Translingual Literature in French: Against Definition

Le langage est une peau : je frotte mon langage contre l’autre. C’est comme si j’avais des mots en guise de doigts, ou des doigts au bout de mes mots.

—Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977).

On ne parle jamais qu'une seule langue… on ne parle jamais une seule langue.

—Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre (1996).

In the Preface to The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism, the editors list the three most regularly encountered obstacles when trying to define the concept of translingual writing: knowing whether an author is indeed writing in an adopted language; the fluidity of linguistic and cultural boundaries which makes separating languages from one another and from dialects, pidgins, etc. challenging; and, finally, the unequal distribution of cultural capital across different languages and regions which, linked as it is to market access, determines the frequency and potency of translingual phenomena (Kellman and Lvovich 2022, ix). These are also the three axes along which most definitions of translingualism have been articulated: biographical, linguistic, and geopolitical. Their common denominator and what effectively differentiates lexically as well as conceptually translingualism from bilingualism or multilingualism (whether in everyday speech or literary writing) is the meaning of the prefix “trans”: the action of bearing across and beyond but also the particular quality of effecting change (“trans—prefix” 2023). In this introduction, we seek to position translingualism in general and translingual writing in French in particular within the contemporary literary landscape as it has been shaped by the persistence of the monolingual paradigm, the political hegemony of the nation state, the practice of translation, and postcolonial migration. We will thus examine how translingual writers’ practice of extending toward multiplicity while also shifting the contours of the environments with which they interact has helped both undermine and buttress existing paradigms of literary production and circulation.

Despite the numerous hurdles one encounters when attempting to define translingualism, such definitions abound. Some theorists have opted for classification through shared features, avoiding the doxical constraints of a mot d’ordre. Echoing Antoine Berman’s contention that translingual authors in French oscillate between a largely vernacular and an eminently purist use of the language, ultimately othering their texts (1984, 18–19), Véronique Porra has suggested that a certain fear of contaminating language or being harshly judged for one’s imperfect use of a non-native code push translingual writers to adopt an often artificially academic style or practice linguistic hypercorrection (2011, 73). Alain Ausoni finds in translingual writing a tendency to perpetually examine one’s relationship with the adopted language and, in doing so, “fréquemment pratique[r] l’écriture de soi” (2018, 32). Paul Kei Matsuda also interrogates this tendency to concern one’s self with one’s translingual condition which places emphasis on the process of crossing over rather than the place left behind or the point of arrival noting that “in translingual writing the process of negotiating assumptions about language is more important than the product” (2014, 481). Similarly, Thérèse Migraine-George has suggested that “the ‘trans’ in translingualism does not simply represent a route or passage from one language into the another for these writers but, instead, the literary ‘destination’ itself and the very material of their creative imagination and literary enterprises” (2022, 140–141). In Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations, Suresh Canagarajah reflects on translingual speakers and writers as not necessarily revolutionaries who upend normative expectations in the cultural contexts where they operate but, rather as conscious, self-reflective practitioners of languages within given dominant structures (2013, 8–9). Fiona Doloughan also detects linguistic and often metalinguistic awareness in translingual works whether the authors are “isolingual translinguals, who construct their literary work in an acquired language… or ambilingual translinguals who… create a highly valued body of work in more than one language” (2022, 33). In particular, she notes that translingual writers share a focus on language and issues of translation, representation or enactment of disparate border-crossing tropes as well as self-reflexive commentary (38).

In addition to definitional attempts based on shared characteristics, there exist definitions of translingualism that, if not dogmatic, certainly aim at a rather strict circumscription of the field. Some of them set aside biography and politics and instead focus on language of expression exclusively, a choice justified by the centering of linguistic expression, in other words, the “-lingual” in translingual. Rainier Grutman calls translingual those authors who choose not to write in their first language while remaining firmly grounded in a single market. Their second-language market recognizes them as non-native but not necessarily as bilingual (2007, 38–39). This echoes Anne-Rosine Delbart’s suggested definition for a category of authors that she calls “exilés du langage,” writers who are integrated to varying degrees within the French literary system because they consistently publish in French although that is not their first language. She finds that they share a degree of francité and therefore assigns to them the adjective français, in italics, to signify that is French any author who writes in the French language regardless of citizenship (2005, 17–20). In both cases, a closed, seemingly autonomous, cultural and linguistic system, the French language, is privileged as the singular locus of translingual praxis.

