De La Terre Research Articles

Césaire after Fanon. Returning to the “master-slave” revolt in Une tempête

In his work, Fanon generously cites Césaire’s poetry. His citation from Césaire’s tragedy Et les chiens se taisaient in Peau noir masques blancs, and later in Les Damnés de la terre, in support of his argument that anti-colonial violence was essential to a new, post-revolutionary beginning, is of particular interest. I want to make the case that Une tempête presents us with a complexity of temporal and intertextual folds that pursues the question of freedom and what comes after. Fanon came after Césaire but Une tempête comes after Fanon. Césaire’s text, I argue, alludes to Fanon’s work in different ways and in doing so appears to assert the case for non-violence, refuses the figure a decolonial tableau rasa and returns us to the predicament of colonial racism that both he and Fanon sought to overcome. In all of this, is the figure of the hyphen—a ligature binding Prospero to his imagined self, that is constituted through Caliban, but also loosely binding Césaire to Fanon.

Artistas latino-americanos no Centre national des arts plastiques: presenças invisíveis

The article focuses on the presence and visibility of Latin-American artists of the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), in Paris- France. It is the first and most perennial world initiative to create a state fund of works dedicated to “living art,” an initiative that began in the end of the eighteenth century and persists to this day. The study of the temporality of the entrance of works in the collection, pointing to the importance of the decade of 1980, it contributes to the history of the global art by repositioning the institutional impact of the exhibition “Magiciens de la terre,” and the centrality of Paris to the Latin-American artists, especially during exile. In this ample context, we discuss the invisibility of women artists from the corpus of works in the Cnap.

Colonial Trauma: A Study of the Psychic and Political Consequences of Colonial Oppression in Algeria. By Karima Lazali

Karima Lazali’s extraordinary book is undoubtedly a milestone in postcolonial and decolonial studies since the publication of Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (1961) and his posthumous Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté (2015). Lazali offers a comprehensive reading of coloniality in Algeria and of the long-lasting effects which France’s colonial violence and domination (1830–62) had on the subjectivities of the colonized, but also on the post-Independence political order, leading to the Internal War (1992–2000). Lazali’s perspective is based on her psychoanalytic practice located in both Algeria and France. Her methodology appeals to transdisciplinarity (history, literature, anthropology, psychology, sociology) in order to elucidate the blank spaces and ideological blind spots created on both sides of the Mediterranean by coloniality. Lazali exposes the legacy of colonialism and the traumas to which it subjected the population: ‘an unusual psychic phenomenon […]. The clinical psychologist is forced to deal with a history deprived of archives, literally and metaphorically. It is now no longer a question of deconstruction, but one of reconstructing traces that exist outside of memory’ (Colonial Trauma, p. 5). Lazali unseals the Algerian colonial world in its totality and dismantles its binary logic (reflected in France’s and Algeria’s frozen, antithetical attitudes regarding colonialism). She enlists key but often lesser-studied Algerian authors (for example, Jean El-Mouhoub Amrouche, Kamel Daoud, Tahar Djaout, Nabile Farès, Mouloud Feraoun, Wahiba Khiari, Mouloud Mammeri, Yamina Mechakra, Arezki Mellal, Rachid Mimouni, Samir Toumi, Kateb Yacine, Amin Zaoui) to give expression to the blank spaces of historical records, alerting readers ‘to how a text is continuously shaped by its invisible margins’ (p. 7), taking them closer to what has been and continues to be erased by the political order.

