French Flag Research Articles

Evolvability in Artificial Development of Large, Complex Structures and the Principle of Terminal Addition.

Epigenetic tracking (ET) is a model of development that is capable of generating diverse, arbitrary, complex three-dimensional cellular structures starting from a single cell. The generated structures have a level of complexity (in terms of the number of cells) comparable to multicellular biological organisms. In this article, we investigate the evolvability of the development of a complex structure inspired by the "French flag" problem: an "Italian Anubis" (a three-dimensional, doglike figure patterned in three colors). Genes during development are triggered in ET at specific developmental stages, and the fitness of individuals during simulated evolution is calculated after a certain stage. When this evaluation stage was allowed to evolve, genes that were triggered at later stages of development tended to be incorporated into the genome later during evolutionary runs. This suggests the emergence of the property of terminal addition in this system. When the principle of terminal addition was explicitly incorporated into ET, and was the sole mechanism for introducing morphological innovation, evolvability improved markedly, leading to the development of structures much more closely approximating the target at a much lower computational cost.

Mobile signals, patterning, and positional information in root development.

Multicellular organisms use mobile intercellular signals to generate spatiotemporal patterns of growth and differentiation. These signals, termed morphogens, arise from localized sources and move by diffusion or directional transport to be interpreted at target cells. The classical model for a morphogen is where a substance diffuses from a source to generate a concentration gradient that provides positional information across a field. This concept, presented by Wolpert and popularized as the "French Flag Model," remains highly influential, but other patterning models, which do not rely on morphogen gradients, also exist. Here, we review current evidence for mobile morphogenetic signals in plant root development and how they fit within existing conceptual frameworks for pattern formation. We discuss how the signals are formed, distributed, and interpreted in space and time, emphasizing the regulation of movement on the ability of morphogens to specify patterns. While significant advances have been made in the field since the first identification of mobile morphogenetic factors in plants, key questions remain to be answered, such as how morphogen movement is regulated, how these mechanisms allow scaling in different species, and how morphogens act to enable plant regeneration in response to damage.

Positional Information-Based Organization of Surfactant Droplet Swarms Emerging from Competition Between Local and Global Marangoni Effects.

Positional information is key for particles to adapt their behavior based on their position in external concentration gradients, and thereby self-organize into complex patterns. Here, position-dependent behavior of floating surfactant droplets that self-organize in a pH gradient is demonstrated, using the Marangoni effect to translate gradients of surface-active molecules into motion. First,fields of surfactant microliter-droplets are generated, in which droplets floating on water drive local, outbound Marangoni flows upon dissolution of surfactantand concomitantly grow myelin filaments. Next, a competing surfactant based on a hydrolysable amide is introduced, which is more surface active than the myelin surfactant and thereby inhibits the local Marangoni flows and myelin growth from the droplets. Upon introducing a pH gradient, the amide surfactant hydrolyses in the acidic region, so that the local Marangoni flows and myelin growth are reestablished. The resulting combination of local and global surface tension gradients produces a region of myelin-growing droplets and a region where myelin growth is suppressed, separated by a wave front of closely packed droplets, of which the position can be controlled by the pH gradient. Thereby, it is shown how "French flag"-patterns, in synthetic settings typically emerging from reaction-diffusion systems, can also be established via surfactant droplet systems.

Identification of static netters fishing trajectories with high resolution data and their evolution in the Bay of Biscay since 2015: Potential implications for short-beaked common dolphin bycatch

