Event Description
Charles Forsdyck (Liverpool) and David Murphy (Stirling)
From Francophone Postcolonial Studies to Transnational French Studies
Over the past decade, we have attempted through a range of collaborative projects and publications to chart two developments within our chosen fields: firstly, the ways in which French Studies has increasingly been obliged to extend the national framework that had often previously determined its frame of reference; and, secondly, the ways in which postcolonial studies has begun to open itself to other languages after the initial Anglophone emphasis of its first two decades. In this paper, we will thus trace the evolution of academic frameworks for the study of postcolonial/transnational material in French, and will ask whether one perhaps unexpected impact of the ‘strategic assertion’ of the existence of a Francophone Postcolonial field will in fact take the form of a transformation in our understanding of the field of French Studies—and arguably of that of Modern Languages more generally.