The Transnational and the Canon The French Atlantic

Quebec and Hocquenghem

The Problem with France un pays sans rencontres, sans métissages (Hocquenghem, La Beauté du métis; Paris: Ramsay, 1979), p. 9 Cf Anglophone and Hispanophone worlds: Pour les Français, ces océans culturels sont dincompréhensibles magmas décentrés; ibid., p. 28.

The Problem with French Studies Cf Descartes: the story of the constitution of the ego, told in covertly diagrammatic terms, schematizes a design of colonization that makes self-identity as its self-currency; Cf The centredness and structures of filiation of French Studies: There ensues the articulation of a closed, depoliticized boundless space in which the classroom becomes the hothouse of a family romance that takes pride in insulating itself from world-scale dilemmas that know none of the refinements of received French (Tom Conley, Afterword/Identity: Never More, in S.Ungar & T.Conley (eds), Identity Papers: Contested Identities in Twentieth-Century France (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp

Ways Forward Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: minor/major languages and cultures; the pack or meute; alliance rather than filiation. Edouard Glissant: Relation; errance rather than lunicité qui est au principe des dominations (Introduction à une poétique du divers; Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 106; archipelago versus continents. Jean Morisset, theorist and practitioner of diasporic French-Canadianness rather than territorialised Quebecness: la véritable Amérique ne saurait exister en français aux yeux de la France, de peur justement que son rêve dAmérique ne devienne un cauchemar indéchiffrable parlant joual ou créole (in J.Morisset & E.Waddell (eds), Amériques: deux parcours au départ de la Grande Rivière du Canada (Montreal: lHexagone, 2000), p.271.

The French Atlantic Site-based: Nantes, La Rochelle, Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, Quebec City, New Orleans, Cayenne, Montevideo Diasporas and transoceanic flows but also grounded in materiality and undergirded by historical catastrophe, notably the slave trade The pack: juxtapositions of heterogeneities, diversity of texts and of high and low cultural forms New light on canonical writings and films, e.g. Demy, Maupassant, Lautréamont

Beyond the Canon: Francophone New Orleans