Joseph Ford | Durham University (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Joseph Ford
Irish Journal of French Studies, 2020
The introduction provides an overview of the intellectual context for the thematic issue and outl... more The introduction provides an overview of the intellectual context for the thematic issue and outlines the complexities around the genesis of Achille Mbembe's 'Provisional Notes on the Postcolony' (1992). It examines how Mbembe's work ushered in a new era of discursive practices that sought to understand the role of the imagination in the operation of power in contemporary Africa and sketches how the articles of the thematic issue engage with the aesthetics of the grotesque that is a key element in the African political imagination. As a new group of populist leaders in the West exhibit traits that are reminiscent of Mbembe's articulation of the grotesque, the editors emphasise the need for an expanded vision of the grotesque as it circulates between Africa and the West as part of a far broader and deeply entrenched colonial matrix of power.
Irish Journal of French Studies, 2020
Taking Achille Mbembe's theory of the grotesque as a starting point, this article examines ho... more Taking Achille Mbembe's theory of the grotesque as a starting point, this article examines how a series of contemporary Algerian novels deploy an aesthetic of the grotesque to contest and deconstruct the operation of State power in Algeria. The article shows how three writers of the post-civil war period (Habib Ayyoub, Salim Bachi and Mustapha Benfodil) engage in distinct yet related ways with representations of the grotesque and the obscene in a renewed effort to break out of a state of false consciousness that renders citizens and observers complicit with the structures of power in place. The article argues that one of the reasons Mbembe's landmark essay is so important to the situation now faced by Algerian artists, writers and civil society, is because it helps us to see the failure of the grotesque as a contestatory aesthetic and hence provides new insight into the spectacle of power at work in Algerian society and politics.
Forum University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture the Arts, Mar 9, 2015
Memory studies has moved from the cultural collective, rooted within the bounds of the nation sta... more Memory studies has moved from the cultural collective, rooted within the bounds of the nation state, to the transnational or transcultural, which in recent years has come to account for the circulation of "memory cultures" in an increasingly complex, globalised and violent world. In what follows, the essays in this special issue on Transnational Memory and Traumatic Histories are briefly introduced and contextualised within this transcultural framework.
Francosphères, Jun 1, 2016
Set in the context of the Algerian ‘décennie noire’, a period of violence which spanned the 1990s... more Set in the context of the Algerian ‘décennie noire’, a period of violence which spanned the 1990s, this article is about how multiple languages of urgence developed during and after the period and were applied to readings of Algerian Francophone literature produced at this time. The article is split into two parts: beginning with an overview of how urgence as a notion was written and constructed during the Algerian ‘décennie noire’ by the Algerian State (état d’urgence) and by French literary markets (écriture de l’urgence), the second part of the article considers how urgence might be seen to be interrogated and recast in the work of Algerian writers published within a blossoming Francophone publishing sector in Algeria. The main focus here is Mustapha Benfodil’s most recent novel, Archéologie du chaos (amoureux) (2007). The article suggests that the ethical imperative of the 1990s has been rethought and remapped by writers, outside of the hegemonic national narrative and reductive press receptions of novels common during the ‘décennie noire’. If initially cautioning against using literary fiction to read contemporary postcolonial societies, the article elaborates, through a reading of Benfodil’s novel, on how a more complex engagement with literary reference as suspended (simultaneously attached to and detached from reality) can offer a tentative but fruitful entry into recent Algerian history.
/// Cet article propose une réflexion sur les langages de l’« urgence » développés pendant et après la « décennie noire » (les années 90 durant lesquelles l’Algérie fut fortement marquée par la violence) qui informèrent la production littéraire algérienne francophone de cette période. L’article est divisé en deux parties. Il montre tout d’abord que le concept d’« urgence » est une invention de l’état algérien (par le biais de l’« état d’urgence ») relayée par l’industrie littéraire française (sous la forme de l’« écriture de l’urgence »). Il étudie ensuite la manière dont certains écrivains algériens se sont réappropriés cette « urgence » après les années 90 afin d’en faire un outil non plus répressif, mais créatif. L’analyse se concentre sur le roman le plus récent de Mustapha Benfodil, Archéologie du chaos (amoureux) (2007), et établit que l’impératif moral de l’écriture propre aux années 90 y est détourné et déjoue tant le grand récit étatique d’hégémonie nationale que les réceptions réductrices de la presse typiques de la « décennie noire ». Tout en mettant en garde contre les dangers de la lecture des sociétés postcoloniales par le prisme de la fiction littéraire, nous montrons que la référence littéraire est toujours suspendue (à la fois reliée à et disjointe de la réalité) et considérons les façons dont la littérature peut offrir un accès provisoire, mais néanmoins fructueux, à l’histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine en nous appuyant sur le cas du roman de Benfodil.
