Research seminar at the Paris Centre for Migrant Writing and Expression, University of London Institute in Paris

6pm on Thursday 18 June 2015

Granville Barker Room ,9-11 rue de Constantine, 75007 Paris

All welcome

Dr Alison Rice will be talking about her current research:

Women’s writing in Paris today is unprecedentedly diverse. Over the past ten years, I have conducted filmed interviews in Paris with eighteen Francophone women writers who hail from around the world, from places as varied as Algeria and Japan, Vietnam and Bulgaria. Some of the women with whom I have spoken have long been renowned names in French-language literature and theory, such as Hélène Cixous, Maryse Condé, Julia Kristeva, and Leïla Sebbar, while others like Fatou Diome, Anna Moï, and Shumona Sinha have only lately created a reputation. Whatever their background, the publications and reflections of these individuals indicate that each of them is contributing to a crucial transformation in the French literary landscape. My talk will address the various reasons why these writers from outside France have felt and responded to the “pull of Paris,” examining the multifaceted aspects of this literary capital that continue to draw foreigners to it. My comments will also evoke the resistance that women from elsewhere have occasionally experienced in the French metropolis. Despite negative experiences that reveal racist or misogynistic attitudes, these writers have almost uniformly embraced Paris with enthusiasm. It is significant that most of them readily identify with the city, but not with the country as a whole.

As my subtitle indicates, the trajectories of worldwide women writers in Paris make it difficult to consider their work in the context of national literary traditions. Instead, the movements that characterize their lives and writings shed light on the limits of borders in an increasingly globalized world. The comparative nature of my work seeks to fill a void, in concert with the analyses of Françoise Lionnet and Shuh-mei Shih who ascertain that in France there is a paucity “of relational discourses among different minority groups, a legacy from the colonial ideology of divide and conquer that has historically pitted different ethnic groups against each other” (Minor Transnationalism). Immigrants to Paris have not often sought commonality and community with others in a similar situation, but I believe this situation is starting to change, and my project participates in that change by bringing together in fruitful dialogue the oral and written expressions of authors who have all found in this location an impetus to create a literary oeuvre in French. Taken together, their works illustrate the positive possibilities of infusing the text with various forms of multiculturalism and multilingualism that are innovative and idiosyncratic, traces of particular journeys to the French language and the French capital.

Alison Rice is Associate Professor of French at the University of Notre Dame. She has published widely on 20th- and 21st-century Francophone literature, postcolonial studies, immigrant and second-generation literature, contemporary women’s writing, and ‘Francophonie’ in a large sense. At ULIP, she will be speaking about her current research project, inspired by a series of filmed interviews conducted in Paris with women writers of French from around the world, which traces their particular journeys to the French language and the French capital and identifies their role in the transformation of the French literary landscape.