Appel à contribution (en français ou en anglais) : publication d'un ouvrage collectif autour des "Trans-Mediterranean Francophonies "
édité par Claire Launchbury (MCF, New South Wales University de Sidney) et Megan C. MacDonald (Koç University à Istanbul)
As a space of cultural and linguistic exchange, multiple migrations and identities, the Mediterranean is also space of trade between the major, and ancient, cities situated on its coasts. From Beirut to Casablanca, Marseilles to Tripoli, these cities, often administrative capitals in their own right, rival their inland counterparts. This collection focuses on the concept of ‘bridging’ in narratives that originate, or are located, in the exchanges between, or voyages to, these Mediterranean urban centres. In particular, we will consider the figure of the bridge, the passerelle, as passage between these locations facilitating transcultural dialogue.[1]
Following Jacques Derrida’s peregrinations in L’Autre Cap (1991), we might ask, following Derrida: What is Europe? When or Where is Paris? Who is the Mediterranean? Perhaps the Mediterranean falls under the rubric of paleonomy, that is, as Michael Naas recalls Derrida’s words in Positions: “the ‘strategic’ necessity that requires the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept.”[2] The Mediterranean is such a word: an old name to launch a new concept. Is there a desire to counter-identify against a Mediterranean identity in favour of a Metropolitan, European, Arab or African one? How are trans-Mediterranean bridging narratives thwarted by the reinforcement of borders in the region – between Africa and Europe, most notably? Finally, how does defining a Mediterranean city, such as Marseilles as European Capital of Culture, feed into the cultural production of a city whose multi-ethnic identities are as outward-looking towards North Africa as they are inward towards the French capital?
We invite essays written in French or English that look at bridging narratives in fictional texts, migratory or travelling tales, and other cultural productions. We especially welcome contributions that address one of the following concerns:
Cultural capital initiatives such as Marseille 2013
Fiction and film set in or dealing with these places as locations through which capital flows
Mediterranean non-capitals and rivalries with political capitals inland
Bodily precarity between and across Mediterranean capitals
Capital flight from/between the Mediterranean
Francophone publishing politics in the Mediterranean
The production of a francophone Mediterranean by machines of capital located in Paris
Considerations of place within a decentered network of Mediterranean cities that together create an imaginary space and sets of identities
Issues of identity and gendered spaces in overtly masculine cityscapes
Mediterranean vectors and troubling the East/West and/or North/South binaries
Migratory texts and identity in Mediterranean city-spaces; explorations of the ‘quartier’, ‘banlieue’, ghetto and district
Interactions between oral and written traditions of storytelling in the Mediterranean context
Mediterranean narratives as challenging Eurocentric notions of heritage and memory
Theoretical writing which explores the cross-axes of identity situate in a Mediterranean context
The Mediterranean as a ‘machine for making civilization’ (Valéry, cited in Derrida’s The Other Heading)
Editors: Claire Launchbury and Megan C. MacDonald
Please send abstracts of 500 words by July 15, 2015 to Claire Launchbury c.launchbury@unsw.edu.au or Megan C. MacDonald mmacdonald@ku.edu.tr
[1] For example, the Dictionnaire des mots français d’origine arabe by Saleh Guemriche (2007), with a preface by Assia Djebar, works to revise the colonial linguistic traffic between France, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean.
[2] See Naas’s introduction to Derrida’s The Other Heading (p. xliii).