Gallimard, 2007), makes use of comparable metaphors, but to offer an alternative definition of the 'francophone' writer:



Etre un écrivain francophone, c'est être dépositaire de cultures, d'un tourbillon d'univers. Etre un écrivain francophone c'est certes bénéficier de l'héritage des lettres françaises, mais c'est surtout apporter sa touche dans un grand ensemble, cette touche qui brise les frontières, efface les races, amoindrit la distance des continents pour ne plus établir que la fraternité par la langue et l'univers. La fratrie francophone est en route.



Mabanckou is, in fact, one of a number of writers and filmmakers who seem less concerned with crossing set boundaries (national, cultural, racial) than with breaking them down. In my paper I propose to discuss the ways in which two novelists, Leïla Sebbar (Algerian-French) and Assia Djebar (Algerian), and two filmmakers, Merzak Allouache (Algerian), and Nadia El Fani (Tunisian) have challenged the links between space, place, and geography that so often serve to reify rigid notions of national and cultural identity. In her Shérazade trilogy, Sebbar denies the myth of geography as personal and national destiny, thus destabilizing the claims on which identity politics are often founded. Djebar's recent novels, La femme sans sépulture and La Disparition de la langue française, engage in a sort of archeological reconstitution of Algerian sites (the city of Cherchell, once Césarée, the casbah of Algiers) that replaces official discourses (both nationalist and colonial) with a more global, less fetishized, understanding of History. In his 1996 film Salut, cousin, Allouache continually defies spectators' expectations about the relationship between places (Algeria and France, Paris and the banlieue) and identity (immigrant and citizen, guest and host) as a way of unsettling these often tenuous discursive categories. And finally, in her 2002 film, Bedwin Hacker, El Fani stages a revolt against authoritarian powers (Western media, North African regimes) on both sides of the Mediterranean, deploying the image of the desert nomad as a symbol of resistance to the forces that would seek to impose an identity delimited by frontiers. My paper will explore the ways in which these works ultimately remap the literary (and cinematographic) geography of the past, thus imagining the uncharted territory envisioned by the writers of the littérature-monde manifesto.