Memory studies has moved from the cultural collective, rooted within the bounds of the nation sta... more Memory studies has moved from the cultural collective, rooted within the bounds of the nation state, to the transnational or transcultural, which in recent years has come to account for the circulation of “memory cultures” in an increasingly complex, globalised and violent world. In what follows, the essays in this special issue on Transnational Memory and Traumatic Histories are briefly introduced and contextualised within this transcultural framework.
This paper considers the recent invocations of the posthumous figure of Albert Camus in the work ... more This paper considers the recent invocations of the posthumous figure of Albert Camus in the work of contemporary Algerian author Hamid Grine.
Journal of Camus Studies , 2014
This article considers the recent work of Algerian exile Alek Baylee Toumi, who has rewritten and... more This article considers the recent work of Algerian exile Alek Baylee Toumi, who has rewritten and continued Camus’s short story ‘l’Hôte’ (“The Guest”) as a play entitled Albert Camus: entre la mère et l’injustice (“Albert Camus: between the mother and injustice”). Published soon after the ‘décennie noire’, the period of resurgent Algerian violence in the 1990s, it is argued that Toumi’s work elucidates ‘l’Hôte’ as a story that continues to tackle taxing moral and political questions in the context of resurgent conflict, reframing Camus as a prophetic ‘Algerian’ figure of the late 1950s. We conclude on a note of caution, however: while, on the surface, claiming to ‘clarify’ Camus’s position on Algeria, Toumi’s work seems a more likely example of the broader phenomenon of ‘figuring’ and blurring a version of an idealised Algeria alongside the real Algeria of the recent civil war, where Camus himself becomes an ambivalent ‘hôte’ (guest/host) of Algerian writing. The article summarises this new phenomenon and questions the effectiveness of the approach taken for the realisation of the stated aims of bringing a posthumous ‘Camus’ back to the land of his birth as a means of restoring peace in a war-torn contemporary Algeria.
Conference & Seminar Organisation by Joseph Ford
Thesis Chapters by Joseph Ford
This thesis explores contemporary Algerian francophone literary production during and after what ... more This thesis explores contemporary Algerian francophone literary production during and after what is widely known as the ‘décennie noire’ in Algeria, also called the ‘Algerian Civil War’ of the 1990s, and a period of intense violence during which up to 200,000 people are reported to have been killed. The research sits between a literary and sociological approach (equating, in broad terms, to the study of the world in the text and that of the text in the world) and has a main corpus of living writers, published between Paris and a blossoming francophone publishing market in Algiers. It calls on both sociological and literary approaches to think through questions of how the 1990s have been written and read in and between France and Algeria. One of the main concerns of the research is to reconcile the complex relationship between literature as a form of social and political testimony and literature as a creative and aesthetic endeavour that gives a far more open-ended and equivocal account of experience and existence. Split into four sections, the thesis studies this problem in the context of contemporary Algeria through the lens of 'urgence', a term which was employed by the Algerian State (‘état d’urgence’), by publishers, the press and critics (‘écriture de l’urgence’) and finally by Algerian writers. Exploring the emergence of a narrative of 'urgence' principally within what we define as a Franco-Algerian ‘champ littéraire’ during the 1990s, Section One also reviews the wide array of literature on contemporary Algeria in an attempt to show how a set of binary narratives was established which implicitly played into the ‘official story’ of the Algerian State. In a further three sections, the thesis shows, through six detailed case studies of the Algerian francophone writers Maïssa Bey, Salim Bachi, Djamel Mati, Habib Ayyoub, Mustapha Benfodil and Kamel Daoud, how literature published after the ‘end’ of the 1990s has increasingly become a site of creative experimentation for the development of discursive strategies to disrupt and contest the dominant binary narrative structures which frame Algeria from within and from outside. The thesis argues that, more than attempting to represent the period of the ‘décennie noire’, a host of writers has sought to recast the ethical imperative of the 1990s in the discursive realm of literature, beyond previously reductive narrative frames.
