Directory of Research and Expertise

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Colonies & Colonization, emigration & immigration, Education, Language and Literature (French)

Research keywords:

French and francophone literature, Decolonial thought, Drama theatre and performance studies, Gender and sexuality, Queer studies, Mathematics and literature

Regions:

Africa, Europe

Languages:

	Spoken	Written
French	Fluent	Fluent
Spanish	Good	Good

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
01-Dec-2024	'A son of Souffles? Abdellah Taïa and the poetics of illiteracy in Vivre à ta lumière', Contemporary French Civilization (49.4) 2024 Articles   In 1966, ten years after Morocco gained independence from French colonial rule, a group of decolonial writers founded the journal Souffles (1966–1972). Its mission was to deconstruct the suffocating binaries, concepts, and essentialisms that trapped Morocco in an enduring French cultural imperialism or hermetic cultural atavism. In this article, I draw a critical genealogy between leading Third World, [AQ1] anti-imperial thinkers including Abdellatif Laâbi, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, and Abdellah Taïa’s latest novel Vivre à ta lumière (2022). Just as the Souffles generation exposed the politics of illiteracy that had cemented the conditions of oppression during the Protectorate and its violent aftermath under the reign of Hassan II, so I argue that Taïa inhabits his mother’s illiterate tongue in the novel as a decolonial language that refuses to make itself legible to monologic forms of European, or Moroccan neocolonial, intellectualism. Attentive to the metatextual tropes of language, words, letters, scripts, and even envelopes as spaces in which Taïa reworks hegemonic colonial and absolutist narratives, I argue that Taïa embraces the poetic potential of illiteracy not as a cultural lack, relegated to silence in Morocco’s post-independence struggle for national sovereignty, but as a potent instrument of postcolonial literary critique.
01-Oct-2024	‘Le palimpseste décolonial de Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’, in 'Le labyrinthe littéraire de Mohamed Mbougar Sarr', eds. Cornelia Ruhe, Sarah Burnautzki, and Abdoulaye Imorou (Leiden: Brill, ‘Francopolyphonies’, 2024) Chapters This chapter reads Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's 'La plus secrète mémoire des hommes' through the prism of the palimpsest: a literary figure of transtextuality, in which one text is superimposed onto another to create textual contact and transformation across multiple times and spaces. Drawing on Gérard Genette's theorisation of the palimpsest as a constitutive part of literary writing, I examine how Mbougar Sarr decolonises his relation to the French literary canon by challenging the oppressive universalisms that mark the history of plagiarism in the novel.
31-Jul-2024	‘Liberating Third World Theatre (1950s–1960s): Radical Humanism in Kateb Yacine, Aimé Césaire, and Jean Genet’, in A New History of French Theatre, ed. Clare Finburgh Delijani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024) Chapters This chapter explores and contests the emergence of a Third World theatre in mid-century France. It traces how Jean-Marie Serreau – the director who was hailed for his inaugural productions of absurdist plays by Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, as well as Bertold Brecht – sought to disrupt the Eurocentric nihilism of the post-war dramatic canon. Galvanised by Brecht’s call for politically realist theatre, Serreau brought the bellicose colonial drama that was unfolding throughout the French Empire to a bourgeois Parisian stage. He staged seminal works by the Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine, the Martinican poet, playwright and politican Aimé Césaire, and the French iconoclast, Jean Genet, in pursuit of a radical new humanism that decentred the intellectual and artistic hegemony of the West. Serreau envisaged a theatre of the third world that would not only eschew the imperialist ghettoization of major francophone playwrights, but which would contest the very values of colonial humanism that had developed under France’s Third Republic. I compare three tragedies that Serreau engaged with in the late 1950s and 1960s: Kateb Yacine’s take on the anticolonial uprisings in Algeria in Le Cadavre Encerclé (1958); Jean Genet’s critique of French imperialism and Algerian neo-nationalism in Les Paravents (1966); and Aimé Césaire’s tragic exposition of Congolese independence from Belgian rule in Une saison au Congo (1967). Using Edouard Glissant’s theory of opacity, I argue that all three refuse assimilative forms of understanding in which cultural difference is reduced to one decolonial agenda. Rather, in juxtaposing Genet with Kateb Yacine and Aimé Césaire, I argue that these playwrights decentre Serreau’s project of a Third World theatre, revelling in their tragic form and their characters’ inevitable defeat to expose a belief in the human beyond the nation.
