Workshop - 10:00 AM
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Lecture - 4:00 PM
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Professor Lionnet discusses the various issues surrounding French literary identity. She examines the increasing award-winning French literature coming from writers outside of France and current issues of the term 'Francophone.' Moreover, Prof. Lionnet analyzes that attempts to create the notion of a world literature in French.

Synopsis

Prof. Lionnet begins by revealing that French literature is no longer conventionally French. Prof. Lionnet explains that there are many ‘canonical figures’ who are Francophone but do not have lineage in France. She cites the key poetic movements of the 18th century that opened the way for romanticism and poeticism in prose of three Creole poets notably including the poet Parny. In France, he was seen as Creole. In Russia, where he spent some time during his travels, Parny was seen as French. Prof. Lionnet moves on to discuss the role of Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) which seeks to promote the French language and oppose the universality of English. Prof. Lionnet also focuses on the tension between the writers’ identity being defined by the language they write in or by their political, social, and ethnic situation. This debate extends into the wider problem of the hierarchy caused by the Francophone system because it arguably impedes French-speaking writers’ access to the same literary glory as native French writers, not in line with the ideals of the French republic. Prof. Lionnet then begs the question of how are we to name this new global literature and how are to deal with this universalism. Prof. Lionnet concludes the first part of her talk by proposing that universalism is the core of the issue. The question lies in how far we are ready to accept differences in the approach to French literature.

Prof. Lionnet begins the second part of her talk by explaining that questions of belonging are still crucial in contemporary debates of identity, especially in literature. Therefore, to Prof. Lionnet, geographically neutral methods of literary criticism fall short. Prof. Lionnet also discusses the 2007 manifesto, published in the newspaper Le Monde, for a world literature in French which crystallizes the cultural, ideological, and political issues relating to identity and language and tries to end the notion of Francophone as unemployable in French literary culture. Prof. Lionnet criticizes the manifesto in a variety of ways. First, she explains that the manifesto naively tries to decouple language and power. She also questions the ability of the French language to work as a world language in all walks of life and highlights the importance of French as a language that adapts and is influenced to wherever region it is used. In arguing against the manifesto, Prof. Lionnet finishes by saying that what is missing from the concept of a world literature in French is respect for the multiplicity of all the languages of the world.

Prof. Lionnet also kindly takes the time to answer many questions in the audience touching on multiple issues. She debates the suitability of the suffix ‘-phone’ in Francophone and analyzes tentative parallels between the situation of today and the 19th century use of ‘lower class’ language in the literature by writers such as Victor Hugo. Prof. Lionnet touches on the role of the Academie Francaise and the long time universality of France which is currently coming into question as the population itself has to deal with identity issues as its ethnic makeup continually evolves. 

About the Speaker

Françoise Lionnet is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. Author of Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Cornell, 1989), and Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Cornell, 1995);co-editor of a special double issue of Yale French Studies entitled "Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, Nomadisms", and a special issue of Signs on "Postcolonial, Indigenous, and Emergent Feminisms."

Currently she is working on a book entitled Dissonant Echoes: Seduction and Disavowal in Postcolonial Novels, which is a study of Francophone Caribbean and Indian Ocean writers' re-appropriation of 19th- and 20th-century British and American classics.

The subject of the lecture is the emergence of memory-life. I consider the early 1980s to effectively bring the twentieth century to a close. In this time of the collapse of Communism it became obvious that the Utopian experiments, based on continuous, deep state intervention on the macro-sphere, could no longer be sustained. Memory as a discursive frame became available and readily usable for anybody, for millions of people, who lost their future because they lost their past, both in the East and West, and especially in East and Central Europe. By making use of the readily available Memory frame, they managed to find a past under a new description. Memory has emerged as a tool with which to reimagine and represent both individual and collective identity. Instead of analyzing notions of individual or collective memory, I will focus my talk on the emergence of Memory as a discursive and existential frame. I will closely examine the emergence of a specific interactive type, The Survivor, The Living Memorial, who considers it as his or her obligation to bear witness to his or her refashioned, newly found past.