Since winter 2016, an increase in strandings of small cetaceans has been recorded along the French Atlantic seaboard. This mortality, which concerns mostly the short-beaked common dolphin (Delphinus delphis), is mainly due to bycatch in fishing gears. Highly vulnerable towards this issue, this protected species is more and more threatened in the Bay of Biscay. Fine scale knowledge on fisheries practices, which are ever evolving, is paramount to address the bycatch issue. The objective of this study was to identify the individual trajectories of static netters flying the French flag and to highlight possible changes in their practices between 2015 and 2019, during the winter period. An analysis of AIS data from vessels over 15 m of length, using a clustering method (HCPC), enabled us to define a typology of the static net fishery trajectories. The possible main trajectories of static netters flying the French flag were identified. Among these, one trajectory was linear with a constant navigation path and was used by offshore gillnetters targeting hake. This trajectory increased in frequency between 2015 and 2017. This study improves knowledge on practices of passive fishing gears that present a risk of short-beaked common dolphin bycatch such as gillnets and trammel nets in the Bay of Biscay. Further analysis of AIS data from other years and fishing fleets, adding environmental data or even dolphin distribution, are needed for a full understanding of the bycatch issue and towards the implementation of efficient mitigation measures.

Optimal control of gene regulatory networks for morphogen-driven tissue patterning

The generation of distinct cell types in developing tissues depends on establishing spatial patterns of gene expression. Often, this is directed by spatially graded chemical signals-known as morphogens. In the "French Flag model," morphogen concentration instructs cells to acquire specific fates. How this mechanism produces timely and organized cell-fate decisions, despite the presence of changing morphogen levels, molecular noise, and individual variability, is unclear. Moreover, feedback is present at various levels in developing tissues, breaking the link between morphogen concentration, signaling activity, and position. Here, we develop an alternative framework using optimal control theory to tackle the problem of morphogen-driven patterning: intracellular signaling is derived as the control strategy that guides cells to the correct fate while minimizing a combination of signaling levels and time. This approach recovers experimentally observed properties of patterning strategies and offers insight into design principles that produce timely, precise, and reproducible morphogen patterning.

In preprints: get to know your neighbours – cell interface surveillance through a molecular zip code

In preprints: get to know your neighbours – cell interface surveillance through a molecular zip code

The scaling of goals from cellular to anatomical homeostasis: an evolutionary simulation, experiment and analysis.

Complex living agents consist of cells, which are themselves competent sub-agents navigating physiological and metabolic spaces. Behaviour science, evolutionary developmental biology and the field of machine intelligence all seek to understand the scaling of biological cognition: what enables individual cells to integrate their activities to result in the emergence of a novel, higher-level intelligence with large-scale goals and competencies that belong to it and not to its parts? Here, we report the results of simulations based on the TAME framework, which proposes that evolution pivoted the collective intelligence of cells during morphogenesis of the body into traditional behavioural intelligence by scaling up homeostatic competencies of cells in metabolic space. In this article, we created a minimal in silico system (two-dimensional neural cellular automata) and tested the hypothesis that evolutionary dynamics are sufficient for low-level setpoints of metabolic homeostasis in individual cells to scale up to tissue-level emergent behaviour. Our system showed the evolution of the much more complex setpoints of cell collectives (tissues) that solve a problem in morphospace: the organization of a body-wide positional information axis (the classic French flag problem in developmental biology). We found that these emergent morphogenetic agents exhibit a number of predicted features, including the use of stress propagation dynamics to achieve the target morphology as well as the ability to recover from perturbation (robustness) and long-term stability (even though neither of these was directly selected for). Moreover, we observed an unexpected behaviour of sudden remodelling long after the system stabilizes. We tested this prediction in a biological system-regenerating planaria-and observed a very similar phenomenon. We propose that this system is a first step towards a quantitative understanding of how evolution scales minimal goal-directed behaviour (homeostatic loops) into higher-level problem-solving agents in morphogenetic and other spaces.

