Between Censorship and Amnesia: The End of The Penal Colony in French Guiana

The article focuses on the censorship of Léon-Gontran Damas’s 1937 Retour de Guyane, a searing critique of French administration of this South American colony. The colonial authorities sought to ban Damas’s book, allegedly purchasing and burning 1,000 copies of it (of a print-run, at the author’s own expense, of only 1,500). In this book, Damas targets in particular the failure of the penal colony in the territory and suggests that the institution has impeded the development of the colony. The aim of the article is to read Damas’ work in a wider corpus of texts devoted to the penal colony, most notably Frédéric Bouyer’s travel narrative La Guyane française: notes et souvenirs d’un voyage exécuté en 1862-1863 (1867) and Albert Londres’ Au bagne (1923). It suggests, however, that Retour de Guyane was a particularly incendiary text, mixing ethnographic report with anti-colonial essay, unpopular with the authorities in that it linked the collapse of the penal colony to the inevitable end of empire.L’article se concentre sur la censure du livre de Léon-Gontran Damas, Retour de Guyane (1937), qui propose une critique acharnée de l’administration française de cette colonie sud-américaine. Les autorités coloniales ont cherché à interdire le livre de Damas, en achetant et en brûlant 1 000 exemplaires (sur un tirage, aux frais de l’auteur, de seulement 1 500 exemplaires). Damas vise en particulier l’échec du bagne sur le territoire et suggère que l’institution a entravé le développement de cette colonie. Le but de l’article est de lire l’œuvre de Damas dans un corpus plus large de textes consacrés au bagne, notamment le récit de voyage de Frédéric Bouyer La Guyane française : notes et souvenirs d’un voyage consacré en 1862-1863 (1867) et Au bagne d’Albert Londres (1923). L’article suggère, cependant, que Retour de Guyane était un texte particulièrement incendiaire, mélangeant rapport ethnographique et essai anticolonial, censuré par les autorités en ce qu’il liait l’effondrement du bagne à la fin désormais inévitable de l’empire colonial

Le regard de l’étranger ? France as ‘elsewhere’ Un échange à partir de six questions

Fixxion: How would you characterize French studies – in terms of the relation- ship of its practitioners to the otherness (or otherwise) of their object of study, in terms of its evolving disciplinary landscape, in terms of its underpinning paradigms and relationship to Anglophone intellectual movements such as Cultural Studies particularly in the United Kingdom? Anna-Louise Milne: It strikes me, when thinking about the currents that have contributed to breaking the banks of a traditional con..

Translating COVID-19: From Contagion to Containment

AbstractThis article tests the hypothesis that all pandemics are inherently translational. We argue that translation and translation theory can be fruitfully used to understand and manage epidemics, as they help us explore concepts of infectivity and immunity in terms of cultural and biological resistance. After examining the linkage between translation and coronavirus disease from three different yet interlinked perspectives—cultural, medical, and biocultural—we make a case for a translational medical humanities framework for tackling the multifactorial crisis brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 infection. This innovative entanglement of perspectives has the merit of carving out a new space for translation research at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities, providing sustainable ways to conceptualize the production of science at times of crisis, and challenging conventional views of translation as a primarily linguistic and cultural phenomenon that traditionally does not engage with science.</jats:p

Avant-propos

Despising, For you, the city, thus I turn my back : There is a world elsewhere. William Shakespeare Toute époque peut se définir par les relations qu’elle établit entre le territoire familier et des espaces lointains, mal déterminés, situés ailleurs ou “elsewhere”. À cet égard, la période de mondialisation qui s’est ouverte dans les années 1980 prend des traits singuliers qu’il reste à examiner. Dans un monde et un temps où les facilités de transport ont favorisé – malgré le désastre humanita..

Max Müller and the Comparative Method

This is an Author’s Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Comparative Critical Studies. The Version of Record is available online at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2015.016

Ruinas, círculos, construcciones

This article is organized around three groups of 'citations' from architectural forms, texts, images, which generate three options of imagination, representation and reading of space: ruins, circular constructions, and rhetoric (in particular figures of repetition). I discuss the story of Borges "Las ruinas circulares" and examples from Iain Sinclair, London orbital (2002), Gianni Biondillo and Michele Monina, Tangenziali. Due viandanti ai bordi della città (2010), and Nicolò Bassetti, Sapo Matteucci, Sacro romano GRA (2013). The circularity generates a repetitive and disparate look allowing the observation of a complementary rhythm of destruction and construction characteristic of progress in the world

‘Ungoogleable’, untranslatable

The news last week that the Language Council of Sweden has dropped the neologism ‘ogooglebar’  (a term meaning 'ungoogleable') from its list of official additions to the Swedish lexicon generated predictable responses. It is alleged that Google did not wish to see its trademark name diluted to refer to all web searches, and as a result requested that the term be defined instead as ‘something that cannot be found on the web using Google’. The Language Council refused. The generic use of the ve..

Anthem Studies in Travel: Call for Book Proposals

We are interested in receiving book proposals for Anthem Studies in Travel. The series publishes new and pioneering work in the burgeoning field of travel studies. Titles in this series engage with questions of travel, travel writing, literature and history, and encompass some of the most exciting current scholarship in a variety of disciplines. Proposals for monographs and collections of essays may focus on research representing a broad range of geographical zones and historical contexts. Al..