Metropolitan Mosaics and Melting-Pots

Paris and Montreal in Francophone Literatures
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4438-4771-1
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 250 Seiten

Migration is both a demographic and a cultural phenomenon. As such, it both reshapes the global village and subverts the all-encompassing vision of the city, a space split between the blending of all new cultures and the need felt by many migrants to maintain their traditions and thereby contribute to a multicultural mosaic.

This series of essays explores how the concepts of the melting-pot and the mosaic have shaped the representation of Paris and Montreal in francophone literatures. Migrant movements to these cities from the Caribbean, the Maghreb, Sub-Saharan Africa, Quebec, Indochina, and the Indian Ocean have produced new groups of intersecting cultures. Under the dual influences of their native and host countries, migrants have produced an innovative and multifaceted literature that reflects their composite world-view. Their writing poses pressing questions of ethnicity, immigration, integration, and citizenship, and challenges longstanding notions both of the concept of the city and of how its spaces embody and articulate Frenchness in the face of ongoing change.

Such shifts produce changes not only in the diasporic culture, but in the national culture as well, through creolization processes. These shifting identities increasingly destabilize current notions of national membership and social and cultural belonging, since we can no longer presume a direct correspondence between place, culture, language and identity. They also pose new questions of national identity and difference as the immigrant presence expands and inflects the cosmopolitan pluralism of today’s societies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Souza, Pascale De

Murdoch, H. Adlai

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Französische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies

Über Autor(innen)

Pascale De Souza completed her PhD in Francophone Studies at the University of Maryland after obtaining an agrégation and graduate degrees in English from University Lille III. She is the recipient of two Fulbright awards and is currently Language and Culture Instructor at the Foreign Service Institute. Her research interests are the cultures and literatures of the Francophone Caribbean, the Mascarenes, and the French South Pacific. She has co-edited special issues focusing on Caribbean and South Pacific literatures for the Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Macomère, and the International Journal of Francophone Studies and published book chapters and articles in various journals, including Research in African Literatures and Romanic Review.

H. Adlai Murdoch is Professor of French and Francophone Literature at Tufts University. He is the author of Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel, and Creolizing the Metropole: Migratory Metropolitan Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film, as well as the co-editor of the essay collection Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies. He has edited special issues of the Journal of Caribbean Literatures, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, and Research in African Literatures, and his articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Callaloo, Yale French Studies, Research in African Literatures, and Francophone Postcolonial Studies.