Интеграционные процессы на Латинском Востоке в XI-XIV вв. (Киликийская Армения в контексте католической культурной зоны)

After the First Crusade against the Levant the Crusade States were created. The four states were: the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Armenian Principality of Cilicia founded before the Crusades in 1080 and granted the status of Kingdom in 1198 was not traditionally included in the Crusade States, i.e. the Outremer States (in French outré-mer signifies overseas, distant lands). However, the cultural expansion of the Crusade States, penetrating the borders of neighbouring Cilician Armenia was unavoidable and natural. The newly emerged military-political conditions in the Levant required the assimilation of novel cultural boundaries and shaping of different cultural dimensions. The new conditions of co-existence entailed expanding the boundaries of the existing cultural-national community as well as understanding of new cultural impulses. Many political, religious figures of Cilician Armenia were influenced by the western world of the “outremer” and the culture of “catholic zone”. Nevertheless, Hethoum of Corycus, the author of “Flor des Estoires de la terre d’Orient”, most vividly highlights the western impact in his works. In Jean Richard’s opinion, the author himself is a “symbol of connection” between the East and the West.

Application of Satellite Data on Water Pollution: An Intensive Review

Evaluation of water pollution is a priority work nowadays. The signature of the waterbody reveals its excellence or mediocrity and reflectance that can measure by a sensor used to analyse the health status of the waterbody. The remote sensing analysis has become the latest state of art technologies for monitoring large-scale waterbodies. High-resolution satellite data are now available to estimate water pollution through various water quality parameters like clarity, chlorophyll, suspended solids, turbidity, temperature, salinity, organic matter, etc. In this review study, a special emphasise has been given to the various satellites like Landsat, sentinel, satellite pourl’Observation de la terre (SPOT), moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS), medium resolution imaging spectrometer (MERIS), Indian remote sensing satellites (IRS) and its application on water pollution. Availability of satellite data, algorithms, and models to assess water quality has also been reviewed in detailed. The review suggests development and innovation in satellites, sensors and techniques to assess the non-optically active constituents of water quality for better understanding and management of water pollution.

Terre, mon beau souci. Quand Frédéric Boyer « fait Virgile »

This article takes as its point of departure Frédéric Boyer’s 2019 translation of Virgil’s Georgics (under the title Le Souci de la terre) and the long introductory essay that accompanies it, entitled “Faire Virgile.” These last two words, understood as an invitation or, in fact, as an imperative to follow a manner of “doing,” to emulate or to translate the most unlikely of poetic models—a text “written in the Italian countryside more than two thousand years ago”—, provide us with a way to understand what it might mean for Boyer’s poetry, and more generally for French contemporary poetics, to attempt to “speak the earth.”

The Returns of the Roman de la terre: Défricheurs and Other Migrants in the Canadien Colonial Imaginary

Popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Québec farm novels, or romans de la terre, have been studied by critics across the humanities and social sciences as discursive spaces through which notions of Franco-Canadien identity and territoriality have been, and continue to be, negotiated. Building on these critiques, my study suggests that these rural works that narrativize colonization and celebrate agriculturalist ideology may also be read as migration narratives—a roman de la terre can also be a roman de la migration. Analyzing three distinct migrant types in Louis Hémon’s 1913 novel Maria Chapdelaine, I demonstrate how notions of migrancy in this emblematic work bear commitments to settler-colonialist attitudes towards land and identity—a relationship that has persisted from the days of the fin-de-siècle rural exodus to contemporary Québec with its colonialistic economic initiatives.

Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age by Jeannine Murray-Román

