Francophone Belgium Research Articles

REALITY, DREAM AND FANTASY IN THE SELECTION «THE NIGHT OF POLASTRI» BY ALBERT AYGUESPARSE

Aim. The paper examines lexico-grammatical and syntactic specificity of the third novelistic collection by Albert Ayguesparse (1900–1996) – one of the more prominent Belgian Francophone writers of the 20th c. It aims at outlining the more important characteristics of individual novellas in the selection, where the reader comes to know the polyphony of the writer’s short prose, moving from Lyrical Realism through tragic episodes of life to the enigmatic and the fantastic. Research methodology. The article employs a systematic approach with the use of literary-historical and comparative methods. On the basis of these two methods, the specificity of the author’s writing, syntactic structure of the text, individualized language of the characters, places of the light-and-shadow, voice-and-silence, life-and-death playing have been determined. Results. The study provides a wider analysis of the selection’s first novella, viz. «Monica sans tête» [«Monica Without the Head»], as well as the novellas «Les Bottes» [«The High Boots»], full of horror stories; «Le Point rouge» [«The Red Spot»], presenting an interest by the functioning of the internal dialogue; the psychological triptych «Les chasses d’Eros» [«The Hunts of Eros»], «Je me nomme Jérôme» [«My Name Is Jérôme»], «Monsieur Oscar» [«Mr. Oscar»], the mystic in its conception novella «Les Survivants» [«Those Who Survived»]. Research novelty. The article is the first in Ukrainian Literary Studies research into the famous Belgian writer’s novellas, with whose novels the Ukrainian reader got acquainted owing to the translation of his work «Notre ombre nous précède» [«Our Shadow’s Ahead»], published in 1984/1985 on the pages of the «Vitchyzna» [«Motherland»] magazine. Practical value. The article may become the basis for a deeper reading of the work of one of the leading representatives of contemporary Belgian Francophone literature, lexical-stylistic features of the writer’s novellas.

Just Getting By? Francophone Belgian Journalists Dealing with Dutch-language Sources in Their Public Broadcasting Service

ABSTRACT In this article, we examine how the Dutch language is used when francophone Belgian journalists prepare and produce their reports—during all stages of the process—up until the actual broadcast. We conducted 16 qualitative interviews with TV news journalists employed by the Belgian French-speaking public broadcaster. Taking as a starting point the highly variable level of Dutch in the newsroom, we highlight four practices used by journalists when they have to cover a news story in Flanders or interview a Dutch speaker: avoidance, mutual assistance, specific efforts to deal with linguistic difficulties and what we call a “tactical use” of Dutch with the sources. This study reveals practices that are by no means a demonstration of excellent language skills. Journalists’ frequent lack of knowledge is compensated by a certain pragmatism: they aim to illustrate how their daily routines tackle a concrete problem in a relatively informal, flexible, and collective manner. Finally, we explore to what extent these practices impact journalistic performance and how the use of the Dutch language in the newsroom reflects the language divide in Belgium’s journalistic landscape.

Videogames in France and Francophone Belgium: discourses and cultural legitimation

Since their first appearance in the early 1960s, videogames have become one of the most popular forms of entertainment in France and Francophone Belgium. As with other cultural industries, recent decades have seen the emergence of multiple discourses around videogames, whether from the media, the public sphere, or the private sphere. From the themes of violence and addiction, to the perception of videogame as a cultural object, this article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of game-related discourses and representations (and their recent evolution) in Francophone Europe.