Risk and Uncertainty in France's Atlantic Slave Trade

In the eighteenth century, about 12% of Atlantic slave-trading voyages organized under the French flag ended in shipwreck, condemnation of the vessel by Admiralty authorities, capture by privateers or pirates, or with the enslaved men and women on board taking control of the ship. During this period, a commercial solution was available to insulate slave traders from the financial losses that shipwreck, capture, and revolts represented to them: marine insurance policies, written to cover the estimated value of enslaved people and slaving vessels. According to early modern merchant manuals and legal commentaries, insurance underwriters compensated losses during slave-trading ventures according to stable principles that were consistent throughout the Atlantic world. In this article, however, I explore new evidence beyond these published sources by comparing the terms of 13 marine insurance policies underwritten in France to cover investments in slave-trading ships and in enslaved people. In these contracts, we find that purchasers of insurance coverage and underwriters added conditions not foreseen in merchants’ and lawyers’ manuals, as well as lines that contradicted the terms such guidebooks and commentaries claimed were standard. Marine insurance policies that covered slave-trading ships were used to hand off the possible financial fallout from profoundly unpredictable situations—not only conflicts between European powers, but also violent encounters between enslavers and captives, between European and African slave traders, and wars between African kingdoms. Insurance policies underwritten on the hulls and cargoes of slave ships thus show that marine insurance in the early modern world was a tool for redistributing both Knightian risk and Knightian uncertainty.

The History and Politics of French Involvement in Lebanon (1860–2021)

French intervention in Lebanon can be traced to the 19th century when in 1860, during the Ottoman period, Emperor Napoleon III sent 6,000 troops to restore peace, help the Christians and contribute to the reconstruction of Mount Lebanon. In the early 20th century France envisaged a direct French military occupation of Mount Lebanon to create a ‘little France, free, industrious and loyal’. Still, the French envisaged their missionary and educational role as a supplementary asset in their competition with the British. The creation of Greater Lebanon in 1920 was mainly determined by the interests of France in dividing and controlling Syria. In May 1926 Greater Lebanon was renamed The Lebanese Republic. The constitution defined its flag as the tricolour French flag with the cedar in the white strip, and adopted French as an official language alongside Arabic. Certainly, the French mandatory authorities left an impact on the local culture, economy and politics. During World War II, in November 1941, General Catroux declared France’s recognition of Lebanon’s and Syria’s independence and invited the representatives of their respective governments to sign a treaty with France to terminate the mandate. After Lebanon’s independence in 1943 French interest in Lebanon continued to be felt in politics and economics mainly because France wanted to support liberal and democratic values and protect Lebanon’s political stability against external threats. Political history and internal Lebanese sectarian rivalries and loyalties asides, this article focuses on the various French economic and political initiatives to help Lebanon stabilise after the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005. As a matter of fact, in May 2007 France renewed its commitment to work closely with the US in order to help Lebanon affirm its sovereignty, democracy and freedom. We argue that French influence in Lebanon has aimed to support its liberal socio-economic and political institutions, initiate reform, and build the state. In August 2020, after the devastating explosion in port Beirut, the leader of the former colonial power, Emmanuel Macron, visited Beirut twice and laid out his demands to the ruling elite to introduce economic and political reform that Paris had been demanding for years, to fight corruption, to form a ‘government of mission’ and rescue Lebanon from imminent collapse. After his predecessors Jacques Chirac, François Mitterand and Nicolas Sarkozy, president Macron took the huge risk to help Lebanon overcome its financial and economic collapse and fight against patronage and the wealth of entrenched baronial dynasties, some of which stretch back to the French mandatory period. We conclude by stressing that Macron’s visit in September 2020 to commemorate the centennial of the establishment of Greater Lebanon in 1920 could be interpreted as a failure on the part of the Lebanese politicians, celebrating 100 years without being able to solve their internal problems. Many Lebanese mourned the colonial legacy.

