Francophone Literatures: A Literary and Linguistic Companion by Malcolm Offord , Nicki Hitchcott , Sam Haigh , Rosemary Chapman (review)

MLR, 104.3, 2009 879 English as 'compearance' (p. 11)). Her precision that forNancy sense' implies not abstract meaning but coexistence or touch (p. 16) gestures towards the complexity imbedded inher study's title. The book is comprised of seven chapters, each focused on a specific novel. As a group, Britton's choices suggest a canonical reading of Antillean literature, covering the best-known authors from the region, ifnot always their best-known work: Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosee (1946); Edouard Glissant's Le Quatrieme Siecle (1964); Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle (1972); Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1992); Daniel Maximin's Vile une nuit (1995); and Maryse Conde's Desiderada (1997). The one novel likely to be less familiar to readers isVincent Placoly's VEau-de-mort Guildive (1973). Because Britton's book is addressed to specialists, she provides scant background information about the textsor their authors. Still, one of the evident challenges of Britton's project ishow to 'make sense' of texts that are, in fact,worlds apart.While she avoids the trap of synthesizing the disparate?her conclusion highlights rather the telling differences among the novels discussed?as a presentation of French Caribbean fiction, the study is somewhat uneven. Britton includes three novels each from Guadeloupe and fromMartinique, but only one from Haiti. Her corpus also spans a period ofmore than fiftyyears, moving from the deeply rooted agricultural community depicted in Roumain's Gouverneurs to Conde's Desiderada, where community is shaped by translocation from Guadeloupe to Paris to Boston. This leaves one to wonder how Britton might have approached works by contemporary Haitian diasporic authors, Dany Laferriere or Marie-Celie Agnant, for example, or even Rene Depestre. Similarly, Britton's brief discussion of the rich intertextual allusions inMaximin's Vile une nuit should encourage other scholars to take up where she leftoff,and topursue not only the novel's engagement with jazz and contemporary artmusic, but also the community of readers implied by intertextual reference. To return to the book's cover, the dust jacket features a painting Peaceful Market, by theHaitian painter Claude Dambreville. Like Britton's own title,Dambreville's suggests the stillness of themoment captured. What ismost striking, however, are the faces of the figures at themarket: several are turned full away from the viewer and none offersmore than a partial profile. This provides a strongmetaphor for the complex and disparate images of community that emerge from Britton's study. Revealing 'the sense of community' requires a patient interrogation ofwhat is, too often, obscured or taken for granted. Britton's book is a thoughtful and valuable contribution to discussions both of Nancy's work and about community in the French Caribbean; it will certainly become a touchstone for scholars in the field. New College of Florida Amy B. Reid Pre-Colonial Africa inColonial African Narratives. ByDonald R.Wehrs. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. 2008. xii+206 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-7546-6088-0. Donald R.Wehrs's study explores the portrayals of pre-colonial Africa by African writers and is an impressive contribution to the field of (postcolonial) African 88 Reviews literature. It is extremely well researched and the author's deep understanding of indigenous African traditions permits him to gain valuable insights, allowing him to challenge current understandings of Africa before the colonial era. The work succeeds in shining a spotlight on thisneglected section ofAfrican literaryresearch and provides a critical overview of the differing perspectives available toAfrican authors. One of its major strengths is the comparative element. It compares both English and French-language textswith those ofHausa and Yoruba and, indoing so, investi gates thepolitical reflection in twentieth-centuryAfrican fiction inboth colonial and indigenous languages. This, in turn,encourages amulti-faceted approach toAfrican literature and its thematic complexities. In his introductionWehrs notes thatEuro pean fictionmerely perpetuates the colonizers vision of pre-colonial Africa. While he concedes thatEuropean fiction has a role toplay, he aims toprovide an overview of how African writers use their own, African strategies in order towrite of a past that is not exotic' but of livingmemory, communal debate, and personal identity' (pp. ix-x). Wehrs's principal objective is to examine the various...