Beyond issue diversification: N-VA and the communitarisation of political, economic and cultural conflicts in Belgium

Since the early 2000s, the Flemish nationalist party New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) has experienced a burgeoning growth. Paradoxically, for a stateless nationalist and regionalist party (SNRP), this performance has occurred without major changes in mass support for independence and only ambiguous ones for more regional autonomy, which suggests that the party appeals to different electoral subgroups through a vote-maximisation strategy of issue diversification. Providing an in-depth analysis of the multi-dimensional ideology of N-VA, this article contributes to the literature on SNRPs by arguing that N-VA has gone beyond issue diversification through a strategy of ‘issue communitarisation’ that consists not only in expanding its agenda beyond the centre–periphery cleavage, but rather in framing all other policy issues explicitly in (sub-state) nationalist terms. According to this strategy, all major conflicts on political power, social redistribution and cultural identity are systematically represented as being based on an unresolvable and overarching centre–periphery antagonism between Flanders and francophone Belgium.

CLIL, an elitist language learning approach? A background analysis of English and Dutch CLIL pupils in French-speaking Belgium

ABSTRACTContent and language integrated learning (CLIL) programmes are increasingly popular throughout Europe, but are sometimes accused of inducing a selection bias in the pupil population, both through selection mechanisms of the schools themselves and self-selection of the pupils (and/or their parents). As a result, the outcomes of the CLIL approach may be artificially promoted, and, at the same time, such a selection bias can contribute to an elitist education model, which arguably runs counter to the aims of the approach. This paper looks into a number of background variables of both English and Dutch CLIL learners in Francophone Belgium and compares them to their non-CLIL counterparts. Results from a logistic regression indicate that there is indeed evidence of selection: the socio-economic status of the pupils appears as the main predictor of whether a pupil is in a CLIL or a non-CLIL track, whereas other, more personal, variables such as non-verbal intelligence play a minor (or additional) role. Moreover, Dutch CLIL programmes appear to be more selective than English CLIL programmes in this context. We conclude that CLIL (and particularly Dutch CLIL) in French-speaking Belgium, although a priori open to anyone, is particularly attractive to a socially privileged public.

Policy advisory styles in the francophone Belgian civil service

In a context of the rising importance of ministerial advisers, this article provides empirical evidence about the nature of involvement of civil servants in policy work. Based on a survey of graduated civil servants in francophone Belgium, it shows that civil servants are much involved in policy work even in a politico-administrative system characterised by strong ministerial cabinets. Belgian francophone civil servants are ‘incidental advisors’. They are less process generalists than issue specialists who mostly deal with policy implementation. Their policy advisory style oscillates between ‘rational technician’ and ‘client advisor’. Despite a low institutionalisation of policy advice in the civil service, civil servants significantly serve the ministers in the policy formulation (for harmonization) phase, supplying information and analysis and participating to the writing of policy-related texts.Points for practitionersThe francophone Belgian case shows the importance of policy tasks conducted by civil servants. It also provides evidence about the importance of in-house policy-analytical capacity as it shows that civil servants primarily rely on internal information sources and consultation when involved in policy formulation.

Putting the dead to work: making sense of worker suicide in contemporary French and Francophone Belgian film

ABSTRACTContemporary French and Francophone Belgian cinema has produced a wave of worker suicides that outdoes even Jean Gabin’s repeated cinematic deaths of the later 1930s. This article discusses its significance in the context of neo-liberalism and develops an analytical toolkit for making sense of it, taking its main theoretical inspirations from Slavoj Žižek’s theorisation of violence and Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming’s analysis of worker suicide, but also drawing on Michel Foucault’s account of parrhesia as the scandalous living of another life in this life. The article suggests that most of the films considered use the apparently subjective violence of worker suicide to force the unseen violences of neo-liberal labour into view, while only a few move beyond this denunciatory position to probe both what a parrhesiastic exit from neo-liberal labour, a killing of the worker-in-the-self, might look like and all that prevents it.