24-Dec-2023	An interview with Amos Gitai on House: ‘A peaceful little object’, Francosphères, 12.2 (December 2023) Articles When the Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad invited Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai to stage his documentary trilogy House (1980, 1998, 2005) at the Théâtre national de la Colline in 2023, geopolitical animosities made way for artistic solidarities. In this article and interview, I explore how Gitai’s play critiques the violent logics of home and homelands, exploring how a commandeered house in West Jerusalem plays host to the multidirectional memory of violent Jewish and Palestinian erasure. Stones become metonyms of the Israel–Palestine conflict: as they are quarried, chiselled, split, cemented, and erected, they testify to the construction of homes that also become tools of destruction, expulsion, and mutual ontological violence (Kotef, 2020). Drawing on an interview I conducted with Gitai in July 2023, and his Collège de France lectures from 2018 to 2019, I read his archaeological journey into the remains of this Arab-Jewish house as a call to hospitality (Derrida, 1997): troubling the subject positions of host and hostage that both underpin and impede a ‘chez soi’.
01-May-2022	Geometry and Jean Genet: Shaping the subject (Oxford: Legenda, 2022) Monographs Though notorious for his visceral, affective, and politically incendiary writing, Jean Genet also had a surprising penchant for the abstract language of geometry. Points, lines, obliques, grids and circles emerge in his texts as shapes that plot a map of subjectivity that he endlessly tries to navigate. However, Genet’s geometry is neither a flat nor vapid representation of space; it forges a dynamic cartography that questions how the subject inhabits its territory, how to chart the relation of the self to the other, and how to measure a selfhood that ruptures calculation, while doggedly seeking form. Through energetic textual analysis, this book reveals how Genet’s mathematical figurations of becoming, rather than being, are refracted in the geometric imagery of poststructuralism. Joanne Brueton reads geometry as a shared discursive field in which to imagine an anti-identitarian epistemology, situating Genet as a unique interlocutor whose shape-shifting selves dance around every static metric of existing in the world.
12-Apr-2022	‘Jean Genet’s vertical geographies: On travel, politics, and form’, Studies in Travel Writing, 25.2 (April 2022), pp.161–178. Articles This article explores the travel writings of dissident, anti-nationalist French writer, Jean Genet (1910-86) and argues that they use the geometry of place to resist the violence of political cartography. Traversing diverse geographies, from the domestic (Chartres) to the distant (Palestine, Japan, and Vietnam), it focuses on how Genet's vertical signifiers reveal an oppressively monolithic vision of a homeland. Genet encourages the reader's microspection into the flattening orthodoxies of a native soil to make visible the exploitation of those without a home. This emphasis on verticality helps him delve into the 1970s Palestinian revolution, his geometric writing excoriating the demarcation lines of imperial rulers seeking to appropriate, know, and dominate a non-Western other. This article reads Genet's vertical travel in two ways: a microscope into the hierarchies of oppressed peoples; and a voyage into travel writing itself, a literary process of “unearthing” that locates home in a perennial departure.
07-Jan-2021	‘Cherchez la fiction’: Stories of Self-Realization in Anne Garréta’s Pas un jour and Leïla Slimani’s Sexe et mensonges’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 58.2 (July 2021), pp.164–177. Articles Faced with the hermetic interiority of post-structuralist narratives, twenty-first-century French literature tends to turn outwards and explore sociohistorical realities as a fertile source of fiction. In this article, I compare two contemporary writers rarely paired together—Anne Garréta and Leïla Slimani—to consider the enduring importance of discursive paradigms in realizing a sense of self. Although Garréta’s mechanised autobiographical aesthetic in Pas un Jour seems to jar with Slimani’s ethnographic journalism in Sexe et mensonges, I argue that both use heuristic narratives to conduct a survey of female desire whose reality is only legible in literature. Intersecting with narrative theories formulated by Barthes, Jameson and Cixous, this article argues that Slimani and Garréta perform their lived sexual experience through a carefully manufactured textual machine that grants them freedom. Only through the straitjacket of a fictional system can the reader glean the reality of female subjectivities so long obscured by myth.
07-Jul-2020	‘Abdellah Taïa’s literary palimpsests’, RELIEF – Revue électronique de littérature française, 14.1 (July 2020), pp.49–62. Articles This article is interested in the relationship of contemporary Moroccan writing to the French literary tradition, concentrating in particular on the texts of Abdelkebir Khatibi and Abdellah Taïa. It focuses on how the culturally composite prose of Abdellah Taïa seeks to transform the neo-colonial assumptions about Franco-Maghrebi relations, in which any trace of a metropolitan French author is presumed to be no more than the result of an imperial education. From Flaubert to Genet, from Les Lettres portugaises to L’Immoraliste, Taïa and Khatibi often resurrect metropolitan French authors in their writing. Yet, rather than parroting French stories in a colonial act of self-effacement, Taïa’s texts rehouse French narratives on the Moroccan page to produce a shared space of intergenerational and transnational memory.