Books by Joseph Ford
![Research paper thumbnail of Cocktail Kafkaïne [Poésie noire]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56001812/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](194 pp., bi-lingual edition, paperback or pixel friendly PDF ISBN: 9781999915360
Irish Journal of French Studies, 2020
The introduction provides an overview of the intellectual context for the thematic issue and outl... more The introduction provides an overview of the intellectual context for the thematic issue and outlines the complexities around the genesis of Achille Mbembe's 'Provisional Notes on the Postcolony' (1992). It examines how Mbembe's work ushered in a new era of discursive practices that sought to understand the role of the imagination in the operation of power in contemporary Africa and sketches how the articles of the thematic issue engage with the aesthetics of the grotesque that is a key element in the African political imagination. As a new group of populist leaders in the West exhibit traits that are reminiscent of Mbembe's articulation of the grotesque, the editors emphasise the need for an expanded vision of the grotesque as it circulates between Africa and the West as part of a far broader and deeply entrenched colonial matrix of power.
Irish Journal of French Studies, 2020
Taking Achille Mbembe's theory of the grotesque as a starting point, this article examines ho... more Taking Achille Mbembe's theory of the grotesque as a starting point, this article examines how a series of contemporary Algerian novels deploy an aesthetic of the grotesque to contest and deconstruct the operation of State power in Algeria. The article shows how three writers of the post-civil war period (Habib Ayyoub, Salim Bachi and Mustapha Benfodil) engage in distinct yet related ways with representations of the grotesque and the obscene in a renewed effort to break out of a state of false consciousness that renders citizens and observers complicit with the structures of power in place. The article argues that one of the reasons Mbembe's landmark essay is so important to the situation now faced by Algerian artists, writers and civil society, is because it helps us to see the failure of the grotesque as a contestatory aesthetic and hence provides new insight into the spectacle of power at work in Algerian society and politics.
Forum University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture the Arts, Mar 9, 2015
Memory studies has moved from the cultural collective, rooted within the bounds of the nation sta... more Memory studies has moved from the cultural collective, rooted within the bounds of the nation state, to the transnational or transcultural, which in recent years has come to account for the circulation of "memory cultures" in an increasingly complex, globalised and violent world. In what follows, the essays in this special issue on Transnational Memory and Traumatic Histories are briefly introduced and contextualised within this transcultural framework.
Francosphères, Jun 1, 2016
Set in the context of the Algerian ‘décennie noire’, a period of violence which spanned the 1990s... more Set in the context of the Algerian ‘décennie noire’, a period of violence which spanned the 1990s, this article is about how multiple languages of urgence developed during and after the period and were applied to readings of Algerian Francophone literature produced at this time. The article is split into two parts: beginning with an overview of how urgence as a notion was written and constructed during the Algerian ‘décennie noire’ by the Algerian State (état d’urgence) and by French literary markets (écriture de l’urgence), the second part of the article considers how urgence might be seen to be interrogated and recast in the work of Algerian writers published within a blossoming Francophone publishing sector in Algeria. The main focus here is Mustapha Benfodil’s most recent novel, Archéologie du chaos (amoureux) (2007). The article suggests that the ethical imperative of the 1990s has been rethought and remapped by writers, outside of the hegemonic national narrative and reductive press receptions of novels common during the ‘décennie noire’. If initially cautioning against using literary fiction to read contemporary postcolonial societies, the article elaborates, through a reading of Benfodil’s novel, on how a more complex engagement with literary reference as suspended (simultaneously attached to and detached from reality) can offer a tentative but fruitful entry into recent Algerian history.
/// Cet article propose une réflexion sur les langages de l’« urgence » développés pendant et après la « décennie noire » (les années 90 durant lesquelles l’Algérie fut fortement marquée par la violence) qui informèrent la production littéraire algérienne francophone de cette période. L’article est divisé en deux parties. Il montre tout d’abord que le concept d’« urgence » est une invention de l’état algérien (par le biais de l’« état d’urgence ») relayée par l’industrie littéraire française (sous la forme de l’« écriture de l’urgence »). Il étudie ensuite la manière dont certains écrivains algériens se sont réappropriés cette « urgence » après les années 90 afin d’en faire un outil non plus répressif, mais créatif. L’analyse se concentre sur le roman le plus récent de Mustapha Benfodil, Archéologie du chaos (amoureux) (2007), et établit que l’impératif moral de l’écriture propre aux années 90 y est détourné et déjoue tant le grand récit étatique d’hégémonie nationale que les réceptions réductrices de la presse typiques de la « décennie noire ». Tout en mettant en garde contre les dangers de la lecture des sociétés postcoloniales par le prisme de la fiction littéraire, nous montrons que la référence littéraire est toujours suspendue (à la fois reliée à et disjointe de la réalité) et considérons les façons dont la littérature peut offrir un accès provisoire, mais néanmoins fructueux, à l’histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine en nous appuyant sur le cas du roman de Benfodil.