Refugees in the news: Comparing Belgian and Swedish newspaper coverage of the European refugee situation during summer 2015

Abstract This comparative content analysis of Belgian and Swedish newspaper coverage of the ‘refugee situation’ in 2015 (N=898) revolves around responsibility indicators, news actor characteristics, and thematic emphasis. As they are a potential influential factor in the public-opinion formation process, the studying of media portrayals is an essential first step in investigating the dynamic interplay between media discourse and societal reactions. Belgium and Sweden differ with respect to migration policy, integration indicators, and the number of incoming refugees. They also differ in terms of journalistic cultural values. As a result, they make for an excellent case study of intercultural differences and similarities in how refugees are reported on. Our analysis made clear that Belgian news coverage shows regional diversity, with Francophone Belgian journalists showing more tolerance towards migrants and thus tending to be more in line with their Swedish counterparts. Still, refugees are seldom allowed to speak for themselves. This warrants attention and action by news professionals.

Discursive constructions of the summer 2015 refugee crisis: A comparative analysis of French, Dutch, Belgian francophone and British centre-of-right press narratives

Abstract Studies in Communication Science indicate that repeated exposure to media has considerable potential to shape audience attitudes to and (dis)engagement with reported issues of public interest, such as migration flows. Therefore, this study examines representation practices of refugees in right-leaning elite press narratives of French-language Belgium, the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands at the peak of the EU refugee crisis summer 2015. The discourse-analytical approach probes into the interpretative aspects of the news content by examining representation practices like collectivization/individuation of the protagonists and assignment of positive/negative semantic roles to the refugees, thereby giving/depriving them of agency and potentially enlisting readers’ compassion or creating a discourse of moral panic. To see whether the refugees have become the object of politicization, we also explore the semantic roles assigned to the three most frequently mentioned non-refugee actors common to the four newspapers (the EU, Germany and Hungary).

Ideological and artistic world in the novel by А. Nothomb “Métaphysique des tubes”

Works by the Belgian Francophone author Amelie Nothomb (born Fabienne Claire Nothomb) (in 1966), the author of more than thirty works, honoured with the range of literary awards. Poetological analysis and studies of А. Nothomb idiostyle contributes to the research of those changes that take place in modern literature. Analyzed the peculiar genre-gender transformation that predetermines the specificity of the work and involves diffusion of features of epic and dramatic genders and genres synthesis. A communicative authorial intention, that is realized in dialogic modus of narration, topical interest of ideological-thematic layer and method of deep psycholization of images, is stressed out as well as a formation and functioning of intrigue as the author’s device of plot formation. The analysis of plot in the work testifies that the author goes back to the classical model of a plot. А. Nothomb creates to the character of a man in search of the “truth” that on plot and ideological levels forms the unity in the formation of genre matrix of the novel initiation. The individual psychological situation of personality in authorial vision becomes the reason of a plot conflict that hangs over substantial type.

Le masque et la plume. Émile Verhaeren et Jean de Boschère devant l’art flamand

Many differences separate Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916) from Jean de Boschere (1873-1958). Yet, by paying tribute to Flemish pictorial tradition, they both reflect modernity with the same reflexive hindsight. Many Belgian francophone writers desired to embed their work in a pictorial tradition, mythicized by mixed labels such as “mystical” and “sensual”. The reasons behind this drive emerge from Verhaeren and Boschere’s respective insights: a fascination for an artistic heritage with a strong symbolic legitimacy, and an attractiveness of a non-univocal posture, preventing the work and the self from getting paralysed.

Educational system in the work of Amélie Nothomb "Glossary of Proper Names"

In the book "Dictionary of proper names" 2002 Belgian Francophone writer A. Nothomb interprets social system, embodies the idea of education’s devastating impact on the psyche of a child and an adolescent. In theory of literature they singled out a genre - the novel of education, which upsets the psychological and social narratives around issues of identity formation. Conceptually the genre of "Dictionary of proper names" is formed on the basis of the story and novel features of novel education that on ideological level transformed into anti educational methods that were accepted and common. By creating an artistic image of the chosen child A. Nothomb reveals educational system: pre-kindergarten, school, ballet education as criminal establishments employing inhumane professionals applying antipedagogical methods of education aimed at the destruction of freedom, joy, and even the health of future generations. The author destroys the "myth" of adequate educational system today, which was formed in the "family", "school", "children's art schools" refutes strict parenting practices of successful strong personality that cripples the psyche of the individual, makes him sick. At the level of subtext writer outlines humanistic perspective - the dominant trend in education should be a particular love for the individual, taking into consideration the psychological nuances of its’ character.

