Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World: Filiations Past and Future offers a critical reflection on some of the leading figures of twentieth-century French and Francophone literature, cinema, and philosophy. Specialists re-evaluate the historical, political, and artistic legacies of twentieth-century France and the French-speaking world, proposing new formulations of the relationships between fiction, aesthetics, and politics. This collection combines interdisciplinary scholarship, nuanced theoretical reflection, and contextualized analyses of literary, cinematic, and philosophical practices to suggest alternative critical paradigms for the twenty-first century. The contributors' reappraisals of key writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals trace an alternative narrative of their historical, cultural, or intellectual legacy, casting a contemporary light on the aesthetic, theoretical, and political questions raised by their works. Taken as a whole, the essays generate a series of fresh perspectives on French and Francophone literary and cultural studies.

The front covers of books written by Algerian women serve as the primary source of investigation in Front Cover Iconography and Algerian Women Writers. These covers have implications that extend beyond selling the book. What we see on one side of the page-or in this case, the cover, (recto) controls what we read on the reverse-in this case, the text itself (verso). Using theories of the paratext, including those of Gerard Genette and Jonathan Gray, this book determines how four dominant iconographies used on the covers of Algerian women's writing - Orientalist art, the veil, the desert, and the author portrait - work with and against the texts they represent. These images have an impact on the initial reception of the book, but beyond that, book covers determine how both the informed and uninformed reader categorize and interpret francophone Algerian women's writing in France and beyond. As the covers help to sell the works, they also produce messages, represented via their iconographies that embed themselves into the texts. A sometimes explicit, and at the very least, implicit dialog between the visual paratextual representation and the written textual one is created: a dialog that extends beyond the life of the physical book to a sort of canonical paradigm for reading these authors' works. Thus, even if the cover image appears ephemeral, it never truly disappears. Its powerful control over critical reception and, ultimately, interpretation of francophone Algerian women's writing remains.

In Remnants of Empire in Algeria and Vietnam: Women, Words, and War author Pamela A. Pears proposes a new approach to Francophone studies. The work uses postcolonial theory, along with gender and feminist inquiries, to emphasize the connections between two Francophone literatures, Algerian and Vietnamese. Specifically Pears focuses on four novels: Yamina Mechakra's La Grotte eclatee, Ly Thu Ho's Le Mirage de la paix, Malika Mokeddem's L'Interdite, and Kim Lefevre's Retour a la saison des pluies. All four novels show the profound transformation of women's roles in Algeria and Vietnam during and following the presence of French colonialism. These four authors never attempt to unfold a clear and single definition of the postcolonial female subject. Instead, they explore the various subjective possibilities, expand on them, and ultimately place them in question. Although the differences between Algeria and Vietnam are striking, it is through their connections to one another that we can foreground postcolonial gender issues. Whereas geographical boundaries and official nationalities serve as divisive classifications, the links between the works lead us to a much more engaging dialogue and ultimate understanding of postcolonial Francophone literature.

In Remnants of Empire in Algeria and Vietnam: Women, Words, and War author Pamela A. Pears proposes a new approach to Francophone studies. The work uses postcolonial theory, along with gender and feminist inquiries, to emphasize the connections between two Francophone literatures, Algerian and Vietnamese. Specifically Pears focuses on four novels: Yamina Mechakra's La Grotte ZclatZe, Ly Thu Ho's Le Mirage de la paix, Malika Mokeddem's L'Interdite, and Kim Lef_vre's Retour DEGREES la saison des pluies. All four novels show the profound transformation of women's roles in Algeria and Vietnam during and following the presence of French colonialism. These four authors never attempt to unfold a clear and single definition of the postcolonial female subject. Instead, they explore the various subjective possibilities, expand on them, and ultimately place them in question. Although the differences between Algeria and Vietnam are striking, it is through their connections to one another that we can foreground postcolonial gender issues. Whereas geographical boundaries and official nationalities serve as divisive classifications, the links between the works lead us to a much more engaging dialogue and ultimate understanding of postcolonial Francophone liter

This volume of essays explores what it is that has brought marginalized and often exiled writers, seen as treacherous, alienated, and/or queer by their societies and nations together by way of Paris. Spanning from the inter-war period of the late 1920s to the present millennium, this volume considers many seminal questions that have influenced and continue to shape the realm of exiled writers who have sought refuge in Paris in order to write. Additionally, the volume's essays seek to define alienation and marginalization as not solely subscribing to any single denominator -- sexual preference, gender, or nationality-- but rather as shared modes of being that allow authors to explore what it is to write from abroad in a place that is foreign yet freed of the constrictions of one's home space. What makes Paris a particularly fruitful space that has allowed these authors and their writings to cross national, ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic boundaries for over a century? What is it that brings together writers such as Moroccan Abdellah Taia, Americans James Baldwin, Richard Wright and, most recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Shay Youngblood, Algerian Nabile Fares, Franco-Algerian Leila Sebbar, Canadian Nancy Huston, French Jean Genet and French-Vietnamese Linda Le? How do their representations and understanding of transgression and marginalization transcend national, linguistic and ethnic boundaries, leading ultimately to revolution, both literary and literal? How does their writing help us to trace the history of Paris as a literary and artistic capital that has been useful for authors' exploration of the Self, race and home country? These are but a few of the many questions explored in this volume. This book relies on an inherently intersectional approach, which is not based in reified identities, whether they be LGBT, postcolonial, ethnic, national, or linguistic. Instead, we posit that, for example, queer theory, and a "politics of difference"i can help us investigate the dynamics of these multiple identity positions, and hence provide a broader understanding of the lived experiences of these writers, and, perhaps, their readers from the early 1940s to the present.