Since at least the eighteenth century, however, language in Western Europe has been synonymous with nation state—one could make the argument that in the case of France this political and cultural equation between state and language goes as far back as the sixteenth century and the edict of Villers-Cotterêts. If the use of French is the sole determinant of translingual writing then, one could argue, France becomes the de facto space, physical, economic or imagined, where translingual writers operate. In reality, the current relationship between nation state and language of expression in literary landscapes across the globe is more complex. In Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition, Yasemin Yildiz argues that the apparent rise of multilingualism in recent years does not quite sound the death knell of monolingualism in literary and cultural production. In our current globalized moment and the ensuing renegotiation of the nation state’s role, she argues, existing multilingual phenomena have become more visible if not entirely free from the hold of the monolingual paradigm. She qualifies the present moment as postmonolingual, pointing to the word’s ability to describe at the same time the persisting effects of monolingualism and the potential of opposing, mostly multilingual, forces for overcoming its dominion. She defines postmonolingualism as “a field of tension in which the monolingual paradigm continues to assert itself and multilingual practices persist or reemerge” (Yildiz 2012, 5). In “French Literature as World Literature,” Charles Forsdick also analyzes the relationship between the current, post-monolingual moment and the pervasiveness of monolingualism despite the rise in both visibility and prestige for translingual authors (2015, 218). As Brian Lennon has suggested, this is partly due to the hold that market forces have over divergent literary practices. Often enough, he argues, the challenging practices of multilingual authors are “recoded as innovation—hybridization or syncretism of the national language—and thus [serve] to reassert the standard while expanding its flexibility and power of incorporation as a literary standard” since “the national and international book publication of literature requires, indeed enforces, national linguistic standardization” (2010, 11). Dominique Combe echoes (albeit not in the same critical vein as he) Brian Lennon’s contention suggesting that literary heterolinguism and polyphony nourish rather than menace languages (2019, 148). Charles Forsdick has qualified this process of absorption, integration, and reinvigoration as one that allows national literatures “to retain their coherence despite pressures to the contrary,” suggesting that “the absorption of translingual writing reflects in part their ability to reinvent themselves” (2015, 218–219).

The post-monolingual moment, however, can, as Yasemin Yildiz has shown us, unsettle normative linguistic and cultural practices even if it must do so from within the monolingual paradigm. In their introduction to an Esprit Créateur special issue devoted to translingual practices in French literature, Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth suggest that “translingualism could add an important linguistic element” to the study of mobility and multiplicity as historically prevalent elements of French literary production (2019, 2) while unsettling assumptions about the dominance of French in the Francosphere. In Metaphors of Multilingualism: Changing Attitudes Towards Language Diversity in Literature, Linguistics and Philosophy, Rainer Guldin examines how common spatial metaphors in translingual authors’ works challenge the nation state, its borders, and its reliance on monolingualism. In particular, the sea, the archipelago, corals and the mangrove move resolutely away from “continental thinking” which “focuses on the autonomous, circumscribed territories of nations and national languages, and considers the sea as a separation.” The ocean, he argues, “is above all a space in its own right and a fundamental link both in temporal and spatial terms” (Guldin 2020, 213). The Glissantian concept of Relation and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome are at the heart of such intellectual experimentations which fundamentally seek to circumvent not only the European rootedness of Enlightenment universality but more generally the teleological, unidirectional (and ultimately hegemonic) Western Reason. Moving away from the continent, one consequently moves away from European centers, a reconceptualization of both placedness and power differentials which favors practices of “minor transnationalism,” in “a space of exchange and participation wherever processes of hybridization occur and where it is still possible for cultures to be produced and performed without necessary mediation from the center” (Lionnet and Shih 2005, 5).