“Cherchez la femme”: Women and Gender in French Scholarship on the Empire

“Cherchez la femme”:Women and Gender in French Scholarship on the Empire Rebecca Rogers (bio) Indigenous women of the French empire have long fascinated writers, painters, and photographers, as a wealth of literary and visual sources attest. Yet this interest is far from a dominant thread in contemporary French historical research. In what follows, I seek to understand the place that scholarship on women and gender in the empire holds today in France, from the perspective of an American who lives and works in France. I begin by sketching out the emergence of scholarship on the topic, beginning in the early 2000s, centering my analysis on the modern period. Secondly, I consider the extent to which women and gender have moved from being the object of dissertations and academic conferences to being subjects that are taught in classrooms. And finally, I offer a few explanations for why the gendering of the French empire has failed to acquire pride of place in academic conversations, despite the existence of a great deal of scholarship on the topic, now reaching back several decades. Bringing Women and Gender to Light in French Colonial History: Views from France A cursory examination of scholarship on women and gender in French colonial history suggests this is a very recent area of research, despite the groundbreaking work of the historians Régine Goutalier and Yvonne Knibiehler thirty years ago.1 A few scholars naturally pursued the questions raised in their wide-ranging exploration of women’s presence in the French empire, but in France, one had to wait for the twenty-first century to see evidence of significant new empirical work on the subject. Christelle Taraud, Anne Hugon, Odile Goerg, and Pascale Barthélémy, in particular, published books that drew attention to the wealth of material available within the imperial archive for those interested in women or questions of gender.2 All four of these historians were trained by specialists in area studies—as opposed to colonial historians—and, with the exception of Christelle Taraud, these scholars define themselves more as Africanists than as specialists on empire.3 In recent years, the subject of women, gender, and colonization has begun to attract more widespread attention in francophone circles, resulting in a number of special issues in academic journals. In Belgium, Amandine Lauro edited an issue of the women’s history journal Sextant that included [End Page 124] articles on women in the French empire, as did Pascale Barthélémy in the volume she coordinated for the French journal Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés.4 In 2013, a group of gender historians went a step further in the effort to promote these perspectives when they launched a new bilingual journal entitled Gender and Colonization/Genre et colonization. The first issue, coordinated by Ryme Seferdjeli and Christelle Taraud, focused on Algeria.5 This scholarship reveals the presence of quite a few active scholars in France, as well as in francophone Belgium, whose work is focused on gender dynamics within French colonies, notably in northern and sub-Saharan Africa. For the moment, these perspectives are far less developed with respect to Indochina and the old regime colonies in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean. The emergence of special issues in journals testifies, nonetheless, to a historiographic moment in which women and gender are part of the story of the French empire. This is the product of important conferences and a series of thematic seminars that helped to bring these issues more directly to the forefront. The first major conference to highlight the importance of a dialogue between historians of gender and historians of empire took place in 2002 at the Third International Congress on Francophone Feminist Research in Toulouse. At the time, Françoise Thébaud and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, the founding editors of Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés, turned to the Africanist Anne Hugon and suggested she organize a series of sessions that examined colonization, decolonization, and postcolonial processes through the lens of gender, given the scarcity of such scholarship in France. Hugon published some of these talks in 2004 in a volume that included four state-of-the-art articles.6 Ten years after...

