Why do people all around the world speak French? What led to that development? After hundreds of years of foreign relations and colonization, French has established a presence on nearly every continent in the world. From the "Hexagon" to Phnom Pen, Quebec to Papeete, and Ivory Coast to French Guyana, one can hear the dialects, use, and evolution of the French language. The panel will discuss the French speaking world and the people who make up its cultural landscape.
Contradiction and Hyperbole in Magyd Cherfi's Oeuvre
This paper continues my exploration of Magyd Cherfi’s discussion of his own national identity, and examines his essays, songs and most recent novel, Ma Part de Gaulois. Cherfi is a French writer of Berber origin whose works have gained attention within France’s multi-faceted debates on national identity. Cherfi’s own “identity trouble” or “confusion” manifest themselves formally in his texts, which are rife with contradiction and hyberbole. However, these characteristics, along with dichotomy and juxtaposition, are productive strategies in that they lead to some resolution of the identity crisis explored in his works.
A Jew and an Harki: Two Victims of the French Decolonization
In this paper, I examine the narratives of two victims of the war of independence between France and Algeria, a long conflict that ended in 1962. More than fifty years later, two journalists, each in her own way, wrote their story: Danielle Michel-Chich, a Jew, lost a leg in a bombing in Algiers when she was five, and Dalila Kerchouche, a Muslim and daughter of an harki (a group of Muslim Algerians who fought as auxiliaries in the French army), grew up like thousands of other harki families in internment camps in France long after the war had ended. Both women use the account of their personal tragedy to call on the responsible party (the FLN bomber or the French government) to finally acknowledge their responsibility.
