"Where the mask ends and the face begins is not certain": Mediating ethnicity and cheating geography in Jonny Steinberg's Little Liberia

Mixing historical commentary, reportage, biography and personal stories, South African writer Jonny Steinberg takes up the tale of a fractured African nation and its diaspora in Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City (2011). The "little Liberia" founded in New York's urban jungle may have represented, for many of its inhabitants, a way to "cheat geography" by recreating a home away from home, but Little Liberia shows the reader it has not allowed them to cheat history. The book deals with the lives of two inhabitants of Park Hill Avenue on Staten Island, where nearly everyone is Liberian. Their conflict threatens to implode the community, igniting suspicions and accusations that had been bottled up since their exile. The article focuses on the interface of mediated ethnicity and citizenship related to the struggle for power in the diasporic Liberian community on Staten Island. Attention is also paid to feelings of identity of Little Liberia's author.DHE

Becoming-Bertha: virtual difference and repetition in postcolonial 'writing back', a Deleuzian reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Critical responses to Wide Sargasso Sea have seized upon Rhys’s novel as an exemplary model of writing back. Looking beyond the actual repetitions which recall Brontë’s text, I explore Rhys’s novel as an expression of virtual difference and becomings that exemplify Deleuze’s three syntheses of time. Elaborating the processes of becoming that Deleuze’s third synthesis depicts, Antoinette’s fate emerges not as a violence against an original identity. Rather, what the reader witnesses is a series of becomings or masks, some of which are validated, some of which are not, and it is in the rejection of certain masks, forcing Antoinette to become-Bertha, that the greatest violence lies

J.M.G. Le Clézio et Édouard Glissant: pour une poétique de la trace

En utilisant les textes que J.M.G Le Clézio et Edouard Glissant ont écrits pour la collection Peuples de l’eau aux éditions du Seuil, cet article analyse la façon dont les deux auteurs repensent la notion d’interculturalité à partir du concept de trace. Ces traces ce sont tout d’abord les signes et les voix qu’ils découvrent lors de leur découverte des îles de la Pentecôte et de Pacques, îlots isolées dans l’immensité de l’océan Pacifique. Suivre ces traces devient pour eux une manière de mettre en avant la dette de l’Occident envers la mémoire de ces peuples mais aussi une invitation à l’imaginaire et au récit pour restaurer un sens caché et perdu. En somme, il s’agira de voir comment une poétique de la trace leur permet de repenser notre rapport aux autres tout en suivant ce que Glissant appelle ‘L’imaginaire des peuples'

Futurity Island

" Pipe is the primary structural and symbolic unit of the Island, referencing the material that has facilitated worldwide land reclamation throughout the modern era. Once used to drain swamps, pipe becomes a metaphor for a human-centered ecology, an infrastructure of environmental domination and one of the prime symbols of the Anthropocene. In Futurity Island, a network of pipes becomes an artificial skeleton that employs sound to channel what we used to call “nature.” Futurity Island builds a sound infrastructure that brings humans and non-humans into a more symmetrical, collaborative relationship, aiming to transmit and to hear the silenced voices of this planet. " -- Publisher's websit