878 Reviews his way through despair. VHomme revolte,Orme argues, was in part a way for Camus to purge his anguish at having supported capital punishment during the post-Liberation purges, thereby increasing injustice at the very moment when he believed thathe was serving justice. But VHomme revolted attack on revolutionary violence led to accusations of self-righteousmoralizing, while Camus's search for a solution to theAlgerian conflictwhich would safeguard the European community and do justice to the indigenous population without conceding independence was doomed to failure. Thereafter, torn apart by thewar and by his inability, in his private life, to practise the justice that he had preached in public, Camus would campaign against specific injustices such as the death penalty, and seek peace of mind in a return tohis roots (Le Premier Homme). In his conclusion Orme suggests thatCamus is closer to JohnRawls than John StuartMill in his understanding of justice* (p. 208), being concerned with fairness rather than utilitarian calculations of maximum aggregate benefit. Unlike either Rawls or Mill, however, Camus never developed a theory of justice and defined what hemeant by social justice only once, speaking invague terms against privilege and in favour of equality of opportunity. Orme's achievement is to have created a narrative from Camus*s scattered pronouncements on the topic, including his famous declaration?referring to the danger thatmembers of his familymight fall victim to FLN terrorism?that he would defend hismother before justice. InOrmes view, Camus thereby tacitly acknowledged the justice of theAlgerian cause, but also implied that 'human life is more precious than all abstract notions of justice* (p. 194). Raising a number of important issues thatdeserve to be pursued in future research, this is ameticulous study,with an extensive bibliography and notes, and will prove a valuable resource for anyone wishing to investigate the subject. University of Central Lancashire Neil Foxlee The Sense ofCommunity inFrench Caribbean Fiction. By Celia Britton. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2008. vii+256pp. ?50. ISBN 978-184631-137-6. Axiom warns against judging a book by its cover. In the case of Celia Britton's most recent book, if the cover is initially deceptive, itultimately proves revealing, providing an entry-point to the nuanced and thought-provoking analyses within. The theme that links Britton's discussions of seven very differentnovels from the French Caribbean is that of community; what the cover does not broadcast is that Britton's primary project is to reread a familiar corpus in the light of thework of French philosopher Jean-LucNancy. The book opens with a substantial introduction that provides both an overview of Nancy's theorization of community and a map of how Britton will apply it to the Caribbean context. Britton's discussion of Nancy's work is at once dense and remarkably clear; she negotiates the threads of jargon deftly, relyingmainly on English translations, but making pertinent reference to the original French as needed to clarify nuance or, indeed, neologism (e.g. comparution', rendered in MLR, 104.3, 2009 879 English as 'compearance' (p. 11)). Her precision that forNancy sense' implies not abstract meaning but coexistence or touch (p. 16) gestures towards the complexity imbedded inher study's title. The book is comprised of seven chapters, each focused on a specific novel. As a group, Britton's choices suggest a canonical reading of Antillean literature, covering the best-known authors from the region, ifnot always their best-known work: Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosee (1946); Edouard Glissant's Le Quatrieme Siecle (1964); Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle (1972); Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1992); Daniel Maximin's Vile une nuit (1995); and Maryse Conde's Desiderada (1997). The one novel likely to be less familiar to readers isVincent Placoly's VEau-de-mort Guildive (1973). Because Britton's book is addressed to specialists, she provides scant background information about the textsor their authors. Still, one of the evident challenges of Britton's project ishow to 'make sense' of texts that are, in fact,worlds apart.While she avoids the trap of synthesizing the disparate?her conclusion highlights rather the telling differences among the novels discussed?as a presentation of French Caribbean fiction...