Steeped in the history of coloniality, translingual practices in French that consciously bypass the continental center, whether by use of decentering metaphors, multilingual variation or, as we will see later, translation, engage the concept of francophonie either to reject its relevance or to include it within their force field. Some definitions of translingual writing in French explicitly exclude authors who were born and raised in regions previously colonized by French-speaking countries. Robert Jouanny’s singularités francophones and Véronique Porra’s “littérature invitée” limit their scope to writers whose acquisition of French did not happen in postcolonial settings. Although Porra is more restrictive in her corpus formation than Jouanny (only including authors who learned French or moved to France after fifteen years of age), they both agree that authors who “cross beyond or over” are those who make an individual choice, or a “démarche individuelle” (2011, 18) as Porra calls it, not, to reference Jouanny this time, writers whose crossing over was dictated by social or administrative imperatives (2000, 4–5). Dominique Combe also excludes authors who have learned French later in life from his francophone corpus while Thérèse Migraine-George approaches the debate more cautiously, pointing to translingual authors’ ability to bring forth the intricate relationship between local and global, personal and universal, individual and collective which can certainly benefit from “deconstructing rigid dichotomies between ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’ writers, the ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’ and highlighting the writing process as a creative form of decentering, deterritorialization, and othering…” (2022, 150).

Other theorists have detected in the plurivocity of French-speaking writers from previously colonized spaces not the hallmarks of bi- or multi-lingualism but rather those of diglossia. In Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat has suggested that no “biscriptive writer” can “translate into one language his relation with the other. Each of his languages entails a unique set of associations, burdens, predispositions. His bilingualism is rather diglossia, the linguistic term for the use of separate languages in different contexts and for different purposes” (2003, 14). Dominique Combe echoes this equation of bilingualism with diglossia noting that in the case of authors born and raised in postcolonial contexts language use is determined by social, ideological or psychological factors which are de facto predicated upon inequalities or asymmetries (2019, 93). Although they both highlight the relationship between indigenous/regional languages and the colonial language in areas previously colonized by European powers, these definitions of postcolonial multilingualism eschew the particular realities of hegemony within coloniality by comparing them to linguistic power relations as they have historically developed in monolingual contexts. Diglossia is linguistic variation within a specific language community.¹ Adapting linguistic choice in a postcolonial environment under the pressure of neocolonial institutions, economic and cultural subjugation, and political disenfranchisement is quite a different experience from the struggle of, for example, Arab-speaking communities to validate their dialectical speech against the traditionally prestigious Koranic Arabic or even Modern Standard Arabic.

Although, as we have seen, defining translingualism runs into a number of ideological and methodological difficulties, it is important to examine how the term operates within its contemporary historical and cultural context. In addition to examining the resistance translingualism encounters when pitched against the histories of the monolingual nation state and coloniality, we would be remiss if we did not consider monolingualism as a theoretical concept that both structures and unravels the hold translingual writing can have on literary practice and book markets. Jacques Derrida has made the now well-known argument that we do not possess the language that we speak; in particular, we do not possess the one language that we speak because language is not singular. We may pretend that we generate it but language is Law and it is heteronomous, remaining, therefore, external to our subjectivity while necessarily bringing us into the world and radically separating us from it at the same time (1996, 69). Not unlike Derrida, in Nimble Tongues, Steven Kellman, circling back to a refined definition of tranlsingualism twenty years after The Translingual Imagination, the seminal Anglophone work in the field, sees in the palimpsest “an apt metaphor for literary translingualism—the phenomenon of writers who write in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one” (2020, 1). And for those authors who never write in more than one language or who always write in their primary tongue “it is probably more precise to refer to them not as monolingual but rather as isolingual. An isolingual writer is one who writes in a language identical with his or her L1” (11). An isolingual writer then is Derrida’s monolingual speaker: one language, necessarily different (although equal to) the primary tongue, always in tension with the palimpsestual layers of otherness that both blur and enhance the heteronomous code.

What then if this heteronomy were to be understood not as the forceful Law that Derrida imagines but rather as dialogue? In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Mikhail Bakhtin explores that very possibility: “A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning… Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched” (1986, 7). Abdelkébir Khatibi makes a similar point in Maghreb Pluriel when he contends that what we call a foreign language engages our primary code as an entity that remains radically exterior to it. Languages in contact acknowledge each other while each maintaining its singularity, its irreducibility and its otherness (1983, 186). Both Bakhtin and Khatibi concede language’s urge for self-containment—after all languages are systems that require external pressure to remain whole. But it is precisely that encounter with the otherness of heteronomous stresses that creates the potential both for linguistic enhancement and existential self-doubt reminiscent of what Deleuze and Guattari have called for in Mille Plateaux: being a foreigner, a bilingual or even multilingual speaker but always within one’s own tongue ([1980] 2013, 124–125). Or as Michael Holquist has suggested in “What is the Ontological Status of Bilingualism?”: “Everybody… is always already bilingual insofar as he is between the level of phonemes and allophones, the parametric level of syntax in Universal Grammar and the syntax individual speakers actually use” (2003, 33).

