Description
Book Synopsis"The Colonial Fortune" highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clézio, Paule Constant, Édouard Glissant, Tierno Monénembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leïla Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Régis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and conceptual presence colonialism in our postcolonial era. The paracolonial describes the phenomena of revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue – in other words, the permanence of the colonial in contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of the colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era’s concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation, and literature’s ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.
Trade Review'First-rate scholarship ... overall, this is a serious, original and insightful study.'
Lydie E. Moudileno, University of Pennsylvania
'Oana Panaïté’s intriguingly titled
Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French is an ambitious and timely attempt to move the field of postcolonial studies on to new terrain both in theoretical reach and particular attention.'
Anna-Louise Milne,
Francosphères'This monograph will be of interest to any scholar working on contemporary French and Francophone literature, given the variety of disciplines the author draws from and insights that she offers to the reader. It bridges the gap between scholars focusing on metropolitan France and those working on francophone countries, as Panaïté points out a new disciplinary way forward.'
Nanar Khamo,
Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
A Primal Scene: The Colonial Fortune
Part One: From Exotic Destinations to Colonial Destinies
1 Departures: Orphans, Heirs and Adventurers
2 Landscape as Vocation
Part Two: Writing as Africans 3 Distant Empathy
4 Maps of Frenchness: Between Self-Invention and Delusion
Part Three: Colonial Remanence 5 Algeria’s Mortified Memory
6 A Place of Dialogue
An Unpayable Debt: For a Paracolonial Aesthetics
Bibliography
Index