Synopsis

Professor Rev begins by explaining that the 20th century had led to the emergence of the science of memory. Prof. Rev shows how there is an unfortunate and unnecessary line between history and memory when in fact they should complement each other. Aiming to survey the public discourse from the mid-1980s , Prof. Rev begins his story at a time where the after effect of the Vietnam War was deeply pitted in the American psyche, there was serious alarm at the high incidents of child abuse, and fundamental critiques were being made of the typical bourgeois family. He discusses the crucial notion of trauma through the example of the work of Catherine MacKinnon in trying to associate mass rape during the Balkans conflict of the 1990s as genocide due to its attacks on sex and ethnicity. Prof. Rev also explains the intense discussions of the trauma in the section on mass rape of the U.N. archives on humanitarian violence in former Yugoslavia. To Prof. Rev, this along with other historical factors, such as the outbreak of hysteria in France in the 1970s, led to a new kind of memory born from the previously unrecognizable state called trauma and the previously unknown kind of forgetting called repression.

Prof. Rev explores how memories of atrocities are closely connected with traumatic silence, as well as the theory of how trauma can be passed onto others by listening, making trauma an intergenerational experience. The significance of such transmission has led to a belief that the history of events such as the Holocaust is better experienced than understood. Prof. Rev also examines how such historical events really came to light once communism had fallen, and there was a ready made discursive frame for the past to be made sense of. The significance of memory, in particular in Eastern Europe, was that memory was a tool of unmediated access to the past or a source of authenticity after decades of censored, centrally written history. Consequently, issues such as the Holocaust departed from being shameful taboos to a respected identity for the Jewish people. Prof. Rev explains how through memory such an identity could really be formed.

Prof. Rev also analyzes how the fall of the Soviet Union led the liberation of memories through key works such as Alice Miller’s ‘Breaking Down the Wall of Silence.’ Miller links difficult childhoods to the acts of great tyrants such as Hitler and Stalin. Prof. Rev reveals how a tough childhood stunts the growth disabling one reach the full human capacity of being able to feel inclinations such as compassion. He links this with the work of Jeffrey Mason, archivist for Freud’s archives, who emphasized that sexual, physical, and emotional violence is a tragic part of the lives of many children. Mason’s book played a serious role in the recovered memory movement. Prof. Rev brings this all together by expressing that, to him, the Holocaust is a symptom as well as a cause of repressed memories of child abuse.

In a lengthy question-and-answer session, Prof. Rev and the audience raise of a number of points. For example, Prof. Rev further explores the concept of inherited or transgenerational memory. In addition, he reiterates his concern about the clash between historians and memory scientists. Another notable point Prof. Rev addressed among a variety of others was the history of the status accorded to victims and the fraudulent behavior that may be caused by this phenomenon.

About the speaker

Istvan Rev is Professor of History and Political Science at the Central European University, Budapest, where he is also the Academic Director of the Open Society Archive. He has been a visiting faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley on several occasions. Since the early 1980s, Rev has published widely on the political cultural, and architectural history of Hungary and other Eastern bloc countries. He is the author of "Retroactive Justice" (Stanford University Press, 2005). He edited the special issue of Representations on "Monumental Histories"(1991).

Sponsored by Contemporary History and the Future of Memory, a project of the DLCL Research Unit co-sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Frank Foley, a 2008-09 Zukerman Fellow, is a postdoctoral student in international security at CISAC. His research concerns counterterrorist policy and operations, the reform of intelligence and police agencies and the increasing role of judicial and prosecutorial actors in the field of security. His PhD dissertation, currently under revision for publication, is a comparative analysis of British and French counterterrorist policies, which argues that western states' different institutional characteristics and norms in the field of security are shaping their responses to Islamist terrorism, leading to divergent approaches to a common problem. At CISAC, Frank is analyzing the co-ordination of counterterrorist agencies within the United States, France and Britain, drawing on organization theory to explain why some countries achieve higher levels of inter-agency co-operation than others. He has also written on European Union security policy and on terrorism and community conflict in Northern Ireland. Upcoming projects include a review of the terrorism and counterterrorism literature for the International Studies Association's Compendium Project and an analysis of the forces shaping international co-operation on counterterrorism at both the diplomatic and operational levels.