Reflections on Brilliance: Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors Trilogy

Reflections on Brilliance:Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors Trilogy Eileen G'Sell (bio) Blue (1993) A pool, the sky, a woolen scarf, a candy wrapper flapping in the wind, a rhinestone mobile, mottled stained glass, a night-lit road, the stripe on a stray beach ball. A lost song, a last psalm, an adulterous husband and wordless daughter. The first installment of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy—undoubtedly its best—explodes onscreen in a symphony of hue-charged, pathos-rich imagery. As thematically substantive as it is voraciously attuned to aesthetic value, the "blue" in Blue is at once a visual motif and affective register, at stake from the very first shot: the camera below the belly of a speeding Saab, the asphalt a muted beryl. In other scenes, multiple shades of blue swallow us whole: blue rain in a blue sky outside blue walls, where a man in a sodden blue shirt steps out of a heart-achingly empty house. Nearly 30 years after Blue solidified Kieślowski's arthouse stardom, the Polish director's trilogy has been restored to 4K cinematic glory for theatrical release in major U.S. cities. Heralded in 1993 by The Washington Post as a "penetrating, hypnotic meditation on liberty and loss," it was bemoaned by The Guardian for its "simple exercises in stylistic flourish." Where the Times dismissed it as "an aridly intellectual kind of filmmaking thought highly of in Europe," the late Roger Ebert concluded that "European films have a more adult, inward, knowing way of dealing with the emotions, and Hollywood hasn't grown up enough." Today's critical response to the trilogy's reissue seems, by turns, as preternaturally glowing as Juliette Binoche's unpainted face. "This summer's most relevant cinematic universe," proclaims IndieWire's David Ehrlich. "It's hard to think of a recent world-cinema endeavour roughly equivalent to Kieślowski's career-crowning triptych," posits Guy Lodge of The Guardian. That the films of the Three Colors trilogy bask in a chromatic brilliance on par with their titles seems undebatable. But how do they stand up as existential portraits of the human experience? And do they honor women as equally ensnared as men in the fists of fate? As two of the three films follow a female protagonist, and the other features a very memorable female antagonist (played by Julie Delpy), one might expect at least some critical attention to be devoted to the portrayal and development of these [End Page 178] characters onscreen. Instead, the discourse has been dominated by male critics blissfully inattentive to such matters. The dearth of feminist readings feels more than strange, and in need of a colorful corrective—my goal in the subsequent paragraphs. Narratively, Blue orbits the interior experience of Julie (Juliette Binoche), a young widow grappling with the sudden loss of her husband, Patrice (Hugues Quester), and five-year-old daughter, Anna, after their car swerves to avoid a dog and slams into a tree. A musical genius in her own right, Julie methodically rips up the handwritten score for her husband's forthcoming composition, Concert for the Reunification of Europe, a composition that, we slowly infer, she has likely written for him. Much of the film hinges on her ability to reinvest herself both in her artistic talents and the prospect of connection with other humans. "I have just one thing to do," she tells her dementia-addled mother midway through the film. "Nothing. I want no possessions, no memories, no friends, no lovers—they're all traps." In response to her grief, Julie seeks the ultimate freedom, speaking to the liberté in France's liberté, égalité, fraternité credo, to which each film in the trilogy roughly corresponds; more overtly, Blue, White, and Red refer to the consecutive colors of the French flag. Kieślowski admitted that, to some extent, the color titles are arbitrary. "If a different country had provided the finance," the Polish director told film scholar Paul Coates. "Germany, for instance, and I had made it as a German film, then yellow would have taken the place of blue and one would have had 'yellow, red, and black.'" Vraiment? It's...

Morphogen-directed cell fate boundaries: slow passage through bifurcation and the role of folded saddles

One of the fundamental mechanisms in embryogenesis is the process by which cells differentiate and create tissues and structures important for functioning as a multicellular organism. Morphogenesis involves diffusive process of chemical signalling involving morphogens that pre-pattern the tissue. These morphogens influence cell fate through a highly nonlinear process of transcriptional signalling. In this paper, we consider this multiscale process in an idealised model for a growing domain. We focus on intracellular processes that lead to robust differentiation into two cell lineages through interaction of a single morphogen species with a cell fate variable that undergoes a bifurcation from monostability to bistability. In particular, we investigate conditions that result in successful and robust pattern formation into two well-separated domains, as well as conditions where this fails and produces a pinned boundary wave where only one part of the domain grows. We show that successful and unsuccessful patterning scenarios can be characterised in terms of presence or absence of a folded saddle singularity for a system with two slow variables and one fast variable; this models the interaction of slow morphogen diffusion, slow parameter drift through bifurcation and fast transcription dynamics. We illustrate how this approach can successfully model acquisition of three cell fates to produce three-domain “French flag” patterning, as well as for a more realistic model of the cell fate dynamics in terms of two mutually inhibiting transcription factors.