Reviewed by: Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age by Jeannine Murray-Román Thelma B. Jiménez Anglada Jeannine Murray-Román. 2016. Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. 244 pp. ISBN: 9780813938486. Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age must be classified as an act of bravery. In this book Jeannine Murray-Román sets out to write a critique about performance in literature, two areas of inquiry—literary and performance studies—that are at constant odds with each other. While the study of literature sits, albeit uncomfortably, at the center of authoritative borders, performance studies thrive on defying disciplinary lines, and tends to resist easy descriptors. In this sense, it shares one of the main characteristics of its object of study: the ephemerality that is at the crux of performance. This transient nature of performance stands in stark contrast to the widely perceived immutability of literature. Performance studies decidedly shifts the sight away from what is traditionally considered to be the text and its discourse, and re-centers it on the endlessly shifting shapes of the body and its contours. Yet, this is precisely what Jeannine Murray-Román sets out to do in Performance and Personhood, where she seeks an answer to the following question: “Why is the representation of performance so pervasive in Caribbean literature?” (1). Unlike most examinations of contemporary Caribbean literature, Murray-Román’s is not restricted by either the language or the imagined geo-political divisions that partitioned the Antilles (and its study) as an aftermath of colonialism. Performance and Personhood would rather navigate the region freely: it transits with ease through the literature of Cuba, Martinique, Jamaica, Guyana, Guadeloupe, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, looking for common threads in their textual representations of performance. From this exploration, performance is situated as the harbinger of dissimilar and non-normative communities within which an undeniable humanity—or personhood—can be built. The formation of personhood in contemporary Caribbean literature emerges together with two other essential elements. According to Murray-Román, performance allows for the articulation of communities that transcend the limitations of everyday reality. With the lifting of these restrictions, temporality becomes altered and distended. Once the linearity of time is broken, historical pasts may be reimagined in narrations that disrupt entrenched versions of history. Projections towards [End Page 181] the future are also rendered transformed in this disjointed temporality. In other words, performance opens up a space in which possible futures may be either discarded or kept, according to their suitability. The main theoretical framework on which Murray-Román’s argument is built, like her objects of study, remains steadfastly in the Caribbean. To sustain its claims, Performance and Personhood relies heavily on Frantz Fanon’s notion of the dance circle. “Le cercle de la dance,” as Fanon calls it in Les damnés de la terre, constitutes a crucial locus for the study of the colonial world (57). His description of the circle is both a reminder of Fanon’s deep understanding of colonial subjectivity, and of the ways in which this category is conceptually ideal for Murray-Román’s analysis of embodied expressions in contemporary Caribbean literature. “La relaxation du colonisé,” writes Fanon, “c’est précisément cette orgie musculaire au cours de laquelle l’agressivité la plus aiguë, la violence la plus immediate se trouvent canalisées, transformées, escamotées. Le cercle de la danse est un cercle permissif. Il protège et autorise” (57–58).1 The dance circle is a finite site of protected freedom, where coloniality is suspended. Read through the Fanonian concept, the textual representations of embodied practices become intelligible in Performance and Personhood. Although at times the rationale behind this book’s structure is not as clear as it could have been, its five chapters do provide convincing evidence to Murray-Román’s claims. The organization of these chapters, says Murray-Román, responds to the ebbs and flows of the Fanonian circle. Unfortunately, what works well in the corporeality of performance, is not...

Contested values and climate change mitigation in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Contested values and climate change mitigation in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Les Damnés de la terre di Frantz Fanon: la traduzione di Cignetti cinquant’anni dopo

This essay analyzes the Italian translation of Les Damnes de la terre by Frantz Fanon, published by Einaudi in 1962, almost at the same time as the French text, and work of Carlo Cignetti. The analysis strives to highlight the need for a retranslation of the essay. After a brief introduction of the topic of retranslation and a presentation of the corpus, generally regarded as a manifesto of the anticolonial and student movements of the sixties and a milestone of Post-Colonial Studies, the essay focuses on the linguistic issues of Cignetti’s translation. These stem from two phenomena that involve both the lexicon and the syntax used: (1) an overuse of calques from the French version and (2) a translation that ennobles the text, leading to its premature aging.

The Returns of the Roman de la Terre : Défricheurs and their Migrant Others in the Canadien Imaginary