If a single language then is never possessed, never equal to itself, never meaningful away from contact and exchange with other codes, how did monolingualism become this “key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern social life, from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as of imagined collectives such as cultures and nations” (Yildiz 2015, 2)? In addition to galvanizing the nation state, the dominant political entity of Western modernity, monolingualism has exerted conceptual hold on the imaginary of Western societies through the powerful metaphor of the “mother tongue.” As Yasemin Yildiz notes “…while the ‘mother tongue’ may indeed be experienced as a wholesome unity by some, the problem lies in the monolingual paradigm’s insistence that this is always and exclusively the case” (2012, 205). Indeed, translingual writers have themselves pointed to the power that the mother language exerts. Nancy Huston, an Anglophone Canadian author who has chosen French as her language of literary expression while consistently self-translating into her native English, has suggested that it is the mother tongue that “envelops” us in her arms and “mothers” us since our earliest days; the foreign language, the language of adoption needs us to mother, master, and tame her (1999, 61). Even though Huston assigns unambiguous ontological primacy to the mother tongue, definitional ambiguities abound: one’s first language is not necessarily one’s mother tongue (this applies to both definitions of first: chronologically and qualitatively “first”); we do not all grow up with a single mother language: the mother can be multilingual or the multiple parental figures in a young child’s life may speak different languages; and, finally, the idea of being “enveloped” by the mother tongue while needing to actively (if not aggressively) “mother” the “adoptive” one is quite problematic establishing as it does a false ontological divide between what is perceived as a natural, affectively beneficial, almost miraculously occurring process, that of acquiring one’s mother tongue, and a deliberate, difficult, conscious, and violent act, that of learning a second language. As Christopher Cannon and Susan Koshy have pointed out in their introduction to the PMLA Special Issue on “Monolingualism and its Discontents”: “…categories such as ‘native speaker’ have buttressed state-sponsored monolingualisms by demarcating and hierarchizing language communities. The concept privileges descent, kinship, and belonging, setting the terms for inclusion and exclusion, and feeding illusions of the mastery and possession of languages” (2022, 774). Furthermore, as Rainer Guldin argues, concepts such as “native speaker,” “mother tongue” or “national language,” based as they are on an ontological vision of language, promote a circumscribed definition of both individuals and territories: “…native speakers are defined by one specific language only—their mother tongue—and each national language is confined to one specific territorial entity…” (2022, 383). In fact, the ontological metaphor of the mother tongue and the nation state are mutually reinforcing conceptual and cultural paradigms that nurtured the exclusionary politics of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalisms and coloniality. In both cases, a powerful group grants—or not—droit de cité to the stranger.

The relationship between language and individual localization is not only biographically significant for a majority of translingual writers who are themselves migrants but also historically and politically relevant in our contemporary moment of migratory crises around the world. The migrant’s linguistic predicament has been cast in both negative and positive terms. Julia Kristeva sees in the migrant an inevitably limited speaker who either withers in silence or speaks a formulaic and artificially exaggerated language ([1988] 2007, 34). In “Bilingualism, Writing, and not Quite Being There,” Sylvia Molloy sees potential where Kristeva identifies loss: “One always writes from an absence, the choice of a language automatically signifying the postponement of another… The absence of what is postponed continues to work, obscurely, on the chosen language, suffusing it, even better, contaminating it, with an autrement dit that brings it unexpected eloquence” (2003, 73). Along these same lines, Doris Sommer points to those sublime moments that could potentially follow the difficult experience of linguistic doubt, postponement, communicational failure, or even silence: “…there can be a pleasing aftereffect of having survived unpleasantness; it returns us to our senses through the operation of the everyday sublime” (2004, 28).

