Research Projects

FR355, The Other French Empire, Then and Now

(Paliyenko)

Darcy Gott ’23- La Mulâtresse Perdue

As part of her independent research project for FR355, Darcy Gott wrote a graphic novel inspired by “la mulâtresse Solitude” (circa 1772-1802), a forgotten historical figure who was martyred in the fight against slavery in colonial Guadeloupe.

FR128 and FR232 students

(Dionne)

During the Fall 2021 semester, students in Cultural Encounters: Engaging with Literature and Media (FR128) and The Rise and Fall of Versailles (FR232), created museum labels with a focus on the historical context of Toussaint Louverture’s life.

Each class went to the Colby Museum of Art to see the exhibit Jacob Lawrence: The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and all the students were able to contribute their interpretations of the prints during their visits. Then the students worked individually on a print of their choice before being paired with the student from the other class who chose the same print. Next they collaborated to develop and write museum labels in French, selecting the most relevant details of the historical context, before translating them into English.

–Valérie Dionne, Associate Professor of French

Click here for full article.

FR493A students

L’autre empire français (Paliyenko)

Paul Gauguin
Sarah BRASELTON

L’histoire naturelle et la définition de la race dans l’empire français colonial du XIXème siècle
Benjamin COOK

La couleur des droits
Allison HESS 

Le Code de la famille algérien : le legs de la politique coloniale française
Elizabeth MALONE

Les abolitions françaises de l’esclavage
Emma LEVIN

La Vénus Hottentote
Madison LOUIS

Julien-Joseph Virey et le racisme scientifique
Alexandra NICHOLS

Le voyage de Raymonde Bonnetain en Afrique (1892-1893)
Molly ROGERS

A Round Table on the Holocaust

French majors Kristin Nissen, Sara Ramsay and Aileen Evans lead a round table on Holocaust memory. They led three round tables on Holocaust memory at the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine, Augusta.

Archibo

After receiving a research grant from the Colby College Center for Arts and Humanities, we (Tara Venkat and Louisa Baum, class 2021) spent the month of January 2021 in Bologna, Italy researching its unique architectural features. This research highlights not only the physical modifications they have undergone over time, but also the impact they have had on the identity of the Bolognese citizens. We focus mainly on how Bologna has recently allocated and re-negotiated the use of its urban spaces in response to the changing socio-economic, religious, cultural, and political demands. This focus was undertaken through an aesthetic and practical lens as well as a sociological and ethnographic perspective to dive deeper into the connection between the portici (a pervasive architectural feature of Bologna), and the political commune of Làbas (a community based political organization which reclaimed some spaces in the city center). We welcome you to explore these elements with us through this site.

Italiamo

Italiamo is a portal of Italian Grammar created by Jessica Reinhart, class of 2020, to document her progress in learning Italian and to serve as a tool for future generations of Italian students at Colby.

The DH [email protected] is an Italian Studies + Digital Humanities workshop open to everyone in the Colby community (students, faculty, and staff) that we offered in the spring of 2017.

It met for lunch in Miller 205 on Tuesdays from 1pm to 2:30pm. Everyone was invited to come and see our digital work, ask us questions, give us feedback, and learn how to use Neatline (the platform we utilized for our geo-spatial work).

The Navigli Project is our current Digital Humanities project that we started developing in the fall of 2016 in a Humanities Lab. This Neatline exhibit displays and narrates the visual, thick history of water in the city of Milan, Italy and can be explored by clicking the points on the map, scrolling along the timeline, opening each of the listed records or by following one of the “Itineraries.”
(Lunch was provided courtesy of the Center for the Arts and Humanities)

Contact: [email protected]

The Navigli Project is a digital map of Milan’s waters that displays and narrates the visual, thick history of water in the city of Milan, Italy. It is an interactive resource for students, researchers, and the general public interested in discovering and learning about Milan’s disappeared canals and current plans to bring them back.

It comprises several layers of history, politics, literature, architecture, sound, video, photography, and geography that show the different factors that throughout the centuries have created the cityscape of Milan today. The map can be explored by clicking the points on the screen, scrolling along the timeline, opening each of the listed records or by following one of the “Itineraries.” The Navigli Project was developed in the Humanities Lab titled IT397A City of Water. Uncovering Milan’s Aquatic Geographies in the fall of 2016, and was also the main project being curated and expanded at the DH [email protected] in the spring of 2017. The exhibit is constantly evolving and expanding.

Follow us on Instragram at the_navigli_project.

Like our Facebook page to follow our development!

We are very interested in your feedback, comments, and suggestions. If you have any questions, please contact serena.ferrando@asu.edu

IT298 Noisemakers! Tracing the Origins of Modern Music in Italy.

In this Origins Humanities Lab, students explored the history of noise and its impact on 20^th-century Italian music. They also produced digital soundmaps of the city of Waterville and the Colby campus. The embracing of noise by Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde musicians marked the origins of a new way of conceiving and writing music, and noise was therefore a gateway to the investigation of the main features and principles that guided modern composers. In a multimedia environment that fostered an atmosphere of creative collaboration and encourages creative design, students turned from consumers of information into producers of cultural artifacts by generating annotated, playable maps, and disseminating them outside the classroom. Primary sources included music, sound clips, music scores, maps, manifestos, poems, essays, city plans, and historical accounts. Secondary sources comprised scholarly works, online archives as well as other digital humanities projects. The Lab traveled once to Harvard’s Harvard Group for New Music for a conversation with the composers and a concert.

The tangible results of this lab were the students’ projects (soundwalks, remixes, an immersive sonic Virtual Reality experience of Waterville, a 2D laser cut map of Waterville with Arduino components, and a noiseintoner) that were showcased at Noisefest!

