No. 20 (2022): Colonial Memory and Fractures in the Cultural Representations of Contemporary Women Authors

This special issue of the magazine focuses on women's literary and artistic productions that bear traces of colonial memory. The gaze extends to all continents touched by French colonization, America, Africa and Asia. The sea, once crossed by colonizers and slave traders and today by migrants, reveals itself to be a space that a very dense "world-frontier" pass through. The female writers, artists, and intellectuals of multiple origins whose works are analyzed here explore this frontier, using the French language. The first two sections "Regards féminins et photographie" and "Le discours colonial chez les écrivaines contemporaines" collect articles that examine the literary works of authors poised between two or more countries: Marie Cardinal, Assja Djebar, Colette Fellous, Marie NDiaye, Fatou Diome, Léonora Miano, Lisette Lombé and Anna Moï; the next section is dedicated to the contemporary dramaturgy of Maryse Condé, Gaël Octavia, Marie-Thérèse Picard and Alexandra Badea, as well as the cinema of Claire Denis; the two contributions in the last section present the engagées biographies of Gisèle Halimi and Elisa Chimenti, intellectuals who played an incisive role in Tunisia and Morocco. The studies collected in this issue cast an unprecedented look at a production still little explored globally and invite us to revisit in a new light the history of French and French-speaking culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in a perspective of close connection with the French colonial past.