Memorial Traces as Tropes of Postcolonial Hauntings in Robert Lalonde’s Sept Lacs plus au Nord and Nina Bouraoui’s Mes mauvaises pensées

This article is a comparative analysis of the language of memory in two auto-fictional narratives by two postcolonial francophone authors of mixed background, belonging to the area of Québec (Robert Lalonde) and Algeria (Nina Bouraoui). It will be argued that both authors seek to deconstruct the binary relationship of the spaces and identities they each belong to (white-Amerindian for Robert Lalonde vs. Franco-Algerian for Nina Bouraoui) through a specific poetics of writing or language of memory. At the same time, they each return cyclically in their writing to the postcolonial spaces, memories and histories of their respective non-Western cultures, as if ‘haunted’ by these spaces. Using the method of close textual reading in a comparative postcolonial francophone context,the article aims to show how the language of memory is deployed in the two narratives chosen. It demonstrates that both authors use the figure of the memorial trace as a trope of haunting in order to construct that language.It concludes that the figures of memory identified in the two texts analyzed give rise to a series of ‘postcolonial hauntings’ producing a postcolonial discourse of ambiguity rather than resistance

Fusing and Creating: A comparative analysis of the knowledge exchange methodologies underpinning Creativeworks London’s Creative Vouchers and London Creative and Digital Fusion’s Collaborative Awards.

This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/J005142/1]

London Creative and Digital Fusion

date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000The London Creative and Digital Fusion programme of interactive, tailored and in-depth support was designed to support the UK capital’s creative and digital companies to collaborate, innovate and grow. London is a globally recognised hub for technology, design and creative genius. While many cities around the world can claim to be hubs for technology entrepreneurship, London’s distinctive potential lies in the successful fusion of world-leading technology with world-leading design and creativity. As innovation thrives at the edge, where better to innovate than across the boundaries of these two clusters and cultures? This booklet tells the story of Fusion’s innovation journey, its partners and its unique business support. Most importantly of all it tells stories of companies that, having worked with London Fusion, have innovated and grown. We hope that it will inspire others to follow and build on our beginnings.European Regional Development Fund 2007-13

Reading Signs and Symbols with Abdelkébir Khatibi: From the Body to the Text

This chapter considers the ways in which Khatibi’s practices of reading contribute to theories of meaning through his thinking on the deciphering of signs and symbols and of making sense of the world, and of the worlds of the text, in their multifaceted forms. It takes as its starting point what Khatibi terms ‘l’intersémiotique’ in his introductory essay entitled ‘Le Cristal du Texte’ in La Blessure du nom propre, an important collection of essays for a better understanding of his work published in 1974. The ‘intersemiotic’ concerns migrant signs which move between one sign system and another, and Khatibi takes as his own project examples from semiotic systems found within Arabic and Islamic cultures, from both popular culture, such as the tattoo, to calligraphy and the language of the Quran, from the body, including the place of the erotic, to the text and beyond – including storytelling, mosaics, urban space, textiles. His readings reveal the intersemiotic and polysemic meanings created in the movements of these migrant signs between their sign systems. For Khatibi, this ‘infinity’ of the ‘text’ is linked also to mobile and migrant identity refracted in the multifaceted surfaces of the crystal (hence the title of the theoretical introductory essay – ‘Le Cristal du Texte’) rather than in one reflection as in a mirror. Moving from these concerns through and with which Khatibi develops his radical theory of the sign, of the word and of writing, and from the ways in which these concerns are reflected in the example of his own autobiographical text La Mémoire tatouée, the chapter goes on to investigate how Khatibi’s reading strategies may help the reading of other writers with a shared, but varied, relationship to their Islamic heritage. To do this, it takes another precise example in a work by the Algerian writer Assia Djebar whose writing, like that of many other twentieth and twenty-first century North African writers, is resonant with Khatibi’s intersemiotic theoretical and cultural project, and is concerned also with the individual and the collective, the historical and the contemporary, the political, the social and the linguistic. The chapter ends, then, by considering the implications of Khatibi’s reading and writing strategies for writers working with and through an Islamic heritage and significantly, as for Khatibi, the Sufi Islamic heritage