Moving away from the individual migrant’s writing experience and toward an examination of the historical, economic, and market forces at play, divergent, if not contradictory, approaches to the phenomenon of migrant literature emerge: some critics center cultural pluralism, heterogeneity, and hybridity, all positively connoted, whereas others, by critically examining the capitalist markets within which migrant literature operates as a lucrative commodity, point to the superficial if not subservient-to-monolingualism nature of plurilingualism. In Passages et ancrages en France: Dicitionnaire des écrivains migrants de langue française (1981–2011), the editors reflect on the migrant writer’s positive contribution to the host culture, unambiguously identified in the title as French. Migrant writers in the French-language literary space explore concepts such as double belonging, plurality, decentering, and wandering, all of which constitute important contributions to the “majority literature” (Mathis-Moser and Mertz-Baumgartner 2012, 12). Dominique Combe reads migrant authors in France as refugees, nomads, exiles, immigrants or displaced people who actively enrich what he calls “plural francophonies” (2019, 190). The stranger is uncritically perceived as value added to the radically reterritorialized francophonie which becomes coterminous with the French nation state. Subha Xavier has questioned this euphoria around migrant writing: “[a]though many critics have celebrated the ‘hybridity’ and the ‘plurilingualism’ of contemporary authors writing in France” one should not fail to highlight “the diverse mechanisms by which this form of literary writing contains and even isolates linguistic difference at the behest of a language which, in order to be published, must evince a certain control and purity” (2016, 125). She centers the power that economic systems in place yield, pointing to the nation state not as the preexisting, natural and inevitable context wherein migrant writing happens but rather as a commanding force that assigns meaning, significance, and monetary value: “migrant texts are written, published, and first circulated within the nation state and as such always carry with them the traces of exoticism and otherness that allow for their creation and dissemination in the national and later global literary marketplace” (19). The economic forces that assign value to book markets are also central to Oana Sabo’s analysis in The Migrant Canon which: “…argues that French migrant literature is best understood as a commodity that occupies a middle ground in today’s cultural industries: it mediates between literary and economic forms of value, academic and mass readerships, and national and global literary markets” (2018, 3).

In fact, as Rebecca L. Walkowitz has argued in Born Translated, in order to enter the global book market successfully, many authors write what she terms “born-translated” literature, works for which “translation is not secondary or incidental but rather a condition of their production” (2017, 4). Often these works are written for translation and therefore instant entrance into multiple linguistic markets; sometimes, as Walkowitz points out, they are written as translations “pretending to take place in a language other than the one in which they have, in fact, been composed” (4). The forms of multilingualism that such works deploy are “designed for the foreign, nonfluent, and semifluent readers who will encounter them” (44). In other words, there is no mastery of any single code or language assumed or required at the genesis, distribution, and reception stages of these novels’ production. As the author notes “different readers will have access to different versions or different parts of the work, and the relativity of access becomes part of the work’s project” (216). Democratization of the literary field where no single linguistic authority controls access or rather babelization of the book market for maximization of profits? Either way, we have to concur with Walkowitz that in this new world literary economy, “reading in translation becomes a condition of literary history, not simply an exception for those who have failed to acquire a sufficient number of tongues” (216).

More than thirty years before the publication of Born Translated, in a very different book market and just as postcolonial critique was beginning to usher in an examination of publication centers and their relationship to their multilingual peripheries, George Steiner had hinted at the centrality of translation as the quintessential modus operandi of human interaction: “…inside or between languages, human communication equals translation. A study of translation is a study of language” (1975, 49). More recently, Keith Leslie Johnson has argued that exophony, the term that he uses to refer to translingualism, “represents not just an exception or special case of translation but the paradigm of literary productivity as such” (2023, 709). Whether we conceptualize translation as condition of literary history or translation as language tout court, it behooves us as literary critics of translingual writing to examine not only the use of translation as mode or theme in translingual literature but also to engage its theoretical vocabulary as we construct new theoretical and critical claims for the study of translingualism. Whether it be Walter Benjamin’s fragmented vessel and his messianic hailing of translation as means to access a Platonic pure language, Paul de Man’s deconstructionist revision of Benjamin’s reine Sprache as a non-existent myth of origin, and Carol Jacob’s critique of the de Manian reading along with her contention that Benjamin’s pure language was never meant to be a specific language at all but rather language qua language; or, Lawrence Venuti’s less philosophical and more politically engaged approach to translation which critiqued the invisibility of the translator as reinforcement of the sway that domestic, often monolingual, certainly powerful and often oppressive institutions hold over the target culture; or Douglas Robinson’s proprioception-inspired reading of translation as phantom limb; parallels between these two fields that carry words and meanings across cultural, geographical, linguistic, and political divides, real or imagined, abound. Translingual writing is etymologically bound not only to the act of crossing over but also to the reality of the remainder, that which is inevitably left behind: phantom limb, reine Sprache, the revolutionary potential of a visible translator, there are as many possibilities of theoretical kinship between translingualism and translation as there are theoretical approaches to translation.

