Colonial Continuities and Decoloniality in the French-Speaking World: From Nostalgia to Resistance(14 Francophone Postcolonial Studies)

This volume pays tribute to the work of Professor Kate Marsh (1974-2019), an outstanding scholar whose research covered an extraordinarily wide range of interests and approaches, encompassing the history of empire, literature, politics and cultural production across the Francophone world from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Each of the chapters within engages with a different aspect of Marsh’s interest in French colonialism and the entanglements of its complex afterlives — whether it be her interest in the longevity of imperial rivalries; loss and colonial nostalgia; exoticism and the female body; decolonization and the ends of empire; the French colonial imagination; the policing of racialized bodies; or anti-colonial activism and resistance. As well as reflecting the geographical and intellectual breadth of Marsh’s research, the volume demonstrates how her work continues to resonate with emerging scholarship around decoloniality, transcolonial mobilities and anti-colonial resistance in the Francophone world. From French India to Algeria and from the Caribbean to contemporary France, this collection demonstrates the persistent relevance of Marsh’s scholarship to the histories and legacies of empire, while opening up conversations about its implications for decolonial approaches to imperial histories and the future of Francophone Postcolonial Studies.

Table of Contents:
Illustrations                                                                                                                            Acknowledgements                                                                                                                 Introduction                                                                                                                            Sarah Arens, Nicola Frith, Jonathan Lewis and Rebekah Vince                                            I. Colonial Continuities and Nostalgia   Bayadères in the French Imagination: A Persistent Dance                                                    Tessa Ashlin Nunn   Jean-Paul Kauffmann: Nostalgia, Empire and Imagined Resurrections                                     Patrick Crowley   A Russian Love Affair: Memory, Nostalgia and Transimperial Connections                Srilata Ravi   Colonialism, Race and Caribbean Migration: A History of the BUMIDOM               Antonia Wimbush   Continuity or Rupture?: Remapping the End of Empire in Marguerite Duras’s ‘Cycle Indien’                                                                                                                        Julia Waters   The Visible Other: Muslim Women, Feminism, and National Identity in France             Edwige Crucifix   Bridge Slaves of Fashion. Les Indiennes: The Extended Triangle                                                    The Singh Twins   II. Decoloniality and Transcolonial Modes of Resistance   Hidden Heritages and Unlikely Legacies: An Eastern Jerusalem in Hubert Haddad’s Premières neiges sur Pondichéry                                                                                     Rebekah Vince   Decolonizing Collective Memory from within: Rwandan Remembrance in Belgium and France                                                                                                                                               Catherine Gilbert   Divided Worlds, Distorted Selves: Coloniality and the Process of Identification in Yasmina Khadra’s Ce que le jour doit à la nuit                                                                     Abdelbaqi Ghorab   The Enslaved Man in Un Cœur simple: A Story within a Story                                           Sucheta Kapoor   Mobility, Immobility and Transgression: Representations of Dangerous Travellers in Mounsi’s La Noce des fous                                                                                                Jonathan Lewis   Policing Black Anti-Colonial Activism in Interwar France: The Surveillance of Lamine Senghor in Fréjus, Marseille and Bordeaux                                                              David Murphy   Afterword                                                                                                                               Charles Forsdick  

About the Author :
Sarah Arens is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in French at the University of Liverpool. Nicola Frith is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Jonathan Lewis is a Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Bangor University. Rebekah Vince is a Lecturer in French at Queen Mary University of London.

Review :
‘As an interdisciplinary series the collection features literary commentary, art inspired by colonial connections, and historical examples of repression; it encompasses a variety of scholarly fields. By illustrating the impact of colonial thought through both literary and socio-historical examples, Colonial Continuities is a striking way of honoring the late Kate Marsh.’ Hope Hecht, The French Review