Unique in its analysis both of literary and linguistic techniques, this text draws together extracts from novels written in French by writers from Francophone areas outside Europe, including North Africa, Black Africa, the Caribbean and North America.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. In The Quebec Connection, Julie-Françoise Tolliver examines the links and parallels that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences that marked their experience. Tolliver argues that the French tongue both enabled and delimited connections between these writers, restricting their potential with the language’s own imperial history. The literary map that emerges demonstrates the plurality of French-language literatures, going beyond the concept of a single, unitary francophone literature to appreciate the profuse range of imaginaries connected by solidary texts that hoped for transformative independence. Importantly, the book expands the "francophone" framework by connecting African and Caribbean literatures to Québécois literature, attending to their interactions while recognizing their particularities. The Quebec Connection’s analysis of transnational francophone solidarities radically alters the field of francophone studies by redressing the racial logic that isolates the northern province from what has come to be called the postcolonial world.

The canon of French literature has been the subject of much debate and now increasingly francophone literatures are demanding more attention in student French literature courses. The first study in English of francophone literatures, this book introduces the diverse bodies of texts in French from the numerous French-speaking areas around the world, with separate sections covering Africa, French Canada, the Creole Islands, and Europe, and will provide students at both undergraduate and 'A' level with a comprehensive introductory survey of the subject. Francophone literatures emerge from rich bi- and multi-lingual cultures in part as colonial legacies. They also challenge the monopoly of the French literary tradition. This introductory survey celebrates the linguistic difference of such texts and the creative possibilities offered by deviance from an established tradition, demanding new critical approaches. The texts studied here cast a new light upon French literature in terms of their diverse perspectives upon writing, history, politics, and culture, their violent rewritings, subversive versions and parodies sometimes forming an elaborate pastiche of celebrated Frence texts. Guides to further reading, a select bibliography, and an extensive index combine to make the book an extremely readable introductory overview of a hitherto little explored area.

"Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body." --Book Jacket.

The Francophone World: Cultural Issues and Perspectives introduces readers to French-speaking communities across the globe and offers a perspective on the cultures that have developed in the wake of French exploration and colonization. This book explores the French influence in West Africa, the diversity of cultures within the Caribbean, the Francophone communities of North America, and the plight of North African immigrants living in France. Through these interdisciplinary essays and the discussion questions that follow them, readers can examine such wide-ranging topics as the media in Francophone West Africa, the special status of women writers in Senegal, and the mix of cultures in Martinique and French Guiana. This book also highlights the transition into modernity in Burkina Faso, the theater of Aimé Césaire, literature and culture in Québec, and the French presence in the northeastern United States.

Ever since Bessie Smith's powerful voice conspired with the "race records" industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women's singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith's blues and Richard Wright's neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson's gospel music and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers. The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century's most beloved and challenging voices.

What characterizes the relationship between literature and the state? Should literature serve the needs of the state by constructing national consciousness, espousing state propaganda, and molding good citizens? Or should it be dedicated to a different kind of creative social endeavor? In this important book about literature and the politics of nation-building, Dominic Thomas assesses the contributions of Francophone African writers whose works have played a key role in the recent transition to democracy in the Congo. Exploring the works of Sony Labou Tansi, Henri Lopes, and Emmanuel Dongala, among others, Thomas highlights writers intimately involved with government and politics -- whether in support of the state's vision or with the intention of articulating a more open view of citizens and society. Focusing on themes such as collaboration, reconciliation, identity, history, and memory, Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa elaborates a broader understanding of the circumstances of African colonization, modern African nation-state formation, and the complex cultural dynamics at work in Africa since independence.

In late medieval and early modern times, books, as well as the people who produced and read (or listened to) them, moved between regions, social circles, and languages with relative ease. Yet, in the multilingual Low Countries, francophone literature was both internationally mobile and firmly rooted in local soil. The five contributions collected in this volume demonstrate that while in general issues of 'otherness' were resolved without difficulty, at other times (linguistic) differences were perceived as a heartfelt reality. Texts and books in French, Latin, and Dutch were as interrelated and mobile as their authors. As awareness of the francophone literature of the medieval and early modern Low Countries continues to grow, texts in all three languages will be ever more firmly connected in an intricate and multilingual weave.

This volume explores the concept and possibility of a black European community by analysing the ways in which contemporary Francophone African writers articulate and interrogate their complex relationships with European society, culture and history.

Francophone Literature as World Literature examines French-language works from a range of global traditions and shows how these literary practices draw individuals, communities, and their cultures and idioms into a planetary web of tension and cross-fertilization. The Francophone corpus under scrutiny here comes about in the evolving, markedly relational context provided by these processes and their developments during and after the French empire. The 15 chapters of this collection delve into key aspects, moments, and sites of the literature flourishing throughout the francosphere after World War II and especially since the 1980s, from the French Hexagon to the Caribbean and India, and from Québec to the Maghreb and Romania. Understood and practiced as World Literature, Francophone literature claims--with particular force in the wake of the littérature-monde debate--its place in a more democratic world republic of letters, where writers, critics, publishers, and audiences are no longer beholden to traditional centers of cultural authority.