THERESE DE RAEDT

My current book project, provisionally titled Taking the Beach: Figuring Francophone Postcolonial Littoral Spaces, which analyzes contemporary literary and cinematic representations of beaches in parts of the world that were colonized by France and that remain under her cultural and linguistic influence. The writers and film directors whose work I analyze are all committed to drawing attention to urgent societal issues that the littoral space and place of the beach bring into focus.

I consider beaches as contact zones where a wide range of interactions, from hostile to hospitable, occur. Nowadays beaches incarnate–for France and more generally the Western world–vacation sites of regeneration, relaxation, and freedom. The beaches I study take on a different valence in terms of how they are represented and thought of. Often the leisure venue gets overlaid, for instance, with the beaches’ role as a point of departure for hopeful, although undocumented, migrants aiming to find better living conditions overseas. Contemporary post-colonial beaches, I argue in this book, incarnate and perpetuate the asymmetrical North-South, South-North relations of domination and subordination that originated in the historical reality of slavery and colonialism. They corroborate what Jan Nederveen Pieterse has called “flashpoints of global inequality.”