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

My dissertation " Folie et stratégies d'évasion dans les romans postcoloniaux au Maghreb (Maroc-Algérie) et à l'Île Maurice." argues that madness is a universal theme in the postcolonial context by Maghrebian and Mauritian women authors such as Nadia Chafik, Leïla Marouane, Nina Bouraoui, Ananda Devi, Nathacha Appanah, Marie-Thérèse Humbert. We include Tahar Ben Jelloun, Patrick Chamoiseau and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio because of their approach to gender, feminine and masculine. This research is not a question of making a psychoanalytic study of madness, but of a literary analysis of this theme in the texts of our corpus. We focus on the meanings of madness in literary texts and the characteristics of female characters suffering from it. We study fictional narratives by women who struggle against the violence and patriarchy inherent in traditional society. We highlight the strategies allowing to grief through the subtlety of their texts. We see why this theme, linked to confinement and violence, is central to the novels of writers in the Maghreb and the Mascarenes, and more specifically to Mauritius. We show that madness appears as the only response to violence and confinement because madness is liberating and allows the female characters to free themselves and to appropriate a new status. Our aim is to show how these writers transform violence, and how madness is an essential element in freeing themselves from the social limits imposed in certain traditional patriarchal societies that condemn women to confinement, social, physical and psychological. The novels of our corpus are situated in a traditional context, either Arab-Muslim in the Maghreb or in Indian society in Mauritius. This theme is not recent in literature, over the centuries and different geographical spaces, but we will focus more particularly on the literary rupture of a new generation of Francophone female writers.

The figure of the zombie is a recurring trope for writers in the French Antilles. Two of the most influential and popular authors in modern French-Antillean literature are Patrick Chamoiseau from Martinique and Simone Schwarz-Bart from Guadeloupe. Both of these authors use the figure of the zombie as representations of colonization and the lingering trauma of slavery in Antillean society. In this thesis, I examine two of the most well-known works by these authors, Chamoiseau’s Chronique des Sept Misères (1986) and Schwarz-Bart’s Ti Jean L’horizon (1979), and how these texts use the nature of the zombie in an effort to define Antillean identity. I argue that it is through the use of the zombie in these texts that Schwarz-Bart and Chamoiseau are able to create a portrait of Antillean culture which, as well as illustrating the importance of history, also proposes a plan to strengthen Antillean identity and literature in the future.

In a survey of postcolonial literature one rarely comes across a writer of English expression grouped together with francophone authors. In Islam and Postcolonial Narrative, John Erickson has included Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses with three francophone novels by Maghrebian writers: L'amour la fantasia by Assia Djebar, L'enfant de sable by Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Amour bilingue by Abdelkabir Khatibi. What links these four writers, as Erickson is quick to point out, is not merely their Muslim background in countries that were once colonized by Western powers, but also the "mixture of genres" (29) that has come to characterize their writings. Drawing on Islamic and Western literary traditions, and using the languages of the people who colonized them, they have succeeded in honing a mode of expression that they have made their own. It is "an alternative discourse expressive of postcolonial sensibilities and perceptions" that dispenses with the "linear, closed worlds of Eurocentric and Islamic magesterial narratives and discourses" (95). These writers, Erickson makes it clear, are not influenced by the written word alone. Much of their writing, he says, draws "on a multitude of non-written sources" (166). The.reader often encounters in their texts extracts of poems and narratives, based both on religious and secular sources, a living testimony of the cultures they belong to and those they have adopted.

This article examines innovative modes of interrogating spectacles of State power in postcolonial dictatorship novels. Authoritarian power in the postcolonial public sphere perpetuates itself through practices that reiterate the prerogatives of State reason, national progress, national unity and the indispensability of the potentate. All these are mobilized and deployed in order to produce indocile subjects socialised by dominant ideologies. Given that discourses of resistance have often ended up re-enacting modes of hegemonic power, authors employ tactics of resistance based on slender narrative and non-totalizing subversive acts that nevertheless constitute an unsettling menace to symbolic fabrics of dictatorial power. Using the theoretical approaches elaborated by Achille Mbembe, Homi K. Bhabha and Michel de Certeau, this paper examines narrative deconstructive practices that aim at opening up the postcolonial public sphere for the expression of marginal voices without endowing literary texts with explicit political teleologies. Examples are taken from the novels of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Sony Labou Tansi, Ahmadou Kourouma and Garcia Marquez. The article concludes that subversive reactions to postcolonial State power thrive on a threatening hybridity and a subversive collocation of significations like profanity/mythology, banality/exceptionality, life/death, laughter/lamentation that find their valence in the context of excessive and pervasive State power.Keywords: subversion, mimicry, rumours, postcolonial, dictatorship