Moreover, the practice of translation, as style, method, or theme is as relevant to translingual writing as theories of translation can be to articulating operative definitions and outlining theoretical frameworks for its study. As Fiona Doloughan suggests “[i]n much contemporary translingual fiction, translation and the figure of the translator is integral to the thematic structure and fabric of the work, in addition to its methodological and/or stylistic deployment” (2022, 35). Furthermore, many translingual authors, some of them belonging to the French-language canon (Samuel Beckett, Nancy Huston, Vassilis Alexakis, etc.), self-translate. As Eva Gentes and Trish Van Bolderen have argued, in self-translation “[t]he first problem arises when attempting to apply L1 and L2 status to multilingual authors’ writing languages” (2022, 373). We can identify a series of additional problems: Which of the two texts is the original and which one is the translation? Are these texts autonomous or do they complement each other in ways that are only accessible to speakers of both languages? Does it matter which language a novel is written in first? Can the bilingual author accurately determine the language of genesis for all parts of a self-translated work? These questions do not only apply to self-translating translingual authors but to all multilingual writers, in our global, born-translated moment, independently of their chosen language of expression. It is impossible and futile to answer them. It is far more interesting to critique what Sara Kippur suggests self-translators do: “As both the author and the translator, they facilitate the circulation of a literary text across linguistic and cultural lines, thereby appealing to a mode of reading that probes the meaning and effects of such an exchange” (2015, 11). If nothing else, translingualism as a term retains the conceptual and etymological advantage over multi- or pluri-lingualism of established, continued relationality between what lies beyond and what remains, what is already plural within, the different moving parts, in other words, of the complex organism that is language. We will, however, concede, as does Jacqueline Dutton, that “[w]hether French studies embraces translingualism as a conceptual framework, not just to examine creolization in African texts or stylistic devices adopted in post-Soviet writers in France, but to rethink the unity and diversity of the French language, remains to be seen” (2016, 417–418).

It is within a context of deliberate definitional opacity and disciplinary multiplicity that the contributors to this volume were invited to reflect on contemporary translingual authors who write in French. Their works range from theoretical reflections on the field (Sara De Balsi, Oana Panaïté), to single-author studies (Marianne Bessy, Jacqueline Dutton, Natalie Edwards, Valerie Zuchuat, Charles Forsdick) to an examination of translingualism across media and disciplines (Alain Ausoni, Sara Kippur, Liana Phsevorska, Oana Sabo). Lida Amiri’s interview with Atiq Rahimi on his varied translingual practices concludes this special issue. It is our hope that instead of prescribing methodological tools and promoting epistemological siloing (an often inadvertent consequence of attempting to contain a concept’s dynamic force-field within strict parameters), this special issue will further an ongoing, lively and vital conversation about translingualism as it is currently shaped at the intersection of language and translation politics, migrant literary spaces, and editorial markets.

Guest Co-Editor      Editors
Ioanna Chatzidimitriou     Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Célestin

Roger Célestin is Professor emeritus of French & Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Eliane DalMolin

Eliane DalMolin is Professor emerita of French at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema, and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Cultures in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Ioanna Chatzidimitriou

Ioanna Chatzidimitriou is Associate Professor of French and John and Fannie Saeger Chair in Comparative Literature at Muhlenberg College. Her research focuses on translingual writing in French and theories of translation. Her recent book Translingual Francophonie and the Limits of Translation (Routledge 2020) examines uses of translation as theme and practice by code-switching francophone authors. She has also co-edited a collection of essays on the Greek francophone author Vassilis Alexakis titled Vassilis Alexakis: chemins croisés (Presses Universitaires de Rennes 2023).

Notes

1 For a definition of diglossia see Charles Ferguson’s “Diglossia” (1959).