The theme “parler la terre” presents an opportunity to reconsider Québec’s romans de la terre—farm novels from the turn of the Nineteenth Century into the Twentieth that are often considered to be the inaugural works of the province’s literary canon. Variously known as the “roman du territoire” or the “roman paysan”, this genre, with its idealized depictions of colonization and rural life, helped articulate what literary historian Dorothee Scholl would call the mythe du terroir—or in her own words, “the mythologizing of the soil as the site of French-Canadian national identity (103).” At the height of their popularity, these novels were heavily patronized by Catholic clergy, provincial politicians, and nationalist literary circles, who promoted the productions in order to discourage the rural flight of francophone Canadiens,1 encouraging them to instead migrate internally and agriculturally exploit the Laurentians region north of Montréal. There is now a vast body of critique that examines how the agriculturalist ideology expressed through these farm novels helped reify notions of Franco-Canadian identity and territoriality. Transcending these studies, critics have also begun to read romans de la terre against the grain, highlighting the multi-dimensionality of the discourses of land in this genre. Some critics even diverge from the agriculturalist debate all together—for example, Sudarsan Rangarajan who does so in order to draw links between the roman de la terre and the contemporaneous French roman d’aventures (767). My paper, however, maintains that there remains work to be done in complicating the novels’ agriculturalist fixation on land, in particular by reckoning with the settler-colonialist implications of this discourse. Before me, geographer Caroline Desbiens productively proposed that certain romans de la terre may be emphasized as romans de ressources—and rightfully so, as many of them do extol the extraction and economic mobilization of natural resources from newly colonized land (121). However, remarking that this exploitation is mediated by the movement of colonists across the national terroir, the question I raise instead is how romans de la terre may also be read as economic récits de la migration. Doing so will allow us to comprehend the place of human migration in the settler-colonialist imaginaries that informed Canadiens of their relationship with the land in the past, and perhaps even continue to shape Québécois territoriality in the present day. As a case study, I turn to the emblematic roman de la terre, Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine; understanding migration loosely as the displacement

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Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I by Anita Rasi May

Reviewed by: Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I by Anita Rasi May Michelle Beauclair May, Anita Rasi. Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I. UP of Oklahoma, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8061-5908-9. Pp. 162. Published in the centennial year marking the end of the Great War, Patriot Priests contributes an intriguing new layer to the memory of that devastating conflict—the personal reflections of thirty-three French priests and seminarians drafted in World War I. This exploration, meticulously researched at the Archives nationales, the Archives de l'Armée de la terre, and the Archives historiques de l'Archevêché de Paris, is the first to feature clergymen's own journal entries, letters, and memoirs to recount the extraordinary contributions of these men of peace in a time of war. It might appear incongruent that priests, "schooled for the altar rather than the battlefield" (4), should serve as soldiers. It is all the more remarkable when viewed in the context of the fraught church-state relationship at the time of their conscription. Anita Rasi May provides an enlightening overview of the shifting power struggle between the Catholic Church and the government of the Third Republic that culminated in the expulsion of several religious orders from France and the separation of church and state in 1905. [End Page 236] This sets the stage for understanding why, after decades of scorn, suspicion, and exile, clergymen and their superiors viewed the call to arms as a chance to prove their loyalty to France. The absence of any hesitation to sacrifice themselves for their country and for a cause that they felt was noble, just, and righteous is one of the most salient features of the priests' diary entries. While many of these men of the cloth initially hoped their wartime service might win converts to the faith, their writings reveal that over time they were grateful simply to offer their support, whether moral, physical, or spiritual. The Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a stretcher-bearer in the war, wrote: "All this, I hope, will gradually establish me as the priest-comrade to whom a man can turn when things go wrong" (53). Poignant passages elucidate the steadfast dedication of chaplains to provide comfort and solace to the gravely wounded, to assist families in locating their fallen sons, and to ensure that soldiers' sacrifices would not be forgotten, but rather be memorialized after the war. Patriot Priests illustrates how, against the odds, the priests' faithful fight brought them back into French society, earned them a measure of respect, and renewed their sense of connectedness and national identity. Compassionately written with clear prose and careful organization, this text assumes knowledge of the lexicon and hierarchy of the Catholic Church and familiarity with major events in nineteenth and early twentieth-century French history. For educators and students of modern French civilization and culture, the study of World War II is often privileged over that of World War I. Patriot Priests addresses this curricular imbalance by providing readers with personal stories and powerful voices to bring the narrative of that more distant but no less important conflict to life. Michelle Beauclair Seattle Pacific University (WA) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