Mourning under Siege:The Uses of Apocalypse in French Caribbean Letters Regine Joseph (bio) « Heureux ceux qui écrivent sous la domination de l'âge dernier : leurs poèmes peuvent faire balles, et conforter l'espoir du nombre de leurs impacts. » —Patrick Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé, 19971 «When I wrote Bonjour et adieu à la négritude, one could perhaps read that as "Hello and Goodbye to Politics." If the notion of revolution itself has failed, it would be illusory for me to continue to sleep with a phantom: the great zombie of modernity, it is revolution, alas. The great zombie. » —René Depestre, Interview with Joan Dayan, 19902 Ruins of Dreams3 Patrick Chamoiseau might have articulated the most fundamental dilemma of French Caribbean writing when he claimed early in Ecrire en pays dominé that it was far better for a writer to write under colonialism—the political domination of "l'âge dernier"—than within the "domination silencieuse" of cultural assimilation. In Chamoiseau's view, colonial oppression provided a much more fertile ground to the writer's literary imagination because it offered a visible target against which his craft could "faire balles et conforter l'espoir du nombre de leurs impacts." In removing the colonial enemy, cultural assimilation disarmed the "guerrier" within the writer, turning him into a mere observer of local reality, "un pauvre scribe, marqueur de paroles."4 This privileging of the writer-guerrier over the writer-scribe expresses Chamoiseau's nostalgia for the ideal of the committed writer—a nostalgia that can be likened to the modern belief in the visionary artist. In the French Caribbean, this (modern) ideal is embodied by figures such as Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and René Depestre whose writings often called for the end of colonial oppression through explosive solutions, radical political change and revolutionary action. Writing fifty years after the 1946 departmentalization of the French Antilles, Chamoiseau is drawn to the hope (l'espoir) that he imagines had been the explosive impact (faire balles) of that earlier writing. As he examines the livres endormis from the high days [End Page 13] of anti-colonial struggle, Chamoiseau asks a question to which we will return throughout this article: What is left for a writer to write once the glory days are gone? What seems to fascinate, yet trouble, Chamoiseau as a writer is the apocalyptic element (seemingly) inherent to the poetics and politics of this earlier literature. Aimé Césaire's call for decolonization, for instance, is indeed explosive. His Cahier d'un retour au pays natal employs metaphors of explosion in the poet's pathological analysis of the native land ('Les Antilles dynamités d'alcool')5 as well as in his vision of its future salvation ('les volcans éclateront, l'eau emportera les taches mûres du soleil et il ne restera plus qu'un bouillonnement tiède picoré d'oiseaux marins').6 In the poet's view, cataclysmic change conceived as 'l'apocalypse des monstres… chaude élection de cendres, de ruines et d'affaissements,' seems to hold the highest potential for stimulating 'l'affreuse inanité de notre raison d'être.' The Cahier's poetic thrust seems to arise as much out of an apocalypse—a movement toward an impending cataclysmic end ('La Fin du monde, parbleu')7—as an affirmation of the poet's Negritude.8 Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre provides another example from this l'âge dernier of an apocalyptic conception of revolutionary change. Fanon's ardent attraction to revolution partly stems from the transformative and purifying power of apocalyptic action. In his vision of the decolonizing process, "Tout est permis; en réalité, l'on ne se réunit que pour laisser la libido accumulée, l'aggressivité empêchée, sourdre volcaniquement. Mises à mort symboliques, chevauchées figuratives, meurtres multiples imaginaires, il faut que tout cela sorte. Les mauvaises humeurs s'écoulent, bruyantes telles des coulées de lave...''9 In Fanon's vision, violence (erupted volcanoes) is necessary ingredient that allows revolution to fulfill its destructive and reconstructive purpose; it brings about the end of decolonization by destroying all of its constitutive elements (colonial system, colonizer...

