Charles Forsdick

From his premature death in 1919 until the final decades of the twentieth century, the French traveller, author, and naval doctor Victor Segalen remained relatively obscure, his extensive work on exoticism largely unavailable. With the appearance of the Complete Works in 1995, the dramatic scope and wide-ranging implications of his reflections on diversity were at last fully apparent. Segalen's understanding of the exotic is radically different from that of his colonial contemporaries. His exoticism - or Aesthetics of Diversity - focuses on the instability of contact between different cultures and represents a unique response to the decline of diversity triggered by colonialism and Westernization. Recent attention to Segalen in a variety of fields - post-modern sociology, post-colonialism, literary criticism, anthropology - indicates his role as a precursory theorist of the exotic whose work is of increasing contemporary relevance. At a moment when exoticism is rapidly emerging as a term of critical currency, this study of the genesis of Segalen's aesthetics is a timely contribution to work in this area.

Exhibition catalogue featuring images by Charles Fox with short essays by Charles Forsdick, Sophie Fuggle, Katharina Massing and Maryse Tennant. The publication offers a series of reflections on the complex space of the Con Dao archipelago located off the South of Vietnam. The largest island Con Son (formerly known as Poulo Condore) once housed a French colonial prison where over 20,000 Vietnamese died.

'In overthrowing me, you have done no more than cut down the trunk of the tree of liberty - it will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.' - Toussaint Louverture The leader of the only successful slave revolt in history, Toussaint Louverture is seen by many to be one of the greatest anti-imperialist fighters who ever lived. Born into slavery on a Caribbean plantation, he was able to break from his bondage to lead an army of freed African slaves to victory against the professional armies of France, Spain and Britain in the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. In this biography, Louverture's fascinating life is explored through the prism of his radical politics. It champions this 'black Robespierre' whose revolutionary legacy had inspired people and movements in the two centuries since his death. For anyone interested in the roots of modern-day resistance movements and black political radicalism, Louverture's extraordinary life provides the perfect starting point.

'In overthrowing me, you have done no more than cut down the trunk of the tree of liberty - it will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.' - Toussaint Louverture The leader of the only successful slave revolt in history, Toussaint Louverture is seen by many to be one of the greatest anti-imperialist fighters who ever lived. Born into slavery on a Caribbean plantation, he was able to break from his bondage to lead an army of freed African slaves to victory against the professional armies of France, Spain and Britain in the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. In this biography, Louverture's fascinating life is explored through the prism of his radical politics. It champions this 'black Robespierre' whose revolutionary legacy had inspired people and movements in the two centuries since his death. For anyone interested in the roots of modern-day resistance movements and black political radicalism, Louverture's extraordinary life provides the perfect starting point.

From the postcolonial perspective of the early twenty-first century, the importance of travel literature, for considerations of national and international cultures and identities, has become increasingly apparent. Travel literature in French has, however, received little critical scrutiny. This book contributes to contemporary reassessments of the form in a number of disciplines, focusing specifically on the discourses and contexts of travel in twentieth-century texts written in French. Its scope is interdisciplinary, involving theoretical and generic considerations as well as a historical overview of colonial and postcolonial texts. The book provides essential reading for all students of travel literature in French -- and of travel literature in general.

This book is one of the first studies of twentieth-century travel literature in French, tracking the form from the colonial past to the postcolonial present. Whereas most recent explorations of travel literature have addressed English-language material, Forsdick's study complements these by presenting a body of material that has previously attracted little attention, ranging from conventional travel writing to other cultural phenomena (such as the Colonial Exposition of 1931) in which changing attitudes to travel are apparent. Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures explores the evolution of attitudes to cultural diversity, explaining how each generation seems simultaneously to foretell the collapse and reinvention of 'elsewhere'. It also follows the progressive renegotiation of understandings of travel (and travel literature) across the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of travel narratives from France's former colonies. The book suggests that an exclusive colonial understanding of travel as a practice defined along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity has slowly been transformed so that travel has become an enabling figure - encapsulated in notions such as James Clifford's 'traveling cultures' - central to analyses of contemporary global culture. Engaging initially with Victor Segalen's early twentieth-century reflection on travel and exoticism and Albert Kahn's 'Archives de la Planète', Forsdick goes on to examine a series of interrelated texts and phenomena: early African travel narratives, inter-war ethnography, post-war accounts of Citroën 2CV journeys, the travel stories of immigrant workers, the work of Nicholas Bouvier and the Pour une littérature voyageuse movement, narratives of recent walking journeys, and contemporary Polynesian literature. In delineating a francophone space stretching far beyond metropolitan France itself, the book contributes to new understandings of French and Francophone Studies, and will also be of interest to those interested in issues of comparatism as well as colonial and postcolonial culture and identity.

This landmark text constitutes the first comprehensive overview of Francophone Postcolonial Studies. Moving away from reductive geographical or linguistic surveys of the Francophone world, this collection of original essays provides a thematic discussion of the complex historical, political and cultural links between France and its former colonies. Providing a theoretical framework for postcolonial criticism of the field, it also aims to trigger a genuine dialogue between Francophone and Anglophone scholars of postcolonialism.Part I provides a historical overview, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, addressing issues of colonialism, slavery and exoticism. Part II looks at language issues and discusses France's belief in the universality of its language and culture and the postcolonial challenges to that view. Part III discusses issues of diversity and multiculturalism in contemporary Francophone cultures. Part IV concludes with an analysis of the French-language contribution to postcolonialism as well as an examination of Francophone postcolonial thought and culture in the principal areas of the French-speaking world.Edited by two of the up-and-coming names in Francophone Postcolonial Studies, the collection includes contributions from an international team including some of the world's leading scholars in the field.