The Re-Presentation of Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre in Arabic Translation

The first Arabic translation of Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre was published in 1963 under the title of معذبو الأرض muʿaḏabū alʾarḍ (literally, “the tortured of the earth”). This paper discusses the way Fanon is reintroduced to the Arab readership through the 2004 revised edition of the Arabic translation. As the 2004 edition was planned with reference to both the Arabic translation of 1963 and the latest French version of 2002, it re-presented Fanon in Arabic by redesigning the book through text revision and including and excluding the paratextual elements of prefaces and a postface. It also helped in updating and reintroducing the book, as well as in correcting many mistranslations. The essay examines how the textual and paratextual elements are dealt with, highlighting the changes introduced in the revision process and how all this contributed to reframing Fanon.

Wynter with Fanon in the FLN: The "Rights of Peoples" against the "Monohumanism" of "Man"

Wynter with Fanon in the FLN:The "Rights of Peoples" against the "Monohumanism" of "Man" Greg Thomas (bio) After the fruitful struggle that it ["the French conscience"] waged two centuries ago for the respect of individual liberties and the rights of [M]an, it finds itself unable to wage a similar battle for the rights of peoples. —Frantz Fanon, El Moudjahid (1957) / Towards the African Revolution (1964) I The "Black" African and Afro-mixed descent peoples were now made into the iconic embodiment of this now extreme form of (racialized) Human Otherness, as well as of the Western world-system's later nineteenth-century, territorially expropriated, and now colonized neo-periphery category of native labor as, in Fanonian terms, Les Damnés de la terre, meaning, literally, "the condemned of the Earth." —Sylvia Wynter, "The Ceremony Found" (2015) In hindsight, "The Ceremony Must Be Found" (1984) must have marked a new moment in the multifaceted career of Sylvia Wynter. The dancer-dramatist and cultural critic who wrote The Hills of Hebron (1962) becomes an epic critical essayist on Western humanism, "Ethno-Class Man," Western bourgeois humanism. Now that essay from boundary 2: a journal of post-modern literature can only be read with "The Ceremony Found" (2015), if this major contribution to a collection titled Black Knowledges / Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology has yet to reap a significant readership in scholarship on the scholar.1 One of many ways to engage this text is to remark the relationship between a new coinage and a sustained commitment or concern—namely, "monohumanism" and Wynter's revolutionary Fanonism. The importance of Fanon in Wynter is hard to overlook yet not easy or simple to gauge in its assorted dimensions. Before "The Ceremony Found" there was "Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be 'Black'" (2001). Earlier still, [End Page 857] there was "Tras el 'Hombre,' su última palabra: Sobre el posmodernismo, les damnés y el principio sociogénico" (1991), via Spanish translation by Ignacio Corona-Guitérrez. It appeared in the same year as "After the New Class: James, Les Damnés, and the Autonomy of Human Cognition" (1991), which also upholds Fanon's "starving fellah" as "the truth," as she would so boldly in "No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues" (1992). Many a notion from Fanon will frame the texts of Wynter over the years. Most monumental are the concepts of sociogeny and damnation or condemnation. Their constant mobilization by Wynter sets her work apart from the standard "postcolonialist" containment of Fanon in Western academe, which only rarely if ever conjoins rather than severs the insights of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks with the insights of The Wretched of the Earth. To open "The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, It's Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition," Wynter returns to "The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism" by recalling the political legacy of the 1950s and 1960s, especially the "Anti-Colonial Revolutions," which would be such a determining factor in her intellectual work. The first Fanon she cites here in the introduction is the ultimate Fanon—of Les Damnés de la terre, whose title she is at pains, again, to retranslate as "The Condemned of the Earth."2 Part 1 of "The Ceremony Found" next presents itself as a manifesto meant to retrieve the "failure" of "The Ceremony Must Be Found" and to practice a heresy—"after Frantz Fanon"—in providing a "profoundly 'narcissistic' and revalorizingly new answer to the question of who-we-are as humans."3 Soon, Black Skin, White Masks is uniquely engaged to craft the "new Fanonian answer" of "The Ceremony Found" in a manner that matches him, again, with Copernicus in worldly significance. Here's where "sociogeny" is key, departing equally from the biologist or biocentric "ontogeny" foundational to "ethno-class" "Man" and the "phylogenetic" expression of Western individualism systematized by Freud's psychoanalytic thought. After the Copernican Revolution, en route to his "African Revolution," this Fanonian Revolution motivates Wynter's proposition in part 2 of a counter-cosmogonic "Autopoetic Turn/Overturn" with Rastafarian intonations...