Frank received his PhD from the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and is a graduate of the University of Cambridge (MPhil) and University College Cork (BA, MA). He worked as a journalist in Brussels and as a researcher in Northern Ireland between 2001 and 2004.

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow at CISAC and FSI and a professor of political science by courtesy. She was the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought and professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., from 1974 to 2007. Her current research focuses on innovation in terrorist campaigns, the distinction between "old" and "new" terrorism, why the United States is the target of terrorism, and the effectiveness of counterterrorism policies.

She has written extensively on the issue of political terrorism; her first article, "The Concept of Revolutionary Terrorism," was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1972. Her recent work includes "Terrorism, Strategies, and Grand Strategies," in Attacking Terrorism (Georgetown University Press), "Terrorism and Global Security," in Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict Management in a Divided World (United States Institute of Peace Press), and "Explaining Suicide Terrorism: A Review Essay," in the journal Security Studies. She is also the editor of a projected volume, The Consequences of Counterterrorist Policies in Democracies, for the Russell Sage Foundation in New York.

She served on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and chaired the American Political Science Association (APSA) Task Force on Political Violence and Terrorism. She has also served on the Council of the APSA and is a former President and Councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). In 2004 ISPP awarded her its Nevitt Sanford Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution and in 2005 the Jeanne Knutson award for service to the society. She serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security, Orbis, Political Psychology, Security Studies, and Terrorism and Political Violence. She coordinated the working group on political explanations of terrorism for the 2005 Club de Madrid International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security. She is a lead investigator with the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005-2006. She served on the Committee on Law and Justice and the Committee on Determining Basic Research Needs to Interrupt the Improvised Explosive Device Delivery Chain of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science. She was a senior fellow at the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City for 2006-2007.

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Gregory Treverton is director of the RAND Corporation's Center for Global Risk and Security.  Earlier, he directed RAND's Intelligence Policy Center and its International Security and Defense Policy Center, and he was associate dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School.    His recent work has examined at terrorism, intelligence and law enforcement, with a special interest in new forms of public-private partnership.  He has served in government for the first Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, handling Europe for the National Security Council and, most recently as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, overseeing the writing of America's National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs).  He holds an A. B. summa cum laude from Princeton University and an M.P.P (Master's in Public Policy) and Ph.D. in economics and politics from Harvard.  His latest books are Intelligence for an Era of Terror, forthcoming; Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information, Cambridge University Press, 2001; and New Challenges, New Tools for Defense Decisionmaking, (edited,), RAND, 2003.

Frank Foley, a 2008-09 Zukerman Fellow, is a postdoctoral student in international security at CISAC. His research concerns counterterrorist policy and operations, the reform of intelligence and police agencies and the increasing role of judicial and prosecutorial actors in the field of security. His PhD dissertation, currently under revision for publication, is a comparative analysis of British and French counterterrorist policies, which argues that western states' different institutional characteristics and norms in the field of security are shaping their responses to Islamist terrorism, leading to divergent approaches to a common problem. At CISAC, Frank is analyzing the co-ordination of counterterrorist agencies within the United States, France and Britain, drawing on organization theory to explain why some countries achieve higher levels of inter-agency co-operation than others. He has also written on European Union security policy and on terrorism and community conflict in Northern Ireland. Upcoming projects include a review of the terrorism and counterterrorism literature for the International Studies Association's Compendium Project and an analysis of the forces shaping international co-operation on counterterrorism at both the diplomatic and operational levels.

Frank received his PhD from the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and is a graduate of the University of Cambridge (MPhil) and University College Cork (BA, MA). He worked as a journalist in Brussels and as a researcher in Northern Ireland between 2001 and 2004.

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