'Neighbourhood watch' model: embryonic epiblast cells assess positional information in relation to their neighbours.

ABSTRACTIn many developing and regenerating systems, tissue pattern is established through gradients of informative morphogens, but we know little about how cells interpret these. Using experimental manipulation of early chick embryos, including misexpression of an inducer (VG1 or ACTIVIN) and an inhibitor (BMP4), we test two alternative models for their ability to explain how the site of primitive streak formation is positioned relative to the rest of the embryo. In one model, cells read morphogen concentrations cell-autonomously. In the other, cells sense changes in morphogen status relative to their neighbourhood. We find that only the latter model can account for the experimental results, including some counter-intuitive predictions. This mechanism (which we name the ‘neighbourhood watch’ model) illuminates the classic ‘French Flag Problem’ and how positional information is interpreted by a sheet of cells in a large developing system.

The Everyday Nationalism of Workers: A Social History of Modern Belgium

The Everyday Nationalism of Workers: A Social History of Modern Belgium

Flags, landscapes and signaling: contact-mediated inter-cellular interactions enable plasticity in fate determination driven by positional information

Multicellular organisms exhibit a high degree of structural organization with specific cell types always occurring in characteristic locations. The conventional framework for describing the emergence of such consistent spatial patterns is provided by Wolpert's "French flag" paradigm. According to this view, intra-cellular genetic regulatory mechanisms use positional information provided by morphogen concentration gradients to differentially express distinct fates, resulting in a characteristic pattern of differentiated cells. However, recent experiments have shown that suppression of inter-cellular interactions can alter these spatial patterns, suggesting that cell fates are not exclusively determined by the regulation of gene expression by local morphogen concentration. Using an explicit model where adjacent cells communicate by Notch signaling, we provide a mechanistic description of how contact-mediated interactions allow information from the cellular environment to be incorporated into cell fate decisions. Viewing cellular differentiation in terms of trajectories along an epigenetic landscape (as first enunciated by Waddington), our results suggest that the contours of the landscape are moulded differently in a cell position-dependent manner, not only by the global signal provided by the morphogen but also by the local environment via cell-cell interactions. We show that our results are robust with respect to different choices of coupling between the inter-cellular signaling apparatus and the intra-cellular gene regulatory dynamics. Indeed, we show that the broad features can be observed even in abstract spin models. Our work reconciles interaction-mediated self-organized pattern formation with boundary-organized mechanisms involving signals that break symmetry.

Estimating Bycatch From Non-representative Samples (II): A Case Study of Pair Trawlers and Common Dolphins in the Bay of Biscay

