Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Beirut On The Seine: Rebuilding Lebanese Identity After The Scourge Of War, Soumaya Al Jarrah

BAU Journal - Society, Culture and Human Behavior

The current situation of Lebanon is difficult. The country is sinking into a deep economic, financial, political, and social crisis, which has become worse since 2019 and especially after the explosion of the Beirut port in August 2020. As a result, several Lebanese decided to leave the country. This situation is partly a result of the civil war that took place between 1975 and 1990.

Indeed, the Lebanese war leaves an important mark on the literary works that have Lebanon as a setting. Authors express their desire to explore in their works the traumas, consequences and effect of these conflicts …

Cambodian Family Albums: Tian's "L'Année Du Lièvre", Angelica P. So

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article explores how Franco-Cambodian cartoonist Tian’s graphic novel, L’année du lièvre [Year of the Rabbit], represents second-generation postmemory in the form of, what I call, a “Cambodian family album,” or a personal-collective archive. The album serves to convey to subsequent generations: 1) the history of the Cambodian genocide, 2) the collective memories of pre-1975 Cambodia preceding the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh, and 3) the Cambodian humanitarian crisis and exodus of the 1970s-1990s. The conceptualization of the family album is derived from the literal translation, from Khmer into English, of the term “photo album” – “book designated for …

Meera Atkinson. The Poetics Of Transgenerational Trauma. Bloomsbury, 2017., Katie Lally

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Meera Atkinson. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma. Bloomsbury, 2017.

Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, And Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard Up, 2016., Julia Watson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Hillary L. Chute. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016.

Amy L. Hubbell. Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity, And Exile. Lincoln And London: U Of Nebraska P, 2015., Anna Rocca

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Amy L. Hubbell. Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity, and Exile. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2015.

Essai De Typologie Des Familles Éclatées Dans L’Oeuvre Romanesque De Calixthe Beyala, Clémentine Mansiantima Nzimbu

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Calixthe Beyala’s novels, the narrators are in search of their own identity due to traumas experienced in broken families. The expression broken or shattered family (famille éclatée) is used in a broad way, pertaining to principles and responsibilities of marriage, particularly with children. The abandonment of a spouse, regardless of the motive, wounds the family unit. This study uses eight novels to examine the various configurations of families in which the place of biological parents is called into question. This study also shows that abandoned children, in the works of Beyala, cope with the absence of a parent.

Littérature Congolaise : Imaginaire Et Miroir De L’Urgence Sociale, Ngwarsungu Chiwengo

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Congolese literature of urgency is the historical conscience which informs the conscience of history, a therapeutic medium which allows the reader to transcend national trauma and to articulate the future. As the foundation of the metadiscourse of Congolese realities, it is the counter-discourse of Western and national cultural domination, the erasure of the national voice, the traumatism of dictatorships, invasions, and political and social conflicts maintained. It therefore condemns theological, political domination and advocates for nationalism, the reconstruction of Congolese identity while affirming Congolese desire to auto-determine their future in a country where truth is extirpated from political euphemisms.

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Le Devoir De Mémoire Ou Une Identité Ravalée Dans Cicatrices D’Alain Kamal Martial, Katharine Hargrave

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article examines the construction of identity in Alain Kamal Martial’s novel, Cicatrices. Conceived during a rape committed by a group of militiamen, the narrator struggles against a sense of obligation to avenge his mother’s assault, as well as a need to liberate himself from this event. However, under the onus of being a proxy witness, he realizes that he cannot forget his duty of memory because he embodies the inherited trauma of past generations. The crude and powerful immediacy of this text forces the reader to reflect upon his or her own role in the remembrance of past injustices.

Le Cinéma Face À L’Oblitération Génocidaire. Silences Éloquents Et Hors-Champ Intérieur Chez Philippe Van Leeuw Et Kivu Ruhorahoza, Alexandre Dauge-Roth, Ayse Irem Ikizler

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Philippe Van Leeuw and Kivu Ruhorahoza’s cinema proposes an esthetic and ethical gaze that distances itself from the historic realism that defines the majority of the films on the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. By conferring an unprecedented eloquence to different types of silence and by maintaining viewers in a concerted state of ignorance, both filmmakers question societies’ will to know within the legacy of genocide and their willingness to culturally acknowledge the traumatic resonance of its aftermath.

Une Poétique De La Mémoire : Lire Matière Grise, Le Film Du Réalisateur Rwandais Kivu Ruhorahoza (2011), Frieda Ekotto

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The film Grey Matter [Matière grise] (2011) directed by a Rwandan filmmaker Kivu Ruhorahoza, is an attempt to offer psychoanalytic approaches to understanding a 1994 Rwandan genocide within the psychic and the social. This director is interested in representing the impossible, instead, he offers a poetic representation of trauma. It may be just like a dream in his psychic, wondering whether this event really happened and how to make sense of as time settles ? This noiseless film is the first feature length narrative film directed by a Rwandan who gives the world the visual interpretation of the impact of …

Accumulated Testimony: Layering French Girls’ Diaries On The Algerian Exodus, Amy L. Hubbell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In 1997, French-Algerian author Leïla Sebbar published an illustrated children’s book, J’étais enfant en Algérie, juin 1962 (‘I was a child in Algeria, June 1962’) in which she creates the fictional account of a young girl from the interior of Algeria leaving her home during the great exodus of the French just prior to Algerian independence. Using the genre of diary writing, Sebbar’s text reads as testimonial of fleeing their country for a homeland they do not know. Although this text is intimate, Sebbar relies on accumulated scraps of collective experience that, when joined to her own, fill in the …

Self And Stuff: Accumulation In Francophone Literature And Art, Natalie Edwards, Amy L. Hubbell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction.

Béatrix Beck: The “Barny Cycle”: Writing To Inform And Heal The Self, Myrna Bell Rochester, Mary Lawrence Test

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

To cope with the traumatic reality of World War II, French society repressed its memories, resulting in a false collective memory. Today, a more truthful history can be restored with the study of wartime and post-war texts. We examine the first six books (1948-67) of Belgian-French writer Béatrix Beck (1914-2008), alongside the theories of psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, who wrote that “traumatic reactions occur when action is of no avail.” Beck’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, Barny, goes through Herman’s stages of forgetting and remembering, healing and recovery. Her emergence as a writer also follows that trajectory: Barny, like Occupied France, was isolated. …

Trauma And Transmission: Echoes Of The Missing Past In Dora Bruder, Judith Greenberg

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay begins with the ethical imperative that Dora Bruder puts forward: to pay attention to the stories of the pain of others that had been ignored during the Holocaust. But Dora Bruder is also full of "missing pieces"—missing details in Dora's life story, missing elements in the narrator's relationship with his father, and the missing understanding that necessarily occurs in relation to "knowing" trauma and particularly, the Holocaust. The essay looks at those "missing pieces" both through insights in trauma theory and through the lens of 9/11, which introduced a new sense of the "missing" to this writer. It …