A Lion for Flanders: Literature, Propaganda, and Flemish Nationalism

In Flanders, Belgium, public acts of national allegiance are often grounded in the political rhetoric of the Great War that was, and continues to be, promoted by several powerful symbols, most visibly the Flemish lion – the official symbol of Flanders and, in its alternate version, the separatist Flemish nationalist movement. The examination of the reliance on the image of the Flemish lion at two annual pilgrimages to the World War I Belgian battlefields highlights an ongoing dialogue between memory and identity that stems from the formation of Belgium. The Great War and the unusual political situation that developed in the trenches of the Belgian Front, comprised of a small portion of unoccupied Belgium in the NW corner of the country, exacerbated the acute desire for Flemish recognition within Francophone Belgium. The myths of Flemish subjugation at the hands of the French-speaking officer class in the Great War played a pivotal role in the rising social and political Flemish organizations in the immediate postwar years. Some factions, the Activists, agitated for a separate Flemish state while others, the Passivists, lobbied for more rights for Flanders within Belgium, but both groups relied heavily on the visual culture created during the war. Much of this nationalist literary and visual language was created in the nineteenth century, but essentially served the cultural rejuvenation of a distinct Flemish consciousness for Flanders and the Flemish language during 14–18 that continues to serve as signs of cultural and political allegiance.

Innovative Model to Fund Scientists

One such impressive new model is the Televie model that exists in the Francophone Belgium (Wallonia region in Belgium). The Televie [2] is a charity event organized in the Francophone Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg by RTL-TVI (a TV channel) since 1989 in cooperation with FNRS (main funding agency in the Francophone Belgium for scientific research like the NIH in USA or the CSIR in India). The funds raised annually are invested in scientific research for fight against cancer and Leukaemia in children and adults. It concludes with a closing ceremony which is televised live.

The Political Geography of the Federal Public Debt in Belgium

We calculate that over the 1970-2002 period the combination of persistent primary surpluses of the Flemish region and persistent primary deficits of the Walloon region – and to a lesser extent of the Brussels region – increased the net fiscal transfer due to the federal debt provided by Flanders to Francophone Belgium to almost 100% of the total interest bill on the Belgian federal debt. This amount is considerably larger than the transfer amount resulting from previous “traditional” interregional transfer calculations that assume a balanced federal budget. The geographically very unevenly spread benefits from Belgian federal budget deficits – and hence the geographically strongly diverging incentives for federal budget deficits – may well explain to a considerable extent the large overall size of deficits and debt in Belgium since the 1970s. In other words, interregional fiscal transfers resulting from the federal debt may be important not just because of their distributional consequences, but even more because they may provide an explanation for the large overall size of deficits and debt that have particularly characterised Belgium since the 1970s. We also test empirically if Francophone Belgian politicians have more of an incentive to run a federal deficit than Flemish politicians. To this effect, we regress the popularity of federal government parties on net fiscal transfers received by Flanders, resp. by Francophone Belgium. We find that transfers to Flanders affect the popularity of Flemish parties governing at the federal level less positively than that transfers to Francophone Belgium affect the popularity of Francophone Belgian parties governing at the federal level. The difference in effect is however insignificant in our major regression specifications.

Les Élections Communales de 2012 en WallonieDandoy, Régis; Dodeigne, Jérémy; Matagne, Geoffroy; Reuchamps, Min (eds) Bruges, Editions Vanden Broele (2013), 195 p., ISBN 978‐90‐4960‐941‐2

Les Élections Communales de 2012 en WallonieDandoy, Régis; Dodeigne, Jérémy; Matagne, Geoffroy; Reuchamps, Min (eds) Bruges, Editions Vanden Broele (2013), 195 p., ISBN 978‐90‐4960‐941‐2

