‘The Transnational and the Canon’

1. ‘The Transnational and the Canon’ The French Atlantic

3. Quebec and Hocquenghem

5. 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 d’incompréhensibles magmas décentrés”; ibid., p. 28.

6. 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. 272-282.

7. 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 “l’unicité 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 d’Amérique 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: l’Hexagone, 2000), p.271.

8. 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

9. Beyond the Canon: Francophone New Orleans