Émergence d’une littérature maghrébine d’expression française : La génération de 1954

Émergence d’une littérature maghrébine d’expression française : La génération de 1954

The Fecundity of Exile

Translated with author's permission by Scott Davidson from the French original, “Fécundités de l’exil” in Histoires de lecture (Lire en Fête, 2003).

Passport for a Hoped Immortality

Acceptance speech delivered to the Bernheim Foundation of French Judaism on May 16, 2011. Translated with the author's permission by Scott Davidson

Letter to Néméla

A letter about Memmi's philosophy of life. Translated with the author's permission by Scott Davidso

Fécondités de l’exil

Cet essai a paru pour la première fois dans Histoires de lecture (Lire en Fête, 2003) et parait ici avec la permission de l’auteur

Lettre à Néméla

Une lettre à Néméla

Passeport Pour Une Immortalité Espérée

Allocution prononcée à la remise du prix Bernheim, à la Fondation du judaïsme français, le 16 mai 2011

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

Transformative sensemaking: Development in Whose Image? Keyan Tomaselli and the semiotics of visual representation

The defining and distinguishing feature of homo sapiens is its ability to make sense of the world, i.e. to use its intellect to understand and change both itself and the world of which it is an integral part. It is against this backdrop that this essay reviews Tomaselli's 1996 text, Appropriating Images: The Semiotics of Visual Representation/ by summarizing his key perspectives, clarifying his major operational concepts and citing particular portions from his work in support of specific perspectives on sense-making. Subsequently, this essay employs his techniques of sense-making to interrogate the notion of "development". This exercise examines and confirms two interrelated hypotheses: first, a semiotic analysis of the privileged notion of "development" demonstrates its metaphysical/ ideological, and thus limiting, nature especially vis-a-vis the marginalized, excluded, and the collective other, the so-called Developing Countries. Second, the interrogative nature of semiotics allows for an alternative reading and application of human potential or skills in the quest of a more humane social and global order, highlighting thereby the transformative implications of a reflexive epistemology.Web of Scienc