The Portail Mondial des Revues/Global Journals Portal of the French Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) comprises a collection of over one thousand decolonial and diasporic periodicals spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often ephemeral and with brief publication histories, these journals offer glimpses into the literary critical and social critical practices of their times.
Publications in the database can be filtered by geographical area, language, and topic (literature, gender studies, diaspora, etc.). For those that are open access, links are provided directly inside the database. Each entry contains a list of articles and books that have recently cited the journal, allowing scholars easy access to critical work surrounding each publication.
At the core of the collection are works published in Paris, particularly during the entre-guerres period, that convey the voices of migrant and diasporic communities. Among these are journals such as the anti-imperialist Phản-Đế (1934), published by the Ligue contre l’impérialisme et l’oppression coloniale, and Césaire and Senghor’s L’Étudiant noir (1935). Many publications such as L’Arche (1944-1948), with joint editions from both Paris and Algiers, publish literary texts from around the world, placing them alongside reflections on contemporaneous philosophical and political debates.
Works span across several dozen languages and every continent of the globe. Publications such as the Catalan El Cami and the Haitian Bon Nouvèl account for just two of many periodicals published in minority languages and creoles. Other publications offer transnational and multilingual perspectives such as the Franco-uruguayan Entregas de la Licorne and Tricontinental, a social critical periodical published through the Organization for Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The Romance Language Collections Instagram feed brings forth little known and new resources and services in the UC Berkeley Library. Once you start following you’ll instantly receive early notices of new books, e-resources, exhibits, readings and more through your smartphone or any web browser.
Since 1896, Éditions Classiques Garnier has been publishing literary works from around the world, French and foreign, ancient and modern, in reference editions. In 2009, under the editorial direction of Claude Blum, the independent publishing house expanded the scope of its publications to all areas relating to literature and social sciences: editing studies and essays in the leading fields in French and foreign literature, linguistics, history, art, music, law, economics and social sciences. The quantity of the signature yellow-bound paperback books in Berkeley’s collection is extensive. The journals we currently subscribe to in print include La Lettre clandestine, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie religieuses, Cahiers Octave Mirbeau, Revue Nerval, Bulletin de la Société Paul Claudel, and Constellation Cendrars. Ten of their journals, including Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, are partially archived in JSTOR but not all available to UCB.
Access to more of the digital content from this publisher would greatly enhance our electronic holdings and expand the accessibility of content in French. Please give it a try before January 15, 2022 and let me know if you’d like to recommend any titles or collections we might put on our wish-list.
Livres de fleurs du xvie au xxe siècle. Namur: Presses universitaires de Namur, 2018.The Library has added more than 1,600 new ebooks to its collection in OpenEdition. Since 2014, we’ve been supporting this initiative based at the Université d’Aix-Marseille to open scholarly content from Europe and France in particular to the world. The Fremium program allows the UC Berkeley community to participate in an acquisitions policy that both supports sustainable development of open access (OA) and that respects the needs of teaching, research and learning communities. With our participation, Berkeley researchers and students benefit from greater functionality while making it possible for anyone in the world to view in html and in open access 70% of the ebook catalog of nearly 12,000 titles.
Here are a few titles from the latest acquisition, all discoverable in UC Library Search:
Daylet Domínguez is an Associate Professor of Caribbean and Latin American literatures and cultures in UC Berkeley’s Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Her new book, Ficciones etnográficas: literatura ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2021), deals with the importance of literature for the constitution of the social sciences as a modern practice and discourse in the Hispanic Caribbean. She proposes that anthropology and its related subjects began to build a place of enunciation at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, in close relationship with travel literature, the “cuadro de costumbres,” and the novel. It is at the intersection with these literary genres that the emerging disciplines shaped a large part of their tropology and discursive genealogy; although, once institutionalized, they disavowed its epistemological validity. In the process of textual and institutional differentiation, the social sciences became one of the most effective ways to consolidate national projects, organize the transition to modern citizenships and undermine the postulates of racial and climatic degeneration associated with the region.
[translated from publisher’s site]
Ficciones etnográficas: literatura ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX. Madrid : Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert,, 2021.
Firenze per Claudio Magris (Firenze University Press, 2021)Firenze University Press is at the forefront for open access (OA) publishing in Italy. By opening up access to more than 1,300 academic books and 50 peer-reviewed journals over the past decade, it has helped its research community to achieve wide and rapid dissemination, increasing exponentially the impact of their research. Today, all Firenze University Press content and metadata are published open access and are discoverable through the tools of transformational infrastructure organizations such as DOAB, DOAJ, and OAPEN.