This book analyses the theme of community in seven French Caribbean novels in relation to the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. The islands’ complex history means that community is a central and problematic issue in their literature, and underlies a range of other questions such as political agency, individual and collective subjectivity, attitudes towards the past and the future, and even literary form itself. Britton examines Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, Edouard Glissant’s Le Quatrième Siècle, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Vincent Placoly’s L’eau-de-mort guildive, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit and Maryse Condé’s Desirada.

The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction seeks to better understand the concept of community as a central and problematic issue in French Caribbean literature. The study examines representations of community in seven French Caribbean novels, including Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, Edouard Glissant’s Le Quatrième Siècle, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Vincent Placoly’s L’Eau-de-mort guildive, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit, and Maryse Condé’s Desirada. Each novel is discussed in chronological order, demonstrating a progressive move away from the ‘closed’ community towards a newer sense of an ‘open’ community. In this study, Britton offers an understanding of the postcolonial societies of the Caribbean by looking at French Caribbean literature’s role in the creation of community. The seven novels analysed reveal a correlation between a tightly knit, purposeful community and a linear narrative that ends in definitive resolution, and, conversely, between a dispersed or heterogeneous community and a narrative structure that avoids linearity and closure.

Book Reviews overarching theme of die "slipknot" This concept conflates die notion of collision and reversal, of negotiating between cultures, wiúi diat of negotiating the socioculturel snares of assimilation, identity and displacement. In diese terms, Walker argues, Francophone literature was able to surpass die delimiting binaries of die modernist tradition, reconceptualizing and modulating both themes and techniques. From here, Walker's approach hews a primarily chronological line. Starting witii the award of die Prix Concourt to René Maran for Batouala in 1921, Walker links die auuior's denunciatory analysis of colonialism in die book's preface to die "slipknot," and tiius to Aimé Césaire's themes of Négritude, alienation, displacement, uprootedness, and survival. Tahar ben Jelloun's The Sand Child is read as an integral part of a larger countermodemist whole that interrogates competing nationalisms and patriarchies widiin a Moroccan context of sexual and ideological tyranny. In contrast, Manama Bâ's So Long a Letter highlights issues of writing, epistolarity and parthenogenesis that posit the power of language for African women. Each auuior's work thus becomes a variant of die "slipknot" as countermodemist discourse, die deliberate breaking down of European binaries through strategies of doubling, appropriation, and difference mat channel patterns of cultural displacement and collision into representations of liminality and hybridity. It is in elaborating Francophone literary production as paradigmatic of a sense of identity generated from strategies of discursive and cultural resistance diat Walker's claims are most convincing. Yet, in such an approach, the key issues diat remain unaddressed are the extent to which Francophone literature defines itself through its own discursive and thematic patterns and parameters, radier Úian remaining a stylistic scion of Europe's literary values and practices, and whedier its literary countermodernism is a monolitiuc construct diat remains unchanged despite die many varying intersections of colonialism and Third World cultures. While die paradox of writing in the colonizer's language remains a vexed question for postcolonial literatures , auuiors like Patrick Chamoiseau have shown the myriad padis by which such linguistic and stylistic strictures may be appropriated and redefined. But by locating diese discourses under the rubric of countermodernism, tfieir texts become responses to die prejudices and absences embedded in die texts of colonialism in terms defined by colonialism itself, which does nodiing to dismantle any resulting hierarchies of signification. Radier, die basic tenets of such a problematic must be refused if true discursive independence, reflective of individual differences in die colonial experience, is to be articulated outside of colonial binaries. Despite diese caveats, Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture provides rich and varied analyses of die heterogeneity of Francophone literary discourses, and forms a coherent picture of the forces undergirding diese intersections of francophonie and postcolonialism. Walker's complex readings aptly demonstrate the key role of these discourses in shaping Francophone cultural identity. By demonstrating wiui appropriate complexity die wide range of what the "canon" still considers a "minority" literature, the challenge of dismantling such institutionalized forms of reading is effectively articulated. H. Adlai Murdtjch University oflllinois-Urbana Jean Rohou. Avez-vous Iu Racine? Mise au point polémique. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000. Pp. 408. The subtitle of this book reveals its thrust. Destined for die general public—but not widiout sound lessons for the specialist, like die "composition régressive de l'œuvre" (eh. 3)—Avez-vous lu Racine? is at once a detailed review of how to approach a fictional work in a professional way and, even more appealing for die connoisseur, a delicious corrective of a number of wrongheaded and often self-serving dieories about Racine die man and his art. Those who know die previous, abundant scholarship of Jean Rohou will not be surprised to find a volume diat is high on historical context married to a vision of Racine's plays as die exprèsVol . XLI, No. 4 115 L'Esprit Créateur sion of a Jansenist sense of die tragedy of human existence. In the years surrounding die bicentennial celebrations of Racine's deadi, Rohou was perhaps the most prominent spokesman for reconsidering Racine's œuvre as bom λ forme and, just as important, as a philosophical and the ological/oiui in the face of a...