Mourning under Siege: The Uses of Apocalypse in French Caribbean Letters

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...

Visual Modernity in the Arab World, Turkey and Iran: Reintroducing the “Missing Modern”

Notwithstanding the fact that opinions between art historians diverge on how it should be done, there is a consensus that nowadays the writing of art history cannot but be global, whether we label it “world art history” or “global art history”. Whereas the two terms are often used synonymously, Hans Belting suggests we distinguish between “world art history”, which would be the history of all art productions in the world since the earliest times, and “global art history,” the history of art production as it has spread around the globe after the opening of the formerly uniquely Western art scene to the planet as whole. Even though “global art” is defined as contemporary art produced all around the globe since 1989 – the year of the ground-breaking Paris exhibition Magiciens de la terre – even though it designates, that is, an art with many different facets but sharing a unified language in its diversity, we still notice, today, a difference in the way production from the “non-West” is considered. One cannot but get the impression that it is presented as if it had come out of nothing, born of a total void or of what had formerly been categorized as ethnographic artefacts. What is striking about this view is that it utterly neglects the existence of the modern phase that preceded the emergence of “global art” and that, from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, saw Western art forms being adopted all over the world and replacing, to a large extent, local art conceptions and styles, thus giving way to a new, original category, generally and locally labelled as “modern art”. In the specific case of art from the Islamic world, contemporary visual creations are often pigeon-holed as “contemporary Islamic art” as if they derived, ontologically, from former art practices peculiar to the region and not from the adoption of Western art in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. This mislabelling is due, among other issues, to two main factors: a field of research which is still in its infancy and, resulting from and directly tied to this, a generalized neglect of the initial phase in which art in its Western modality was introduced in the region.

The Farm Novel in North America: Genre and Nation in the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, 1845-1945 by Florian Freitag

