Women, Memory, and Intergenerational Transmission in the Francophone World
Reflecting on the role of novels written by women writers in the context of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship in Haiti, Régine Jean-Charles argues that cultural production fills the memory gap left by the dictatorship, due to the refusal on the part of the Haitian government to create official acts of memorialization about this traumatic period. She writes: ‘because the historical record is so incomplete, the realization of justice so elusive, the cultural memory so lacking, the imaginary becomes a space in which to explore other possibilities’ (2013: 161). This imaginative space is all the more important for women who have often been locked out of historical discourse in patriarchal societies where it has been men who have determined which histories have been told and how they have been remembered. The centrality of the theme of memory for women writers and artists across the Francosphere is intimately tied to the French colonial past. The colonization and enslavement of peoples from Africa and the Caribbean wiped out indigenous memories and engendered a fracture in the subjectivity of subsequent generations from these locations, a void Édouard Glissant identifies in his 1981 treatise Le Discours antillais. At the same time, the French government has endeavoured to integrate the historical experiences of the formerly colonized – and, in the case of Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion, subsequently departmentalized peoples – into the rhetoric of the French Republic, meaning that histories that contradicted the Republican ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité have been erased (Vergès 1999; Niang 2022). Women writers and artists from across the Francophone world have thus sought to recuperate these difficult and traumatic memories to place their stories at the centre of discourses surrounding violence, colonization, enslavement, and forced displacement. Well-known figures such as Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Fabienne Kanor, Fatou Diome, Assia Djebar, Véronique Tadjo, and Michèle Rakotoson have paved the way for a new generation of artists to engage with themes of memory and intergenerational transmission.
This online event seeks to explore specifically feminine processes of coming to terms with the past. It asks what histories and memories are foregrounded by women across the Francophone world, and how this memory transmission occurs. How does the French colonial and postcolonial context come to bear on these memories and their transmission? How do women transmit these difficult and traumatic memories across generations through techniques such as postmemory, a process whereby stories, images, and behaviours are imbued with so much emotion that the subsequent generations take on these memories as if they were their own, according to Marianne Hirsch? (2012). We welcome proposals from a range of time periods and geographical contexts. Proposals could consider the following themes:
- Women’s role in personal and collective memory practices;
- The role of different media and genre in this memory transmission;
- Intersectional influences on memory and its transmission, including but not limited to race, social class, sexuality, and disability;
- Ethical implications of transmitting difficult and traumatic memories;
- Memory as resistance and empowerment.
The event will take place on Wednesday 29th and Thursday 30th November 2023. The first half day will be run from the UK will take place on 29th November (this will be accessible to European time zones (afternoon of 29th November) and also EDT and CDT in North America (morning of 29th November).
The second half day will be run from Australia and will take place on 30th November (this will be accessible to Australian and South Pacific time zones (morning of 30th November) and also all other North American time zones (afternoon of 30th November)).
Please send your proposals (250-300 words & a biography of no more than 100 words ) for 20-minute presentations and any questions to the organisers Alison Clare (A.M.Clare@liverpool.ac.uk) and Antonia Wimbush (Antonia.Wimbush@unimelb.edu.au) by 15th September 2023.
We particularly welcome and encourage proposals from postgraduates and early-career researchers.
Works Cited
Édouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1981)
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)
Régine Jean-Charles, ‘Beyond Truth and Reconciliation in La Mémoire aux abois and Un alligator nommé Rosa’, French Forum, 38.3 (2013), 147-64
Françoise Vergès, ‘Colonizing Citizenship', Radical Philosophy, 96 (May/Jun 1999), 3-7
Mame-Fatou Niang, ‘Innocence, Ignorance et Arrogance : Les Trois Grâces de l’Anti-Noirité en France’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 26.4-5 (2022), 361-374