Asian summer monsoon sets in over India after the Intertropical Convergence Zone moves across the equator to the northern hemisphere over the Indian Ocean. Sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies on either side of the equator in Indian and Pacific oceans are found related to the date of monsoon onset over Kerala (India). Droughts in the June to September monsoon rainfall of India are followed by warm SST anomalies over tropical Indian Ocean and cold SST anomalies over west Pacific Ocean. These anomalies persist till the following monsoon which gives normal or excess rainfall (tropospheric biennial oscillation). Thus, we do not get in India many successive drought years as in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to the ocean. Monsoon rainfall of India has a decadal variability in the form of 30-year epochs of frequent (infrequent) drought monsoons occurring alternately. Decadal oscillations of monsoon rainfall and the well-known decadal oscillation in SST of the Atlantic Ocean (also of the Pacific Ocean) are found to run parallel with about the same period close to 60 years and the same phase. In the active–break cycle of the Asian summer monsoon, the ocean and the atmosphere are found to interact on the time scale of 30–60 days. Net heat flux at the ocean surface, monsoon low-level jetstream (LLJ) and the seasonally persisting shallow mixed layer of the ocean north of the LLJ axis play important roles in this interaction. In an El Nino year, the LLJ extends eastwards up to the date line creating an area of shallow ocean mixed layer there, which is hypothesised to lengthen the active–break (AB) cycle typically from 1 month in a La Nina to 2 months in an El Nino year. Indian monsoon droughts are known to be associated with El Ninos, and long break monsoon spells are found to be a major cause of monsoon droughts. In the global warming scenario, the observed rapid warming of the equatorial Indian ocean SST has caused the weakening of both the monsoon Hadley circulation and the monsoon LLJ which has been related to the observed rapid decreasing trend in the seasonal number of monsoon depressions.