Memory studies has moved from the cultural collective, rooted within the bounds of the nation sta... more Memory studies has moved from the cultural collective, rooted within the bounds of the nation state, to the transnational or transcultural, which in recent years has come to account for the circulation of “memory cultures” in an increasingly complex, globalised and violent world. In what follows, the essays in this special issue on Transnational Memory and Traumatic Histories are briefly introduced and contextualised within this transcultural framework.
This paper considers the recent invocations of the posthumous figure of Albert Camus in the work ... more This paper considers the recent invocations of the posthumous figure of Albert Camus in the work of contemporary Algerian author Hamid Grine.
Journal of Camus Studies , 2014
This article considers the recent work of Algerian exile Alek Baylee Toumi, who has rewritten and... more This article considers the recent work of Algerian exile Alek Baylee Toumi, who has rewritten and continued Camus’s short story ‘l’Hôte’ (“The Guest”) as a play entitled Albert Camus: entre la mère et l’injustice (“Albert Camus: between the mother and injustice”). Published soon after the ‘décennie noire’, the period of resurgent Algerian violence in the 1990s, it is argued that Toumi’s work elucidates ‘l’Hôte’ as a story that continues to tackle taxing moral and political questions in the context of resurgent conflict, reframing Camus as a prophetic ‘Algerian’ figure of the late 1950s. We conclude on a note of caution, however: while, on the surface, claiming to ‘clarify’ Camus’s position on Algeria, Toumi’s work seems a more likely example of the broader phenomenon of ‘figuring’ and blurring a version of an idealised Algeria alongside the real Algeria of the recent civil war, where Camus himself becomes an ambivalent ‘hôte’ (guest/host) of Algerian writing. The article summarises this new phenomenon and questions the effectiveness of the approach taken for the realisation of the stated aims of bringing a posthumous ‘Camus’ back to the land of his birth as a means of restoring peace in a war-torn contemporary Algeria.
This thesis explores contemporary Algerian francophone literary production during and after what ... more This thesis explores contemporary Algerian francophone literary production during and after what is widely known as the ‘décennie noire’ in Algeria, also called the ‘Algerian Civil War’ of the 1990s, and a period of intense violence during which up to 200,000 people are reported to have been killed. The research sits between a literary and sociological approach (equating, in broad terms, to the study of the world in the text and that of the text in the world) and has a main corpus of living writers, published between Paris and a blossoming francophone publishing market in Algiers. It calls on both sociological and literary approaches to think through questions of how the 1990s have been written and read in and between France and Algeria. One of the main concerns of the research is to reconcile the complex relationship between literature as a form of social and political testimony and literature as a creative and aesthetic endeavour that gives a far more open-ended and equivocal account of experience and existence. Split into four sections, the thesis studies this problem in the context of contemporary Algeria through the lens of 'urgence', a term which was employed by the Algerian State (‘état d’urgence’), by publishers, the press and critics (‘écriture de l’urgence’) and finally by Algerian writers. Exploring the emergence of a narrative of 'urgence' principally within what we define as a Franco-Algerian ‘champ littéraire’ during the 1990s, Section One also reviews the wide array of literature on contemporary Algeria in an attempt to show how a set of binary narratives was established which implicitly played into the ‘official story’ of the Algerian State. In a further three sections, the thesis shows, through six detailed case studies of the Algerian francophone writers Maïssa Bey, Salim Bachi, Djamel Mati, Habib Ayyoub, Mustapha Benfodil and Kamel Daoud, how literature published after the ‘end’ of the 1990s has increasingly become a site of creative experimentation for the development of discursive strategies to disrupt and contest the dominant binary narrative structures which frame Algeria from within and from outside. The thesis argues that, more than attempting to represent the period of the ‘décennie noire’, a host of writers has sought to recast the ethical imperative of the 1990s in the discursive realm of literature, beyond previously reductive narrative frames.
194 pp., bi-lingual edition, paperback or pixel friendly PDF ISBN: 9781999915360