The Geography of Incentives to Run a Federal Budget Deficit in Belgium

Political parties in Belgium are split along Flemish-Francophone lines, and Flanders enjoys relatively less federal expenditures and pays relatively more federal taxes than Francophone Belgium. As the federal debt is serviced out of federal tax revenues, Flanders bears most of the cost of debt servicing, while on average having benefited the least from the deficit-funded expenditures. Those uneven net benefits from Belgian federal budget deficits – and the diverging incentives for federal budget deficits this disparity seems to create – may be an explanation of the large overall size of deficits and debt in Belgium since the 1970s. Hence, interregional fiscal transfers resulting from the federal debt may be important not just because of their distributional consequences, but even more because they may provide an explanation for the large Belgian federal deficits and debt burdens. We test for these differing deficit incentives by investigating the difference between the effect of an increase in net formula-based transfers on Flemish resp. Francophone Belgian federal government parties’ vote share. We find at first sight that an increase in net transfers causes Flemish governing parties to lose votes during the next federal election, while the effect is insignificant in Francophone Belgium as well as in Belgium taken as a whole. The negative Flemish effect may be suggestive of Flemish voters being aware that increases in formula-based net transfers to Flanders may go hand in hand with similar increases to Francophone Belgium, that these increases may increase the public debt, and that the latter is serviced mainly with federal taxes raised in Flanders. However, when taking into account legislature-specific shocks that differ between Flanders and Francophone Belgium, the Flemish negative effect of transfers on votes mostly turns insignificant. Neither is there a consistently significantly positive effect of transfers on votes in Francophone Belgium, and also when investigated for Belgium as a whole the effect is insignificant. In conclusion, Francophone Belgian (Flemish) voters do not seem to particularly reward (punish) extra net transfers with more (less) votes. Francophone Belgian voters seem to overestimate the future cost of extra transfers they will bear, while the opposite seems to hold for Flemish voters. Alternatively, Francophone Belgian parties may overestimate the rewards – in terms of voters’ gratitude – of steering extra transfers to Francophone Belgium, while Flemish parties may correctly estimate the – lack of- punishment – in terms of voters’ anger of steering extra transfers to Flanders.

Bye Bye Belgium: remediating Flemish nationalism in prime time

This article discusses the special news bulletin on the imminent and unilateral declaration of independence of the Flemish Republic that was aired on the Belgian francophone public broadcasting service (RTBF) in December 2006. Following in the wake of 90+years of Flemish nationalism often tinged with separatism and overshadowed by a history of fascist collaboration during World War II, moreover broadcast in the immediate context of a Belgian state paralysed by petty territorial disputes, the disturbingly plausible docu-fiction Tout ça (ne nous rendra pas la Belgique), which was later titled Bye Bye Belgium, gave the viewing public a bitter taste of the power of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's remediation-concept. Termed an adaptation of sorts ‘designed to erase its own traces’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000), remediation in broad terms implies the repurposing of signifiers and signifying systems into a new, presumably coherent narrative. Philippe Dutilleul, the creator of Bye Bye Belgium, for one, had been accused from various parts in Flanders and Wallonia alike of polarising the political debate and accelerating a psychological acceptance of the country's imminent doom on both sides of its linguistic border. Accordingly, a closer look at the parallel machineries of narrativisation, adaptation and remediation should thereby prove pertinent. After all, remediating a history of nationalist tensions with the willing participation of right-wing Flemish political leaders in prime time on the broadest public platform available in this instance did not fail to make an impact.

Seeing education with one's own eyes and through PISA lenses: considerations of the reception of PISA in European countries

The paper addresses the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a public policy instrument, whose worldwide circulation is mediated by processes of reinterpretation, negotiation, and re-contextualization, where national, local, and international agencies intertwine. It is focused on the active reception of PISA in six European spaces (Francophone Belgium, France, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, and Scotland) along its first three cycles. The paper identifies two contrasting developments: the Program's divergent uses and its attractiveness in different social worlds. The paper gives particular attention to what is called the ‘update of reference societies’ in the context of national receptions of PISA. These ‘updates’ are analyzed as part of a composite process that involves domestic reasons, either related to current agendas for education or to deep historical factors, and injunctions related to PISA's rationale and PISA objects.