Marine megafauna plays an important functional role in marine ecosystems as top predators but are threatened by a wide range of anthropogenic activities. Bycatch, the incidental capture of non-targeted species in commercial and recreational fisheries, is of particular concern for small cetacean species, such as dolphins and porpoises. In the North-East Atlantic, common dolphin (Delphinus delphis, Linné 1758) bycatch has been increasing and associated with large numbers of animals stranding during winter on the French Atlantic seashore since at least 2017. However, uncertainties around the true magnitude of common dolphin bycatch and the fisheries involved have led to delays in the implementation of mitigation measures. Current data collection on dolphin bycatch in France is with non-dedicated observers deployed on vessels for the purpose of national fisheries sampling programmes. These data cannot be assumed representative of the whole fisheries' bycatch events. This feature makes it difficult to use classic ratio estimators since they require a truly randomised sample of the fishery by dedicated observers. We applied a newly developed approach, regularised multilevel regression with post-stratification, to estimate total bycatch from unrepresentative samples and total fishing effort. The latter is needed for post-stratification and the former is analysed in a Bayesian framework with multilevel regression to regularise and better predict bycatch risk. We estimated the number of bycaught dolphins for each week and 10 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) divisions from 2004 to 2020 by estimating jointly bycatch risk, haul duration, and the number of hauls per days at sea (DaS). Bycatch risk in pair trawlers flying the French flag was the highest in winter 2017 and 2019 and was associated with the longest haul durations. ICES divisions 8.a and 8.b (shelf part of the Bay of Biscay) were estimated to have the highest common dolphin bycatch. Our results were consistent with independent estimates of common dolphin bycatch from strandings. Our method show cases how non-representative observer data can nevertheless be analysed to estimate fishing duration, bycatch risk and, ultimately, the number of bycaught dolphins. These weekly-estimates improve upon current knowledge of the nature of common dolphin bycatch and can be used to inform management and policy decisions at a finer spatio-temporal scale than has been possible to date. Our results suggest that limiting haul duration, especially in winter, could serve as an effective mitigation strategy.

Colouring the claim: visual code and national allegiance in 120 battements par minute (Robin Campillo, 2017)

ABSTRACT The visual language of 120 Battements par minute imposes a disciplined approach to colour: specifically, the Tricolore. Blue, white, and red appear in a colour ‘chord’ that indexes the French flag. This chromatic iconography enables the film to assimilate minoritarian discourses into a French Republican narrative, staking a claim on the French nation on behalf of Act Up-Paris. By placing the national colours strategically within the mise-en-scène, Campillo’s film uses the Tricolore to help the audience integrate the characters and plot out of their organizational, medico-sexual, and ethnic specificities and back into the prevailing and exclusionary Republican ideology. Although 120 BPM aligns itself strongly and explicitly with various sexual minority and PWA communities, I argue that its cultural and commercial contexts require it to sidestep possible charges of communautarisme. Faced with the risk of telling the story of an exotic, possibly foreign-inspired movement, the film tells its story through a minoritarian plot and dialogue, while showing it to be patriotically French, through colour. Thus does 120 BPM command authority as a National film, while quietly balancing queer visibility with a claim to integration.

Contact-mediated cellular communication supplements positional information to regulate spatial patterning during development.

Development in multicellular organisms is marked by a high degree of spatial organization of the cells attaining distinct fates in the embryo. Recent experiments showing that suppression of intercellular interactions can alter the spatial patterns arising during development suggest that cell fates cannot be determined by the exclusive regulation of differential gene expression by morphogen gradients (the conventional view encapsulated in the French flag model). Using a mathematical model that describes the receptor-ligand interaction between cells in close physical proximity, we show that such intercellular signaling can regulate the process of selective gene expression within each cell, allowing information from the cellular neighborhood to influence the process by which the thresholds of morphogen concentration that dictate cell fates adaptively emerge. This results in local modulations of the positional cues provided by the global field set up by the morphogen, allowing interaction-mediated self-organized pattern formation to complement boundary-organized mechanisms in the context of development.

Lewis Wolpert (1929–2021)

Lewis Wolpert (1929–2021)

Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination by Toni Pressley-Sanon