Besides UC Library Search, many of the press’ publications, along with other Italian OA publishers, are also available through Casalini Libri’s online platform Torrossa.
Mairi McLaughlin is Associate Professor of French and an Affiliated Member of the Linguistics Department and the Department of Italian Studies. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and Translation Studies. Her most recent publication presents the results of the first major study into the history of language in the French press. It has a dual aim: to shed light on the history of the genre of journalism and to explore what the study of historical periodicals can bring to our understanding of the history of language.
Professor McLaughlin discussed her recent book with David Bates (Rhetoric) on November 10, 2021 through the Townsend Center’s Berkeley Book Chats.
From its beginnings on the artistic fringe during the Hispanic Civil Rights Movement to its current status as the oldest and most accomplished publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by US Hispanic authors, Arte Público Press and its imprint, Piñata Books, have become a showcase for Hispanic literary creativity, arts and culture.
The original publishers of Sandra Cisneros’ seminal The House on Mango Street, Arte Público’s other well-known authors include Obie-award-winning playwright and filmmaker Luis Valdez, playwright Miguel Piñero and best-selling authors Nicholasa Mohr, Victor Villaseñor, and Helena María Viramontes. As part of the ongoing efforts to bring Hispanic literature to mainstream audiences, Arte Público Press launched the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program in 1992. This program represents the first nationally coordinated attempt to recover, index and publish lost Latino writings that date from the American colonial period through 1960. [from the publisher’s web site].
From children’s books and contemporary fiction to critical social history, the UC Berkeley Library is proud to hold most of Arte Púbico Press’ bilingual catalog of publications in the Main (Gardner) Stacks, the Ethnic Studies Library, and The Bancroft Library. In recent years, the Library has also acquired many of its publications in digital form through Digitalia Hispánica, Latino Literature, and other ebook platforms such as OverDrive. These can be discovered in UC Library Search with keyword phrase “arte publico press” and limiting to online through UC Berkeley.
Oral Narratives and Black Lives in Francophone Studies
Senegalese in the Diaspora: What Sociolinguistic Interviews Can Tell Us about Language, Race, Mobility, and Belonging Maya Smith, University of Washington
Drawing on extensive interviews with people of Senegalese heritage in Paris, Rome, and New York City, this talk explores the fascinating role of language in national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities. Senegalese in the diaspora are notable in their capacity for movement and in their multifaceted approach to discourse, shaping their identity as they purposefully switch between languages. Through a mix of poignant, funny, reflexive, introspective, and witty stories, interviewees blur the lines between the utility and pleasure of language, allowing a more nuanced understanding of why and how Senegalese move.
“Un désordre indescriptible”: Folklore as Mask in the Congolese Nervous State Jonathon Repinecz, George Mason University
This paper is part of a larger project about how colonial explorers, missionaries, and magistrates in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo used strategies of “folklorization”—that is, the framing of oral traditional materials as quaint, rural, and authentic—as propaganda in the service of popularizing the colony and obscuring the everyday violence of the colonial state. It will focus on the archives of Léon Guébels, a prosecutor and judge who published many folklore collections under a pseudonym, contain manuscripts written by Congolese schoolchildren in both French and African languages, sent to him by their teachers, which he overwrites in large red letters with appreciations such as “IDIOTIC,” “NOT WITTY ENOUGH,” or “CLEARLY THE INVENTION OF A SILLY CHRISTIAN GIRL.” I will examine some of the reasons he finds these tales inconvenient, framing my findings in the context of colonial racial anxieties over subversive ideologies, urbanization, “detribalization,” and open rebellion.
It has been a challenging year and we look forward to most of you returning to campus where you can take advantage of all the resources the Library has to offer. By August 25, most of UC Berkeley’s libraries will have reopened. This year’s welcome back newsletter for those working in the Romance languages focuses on both digital and print resources. For the most up-to-date information on the UC Berkeley Library’s services, please continue to check the Library services and resources during COVID-19 page.
Photo: Centre Cultural La Nau – Universitat de València by Claude Potts, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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![Firenze per Claudio Magris [book cover]](https://media.fupress.com/cover/n/7112)