31-Dec-2019	‘Genet’s Palestinian folklore’, Modern Humanities Research Association Working Papers in the Humanities, 14.3 (December 2019), pp.9–17. Articles Jean Genet’s political and personal allegiance to the Palestinians has often been interpreted as a putative exoticism, born out of a homoerotic fetishization of Arab alterity. This essay probes such criticisms to suggest instead that Genet’s Palestinian poetics deconstruct orientalist tropes by subversively over-exaggerating them. In bearing witness to the Palestinian revolution, or in trying to pay homage to the massacres at Sabra and Chatila in 1982, Genet can never adopt an authorial position of confederation. His voice is mired in the privileges of resource, readership, and mobility facilitated by Western hegemony, which stands anathema to the democracy of his political project. In order to gesture to the reality of the Palestinians, without reification or evangelization, I argue that Genet subversively borrows the language of fairy-tale, folklore, epic, and mythology long associated with nineteenth-century French exoticism, to draw attention to the ultimate artifice of his portrayal. He invites us to glean the authenticity of an Arab world beyond the clutches of the European author, repurposing exoticist legends and formerly lurid colonial representations to transform them into revolutionary fable. In his overly aestheticized portrayals, I argue that Genet does not immobilize the fedayeen in the flat planes of a one- sided image, but disguises them in the layers of such folkloric make-believe that he makes a spectacle of the orientalist fantasy itself.
28-Aug-2019	'Une rose des vents politique: The Southern winds of Jean Genet’s poetic compass’, in 'The Challenge of Caliban', eds. Roland Béhar and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Artl@s Bulletin, 8.2 (September 2019), pp.44­–55. Articles Jean Genet, notoriously channelled his hatred of the West as a way to discover the South. This article reads Genet’s admiration for the Palestinians as more than just a foil to the imperialist hegemony of a French homeland he reviled; but as a relation of equality that debunks the oppression of North-South dialectics. Tackling Éric Marty and Ivan Jablonka’s accusations of anti-Semitism, as well as criticisms of Orientalism, I use Genet’s 1982 essay ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’ to argue that his Palestinian texts radically re-orient the political compass where the North constructs and reifies a one-dimensional South.
18-Feb-2019	‘Drifting with direction: Going astray with Jean Genet’, Performance Research, 23.8 (December 2018), pp.81–88. Articles This article offers a double-focused reading of the drift in Jean Genet’s work and its reverberations in the dérive of the Situationist International. Tracking Genet’s biographical nomadism through the Mediterranean to the Middle East, I explore how he performs Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of deterritorialisation by displacing the fixed positions and affiliations by which any identification is made possible. He becomes the literal embodiment of Giacometti’s Homme qui marche 1 (1960): an artist forever caught in the interstice between walking away and walking towards. Yet this personal drift also has a radically political echo: in his tribute to deviance and deviants, replete with their etymological proximity to the dériviste, Genet strays away from the straight, upstanding backbone of normative politics. Instead, his texts experiment with a practice of obliqueness that demands that we see past the inauthenticity of an overly accessible culture of image and hypervisibility to locate meaning in the off-centre and the unseen. Despite the SI’s excoriation of theatre, I contend that Genet’s theorisations of a ‘theatre-cemetery’ revolutionise the dérive not as a performance, but as a transversal space of radical detachment: a double heterotopia that escapes urban geographies of total domination and forward-marching narratives of material progress by putting death and absence centre stage.
06-Dec-2018	Le Compas et la Lyre : Regards croisés sur les mathématiques et la poésie (Paris: Calvage et Mounet, 2018) Edited Book Brueton, Joanne, Randé, Bernard, and Houlou-Garcia, Antoine, 'Le Compas et la Lyre : Regards croisés sur les mathématiques et la poésie' (Paris: Calvage et Mounet, 2018)
01-Dec-2014	‘A stitch in time: Temporal threads in Genet and Derrida’ in Matters of Time: Material Temporalities in twentieth-century French culture, eds. Lisa Jeschke & Adrian May (Oxford; New York: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 261–279. Chapters

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