Reviewed by: Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination by Toni Pressley-Sanon Angela Watkins Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination. By Toni Pressley-Sanon. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. ISBN 0-8130-5440-7. 192 pp. $74.95 hardcover. In Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination, Toni Pressley-Sanon foregrounds her examination of cultural production and cultural memory in the African diaspora within three theoretical concepts: tidalectics (the figurative ebb and flow of water that symbolizes the transatlantic dispersal of enslaved Africans and the resulting physical/metaphysical displacement), La Marassa (the sacred twins in Haitian Vodou), and istwa (history, story, and memory).1 Tracing the origins of enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) to Dahomey (present-day Benin) and the Kongo, Pressley-Sanon explores how African belief systems were sustained and redefined in the New World despite the attempted erasure by slave owners and colonists. At times poetic in her explanation of the African diaspora as both fractured and reinvented in an attempt to be made whole, Pressley-Sanon reimagines the capture and survival of enslaved Africans and the transformation of cultural practices that preceded slavery. Beginning with the significance of Haiti's bicolor flag, legendarily created by removing the French flag's white stripe—which, according to Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, had once symbolized the white, slave-owning population of Saint-Domingue (1–2)—Pressley-Sanon contextualizes the fight for independence during the Haitian Revolution as the reclamation of African roots among free and enslaved people of color and the (re)invention of Haitian identity. According to the author, the blue and red of the Haitian flag, which represent the Black and mulatto populations, respectively, also symbolize "two lwa who were invoked most strongly during the Haitian Revolution: Èzili Dantò and Ogou Feray" (1). Bolstered by faith in the African deities from whom they sought guidance and protection, the insurgents defeated their oppressors. [End Page 208] In her book, Pressley-Sanon examines storytelling as an integral part of African and African diasporic culture. She recalls the story of Bokofio, which Melville Herskovits writes about in Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (1938) after an anthropological field study in the 1930s. Bokofio is taken on a treacherous journey before he is freed and allowed to return home. Pressley-Sanon presents three scenarios through which the story may be understood. She reinscribes the protagonist as someone uprooted from his homeland as a result of the transatlantic slave trade, who is taken to new lands and forced to adapt to a new way of life. Alternatively, she interprets Bokofio's "return" as the physical return to Africa after the end of slavery, in reference to documented cases in which newly freed people were sent back to their native land. Finally, she suggests that Bokofio's return to his homeland is an allusion to the belief that after death the souls of enslaved Africans return to Ginen, the spiritual underworld. She argues that both the oral tradition and the material culture specific to certain regions of the African continent and its diaspora reveal a deeper understanding of how enslaved people "died to one way of being as a result of their contact with the transatlantic slave trade [and] were also reborn to another" (11). According to Pressley-Sanon, the forced assimilation involved the act of forgetting (due to the passage of time or as a survival technique) or maintaining one's cultural beliefs by adopting Western religions and practices as a guise. Pressley-Sanon focuses on material culture in explaining tidalectics in terms of the cyclical nature of history, specifically focusing on how the past informs the present and the recognition of contemporary iterations of bondage and racial oppression. She also explores how these ruptures, as a consequence of chattel slavery, led to a fusion and reinterpretation of various African cultural practices. For example, she refers both to a performance group in Haiti whose costumes consist of cords that represent the power of bociọ, sculptures crafted "to 'work' for their owners to shield them against harm and function in conjunction with vodun [sic] energies to protect humans and...

“#JeSuisSirCornflakes”: Racialization and resemiotization in French nationalist Twitter

Abstract After the 2016 spelling reforms deleted the accent circumflex from some French vowels, on right-wing French Twitter, the circonflexe reappeared in the center of the French flag – echoing the flag of Vichy France. Tweets with the hashtag #JeSuisCirconflexe resemiotized the accent circumflex as icon of a lost Frenchness, or voiced the racial other in a colonial faux pidgin to frame them as illiterate and brutish. Drawing on research on resemiotization (Leppänen, Sirpa, Samu Kytölä, Henna Jousmäki, Saija Peuronen & Elina Westinen. 2014. Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media. In The language of social media, 112–136. London: Palgrave Macmillan) and raciolinguistics (Flores, Nelson & Jonathan Rosa. 2015. Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2). 149–171), this article explores how constructions of mock youth French use raciolinguistic tropes to imagine a language of social decline, connecting linguistic purism to racist myths of white genocide and the great replacement. Despite this, youth invert the imagination of their illiteracy, using playful language and satirizing white speech (Rosa, Jonathan. 2016b. Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(2). 162–183) to contest French nationalism – reframing #JeSuisCirconflexe as #JeSuisSirCornflakes.