This collection comprises a thirteen-page Introduction and nine chapters. Its aim is to explore the construction of the female autobiographical subject in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century ‘postfeminist’ and postcolonial context, by means of analysis of a sample of authors representative of world literature in French: from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Belgium, and metropolitan France. Hybridity is the key term of analysis, reflected in the choice of writers covered in the volume: Nina Bouraoui, Marie Cardinal, Leïla Sebbar, Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, Marguerite Duras, Maryse Condé, Ken Bugul, Amélie Nothomb, Suzanne Lilar, and Christine Angot. The editors' Introduction situates the collection in the context of female autobiography as a relatively new field of enquiry, for which it provides an overview, culminating in the postcolonial, transnational, and transcultural present. The individual chapters explore, from a variety of perspectives, the textual strategies that create the hybrid, plural, often fragmented nature of the autobiographical selves in the works they analyse. Thus Ann-Sofie Persson's discussion of Bouraoui's work is three-pronged, considering the transcultural aspects, gender, and the author's multiple narrative ‘I’s; and Amy L. Hubbell's chapter posits Cardinal, Sebbar, and Cixous as cultural migrants, with their autobiographical selves divided and doubled, and in-between. For Névine El-Nossery, Djebar's decentred self is in productive tension with a collage of multiple narrative voices, so that her work represents an ‘écriture des “multiplicités simultanées”’ (p. 58) rather than a traditional form of autobiography. Erica L. Johnson analyses shame as a critical term in Duras's L'Amant in relation to colonial and racial ideologies, and looks especially at the role of the adult narrator. Colonialism and racism are also the subject of criticism in Condé's Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, which Lisa A. Connell approaches from a pedagogical perspective. She focuses on learning, reading, and writing in the text as offering a critical space, with literature giving voice to the subaltern writer. Christopher Hogarth's chapter on Bugul, who migrated from Senegal to Belgium, identifies a longing for and the creation of a ‘home culture’ that never existed. The chapters on Belgian writers — Nothomb (Mark D. Lee) and Lilar (Carmen Cristea) — relate to a different kind of doubling. Lee analyses the misogynistic media constructions of Nothomb, who has even been accused of not being the author of her books, while Lilar's techniques of doubling are considered not only to reflect the duality of her situation (Belgian culture and language itself being double, and Lilar was a lawyer as well as a writer) but also to be a technique of ‘automythification’ (p. 146), of unmasking herself in her writing. The collection ends with Natalie Edwards's analysis of Angot's Sujet Angot as autobiography in the second-person, focusing on the relation between reading and autobiography and the way in which Angot's work tempts readers with the traps of reading a life, while problematizing their constructions of the author.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is strongly affected by flood hazards, which endanger human lives and disrupt economic stability. It is therefore critical to further understand the potential impact of climate change and variability on historical and future flood hazards in SSA. To do so, we first reconstructed a complete 65-yearlong daily streamflow, presenting over 600 stations distributed throughout SSA. Using this new dataset, we found that historical trends in flood frequency, duration, and intensity were strongly modulated by decadal to multidecadal variability. We then identified internal modes of climate variability in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as primary drivers of decadal variations in flood occurrence in southern and eastern Africa. Meanwhile, decadal sea-surface temperature anomalies (SSTa) over the eastern Mediterranean region and the North Atlantic were primarily driving decadal trends in floods occurring over western and central Africa. Using 12 climate model large ensembles from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phases 5 and 6 (CMIP5 and 6), we also found such decadal variations in SSTa in the Mediterranean Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans could modulate the occurrence of flood hazards by up to 50% in SSA during the 21st century. Finally, combining bias-corrected CMIP6 data and the open-source hydrological model LISFLOOD, we examine the potential impact of climate change on future trends affecting the intensity, frequency, and duration of floods in West Africa. This study therefore enabled us to compare for the first time the relative importance of climate change and climate variability on future changes affecting flood hazards in SSA.

This chapter offers an insider’s view of the “big” questions that need to be explored by anybody interested in doing work in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). In addition to our own research, we have also worked extensively with MNEs, governmental agencies, and African scholars for more than two decades. This has led to our insights and conclusions on the most important questions that international business (IB) scholars should explore in Sub-Saharan Africa.We offer broad suggestions, and there are many specific questions that can be asked under each of our themes. This is deliberate: To understand Sub-Saharan Africa requires an understanding of the diversity of the region and its recent historical past, both of which continue to shape institutions and the business environment and will do so for the foreseeable future. In this way, we suggest research themes that assist MNEs, stakeholders, and scholars to find relevant and practical approaches to problems such as the unique institutions and instability in SSA, understanding how the legacies of slavery and colonialism still influence the way of doing business in Africa and how MNEs subsidiaries interact with the complexity of stakeholders in the countries in SSA. The chapter begins by providing a necessary overview of the SSA region and how recent histories of slavery and colonialism have influenced FDI and IB in the region. We then introduce four research themes and suggest research questions that we feel scholars interested in SSA may want to engage with.