Reviewed by: The Farm Novel in North America: Genre and Nation in the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, 1845-1945 by Florian Freitag Albert Braz Freitag, Florian. The Farm Novel in North America: Genre and Nation in the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, 1845-1945. Rochester: Camden House, 2013. Pp. 372. Florian Freitag’s comparative study of the farm novel in the United States, English-speaking Canada, and Québec between 1845 and 1945 is a very impressive contribution to North American literary culture—excepting Mexico. Freitag makes a compelling case that “the farm novel played an important role in making the farm a symbolic space of the United States, English Canada, and French Canada.” More precisely, he argues that rather than “merely portraying agriculture as an economic venture or a way of life—which they also do—farm novels dramatize the relationship between farming and constructing the nation and depict farming as a social practice that has helped to articulate the nation” (5). That is, while the farm novel emphasizes the naturalness of both its location and the lifestyle it promulgates, it is shaped by cultural and political concerns and deeply imbricated in the national project of the given polity to which it belongs. [End Page 311] Although Freitag notes the many similarities among the three literatures that he examines, he contends that each possesses distinctive “national” characteristics. For example, he maintains that most US “farm novels focus on pioneer farmers or settlers and portray farming as a way of realizing the American dream of material and non-material success” (6). Québécois farm novels, in contrast, depict “well-established farmers or farmer dynasties” and reflect “the French Canadian national myth of agriculturalism,” presenting “farming as a way—indeed, the only way—of ensuring the survival of the French Canadian cultural community on the North American continent” (6), At last, like their US counterparts, English-Canadian farm novels generally “concentrate on pioneer farmers and settlers, but here the representation of agriculture is informed by English Canadian ideals of ‘Peace, Order, and good Government’ or ‘Order and Control’” (6). Freitag supports his thesis that the US, English Canadian, and Québécois farm novels “tend to portray specific types of farmers and to project particular national myths or ideologies onto the farm space” (22) by examining a wide variety of texts. After producing a theoretically and historically informed survey of the field, he analyzes the genesis of the genre in such “‘proto farm novels’” (66) as St. John de Crèvecoeur’s “History of Andrew, the Hebridean,” Patrice Lacombe’s La terre paternelle, and Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush. He then explores how naturalism informs the portrayals of farm life in Frank Norris’s The Octopus, Albert Laberge’s La Scouine, and Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh. In “New World Demeters,” Freitag scrutinizes the role of farm women in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine, and Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese. In “Rich Harvests,” he investigates whether “materialism is [or is not] an integral part” of farm existence (186) in Joseph Kirkland’s Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County, Claude-Henri Grignon’s Un homme et son péché, and Frederick Philip Grove’s Fruits of the Earth. Freitag then probes the impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Félix-Antoine Savard’s Menaud, maître-draveur, and Robert J.C. Stead’s Grain. Finally, before closing the book with an epilogue about developments in the North American farm novel since the mid-1940s, he assesses such “farm epics” (269-70) as Louis Bromfield’s The Farm, Ringuet’s [Philippe Panneton] Trente arpents, and Grace Campbell’s The Higher Hill. Not the least significant achievement of The Farm Novel in North America is that, despite the sizable number of texts that he examines, Freitag provides close readings of all of them. For instance, upon discussing the characterization of young women in several Québec romans de la terre, he contends that “what ultimately matters is not whether the daughter’s choice...

Fanon’s Nordic Adventure: A Brief Study of Translations and Reception

Fanon seems to have played an exceptional role in Scandinavia, and especially in Sweden. Last year’s appearance of Goran Olsson’s documentary film Concerning Violence. Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self Defense , based on the first chapter of Les Damnes de la terre and narrated by Lauryn Hill, only goes to show that he is still highly relevant. When working toward the completion of this special issue on Frantz Fanon in a Caribbean context, I came to reflect upon his position in the North wondering if it would be possible to map Fanon’s presence in Sweden, and from this mapping, understand why Fanon has been a prevailing reference for academics, intellectuals and artists. Studying Fanon’s presence involves various subjects and disciplines since it raises questions of how the Left has evolved, of how certain concepts are transposed from one language and context to another reality in another language depending on factors such as who introduced Fanon, through which channels and to what purpose. What follows here is an essayistic pilot-study, more based on conversations and observations than on theory and methodology. Hopefully, it will offer the reader a basic outline and a description of a phenomenon in what we can call a “peripherical translation zone” that may, even though it is incomplete, contribute to decentering translation studies, and allow us to estimate the tremendous impact of Fanon in this region, an impact that, as we shall soon see, has far more ramifications than one would tend to believe.

Visual Skin, Virtual Masks: Frantz Fanon’s Legacy and the Caribbean

This essay explores the question of Frantz Fanon’s relevance to the contemporary Caribbean in the context of his views, articulated in Peau noire, masques blancs and Les Damnes de la terre , on the psychological legacy of the violence of colonialism and his proposed solution for psychological and political decolonization. In the 21st century context, technological advances in the area of communication extend the promise of a brave new world, which minimizes or even erases the importance of an individual’s visual (visible) persona. Drawing on illustrations from his native land of Barbados, as a territory with a history of colonization similar to that of Fanon’s native Martinique, this author offers insights into Fanon’s importance to contemporary generations of Caribbean people emerging in the context of a globalized, virtual environment that, while diminishing the significance of the visual in relation to the skin color of individuals, tends to mask the persistence of new permutations of neo-colonial, racialized ideologies.