Find more about the students’ projects at the links below:

–Soundscape
–Soundstream
–Walking Sound
–Phonicphiles

Follow some of the projects’ construction phases on Twitter @Noisemakers11

FR252 Provocative Texts (2017): http://web.colby.edu/provocativetexts/

PLOTTING POETRY. On Mechanically-Enhanced Reading

In 1917, commenting on the rise of new media, Apollinaire urged for “plotting/mechanising (“machiner”) poetry as has been done for the world”. A century later, the slogan’s rich metaphor is made all the sharper with the new technologies’ emergence in literary studies. What role have machines taken up in text reading? What do they teach us about the mechanics of poetry? What mechanical and strategic devices are we developing, with what results?

We are producing all sorts of computing and statistical apparatuses to describe and analyse metre, style and poeticity. We entrust them with part of our research to gain in speed and/or power, escape the physical boundaries of what our mind can embrace, rethink the usual questions and address new ones previously out of reach of traditional readings. Statistical analyses, digital corpuses, miscellaneous inventories shed light upon literature and provide our interpretations with the physical evidence they had to do without so far, but they in turn raise hermeneutic challenges.

To apply mechanical processes to the reading of texts is to raise the question of poeticity. Is it to be found in the measurable sum of artfully assembled processes, or does it escape normalisation efforts? Reading machines, by allowing a distant vision, measure phenomena that a natural reading would not detect, thus questioning the role of such invisible features in readers’ perception. Jacobson’s poetic function has objective linguistic features at its centre, but shall its efficiency be reduced to that of a machine, with levers and pulleys we can take apart?

Finally, the machine carries some notion of dehumanisation of the processes where it replaces us, and symmetrically, we readily adopt an anthropomorphic perception of it. Its use questions the usefulness and legitimacy of adopting “non-human” readings to access a fundamentally “human” material. Must the literary scholar, whose object is not a natural phenomenon, meet the burden of proof, or can one rely on intuitions? How shall mechanically enhanced “readings” and more traditional ones be linked together?

(University of Basel, 5-6-7 October, 2017/https://machinerlapoesie.wordpress.com)

In the course “L’écriture de soi”, students explored concepts of memory and self-fashioning in French and Francophone non-canonical/non-traditional autobiographical narratives, and questioned the (im)possibilities of writing the self. Through theoretical readings and creative research projects with digital platforms such as Tumblr and Storymaps, students acquired a better understanding of the processes by which written/visual memoirs and autobiographies were produced. To help them frame their own digital project, students analyzed a variety of texts (written/visual) to understand how writers, artists, theoreticians and filmmakers were writing and conceptualizing the self. In this Humanities Lab, students put into practice what they learned in class by conducting research/creative digital projects that challenged their own notion of “self” vis-à-vis issues of race, gender, identity, and community.

View the interactive exhibit.

Un aller simple, or Rewriting L’immoraliste in Reverse (2021)

This article situates Didier van Cauwelaert’s Un aller simple (1994) in a broader literary context by arguing that it is a “rewriting” of André Gide’s L’immoraliste (1902). The analysis, anchored in theoretical frameworks of Orientalism and postmodernism (including Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of “rewriting”), examines the texts’ shared themes of travel, illness, and the pursuit of personal authenticity. I contend that Un aller simple reverses within these themes the diegetic structure and the protagonists’ character development, linguistic strategies, and relationship to power structures of class and ethnicity. The rewriting found in Un aller simple creates subtle yet pervasive intertextuality with L’immoraliste.

The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne (2017)

This new volume from Oxford University Press includes essays on “Montaigne on Virtue and Ethics” by Valérie M. Dionne (Associate Professor), “Montaigne’s Travel Journal” by François Rigolot (Meredith Howland Pyne Professor Emeritus), and “Montaigne on Language” by Katie Chenoweth (Assistant Professor).

PUBLICATIONS

Books

• Crossing Borders: A Reading of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Emile Zola’s Germinal, Frankfurt: Verlag DM, 2010.
• L’écriture de l’espace dans les littératures africaine et créoliste: De la polarité à sa transcendance. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2020. (revised edition)
• Rêves d’adolescents en terre noire. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2021. (novel)

Journal Articles

• “Biocentrism as Magical Realism, Realism and Hybrid Transculturation: Fatou Diome’s Innovative Fictionalization of Biocentric Characterization through Transnational Testimonials in Kétala.” Research in African Literatures 52.3 (2021): 20-40.
• “In defense of secular modernity: Politicizing the body and space in Malika Mokeddem’s Of Dreams and Assassins.” The Journal of the African Literature Association 15.2 (2021): 289-307
• “Global Capitalism, Multinational Corporations and The Invention of Identities in the Sahara: A Case Study of Idrissou Mora Kpai’s film Arlit: Deuxième Paris.” CELAAN 15.2.3 (2018): 134-161.
•  “La dramaturgie lamartinienne ou le postcolonial avant la lettre : Le marronnage comme résistance,” Toussaint Louverture ; Nineteenth Century French Studies 42.3-4 (2014) : 190-205.
• “Le choc des imaginaires dans Les Soleils des indépendances d’Ahmadou Kourouma et L’année maigre d’Alhassane Ag. Baille.” French Studies in Southern Africa 44 (2014) : 132-156.
• “L’africanisation du polar ou l’élucidé du relationnel dans Les Cocus posthumes de Bolya Baenga.” La tortue verte. Revue en ligne des littératures francophones, special volume on the detective novel, ALITHILA, Lille, France : Université Lille 3, 2012, 47-60.
• “Ascendance étatique ou l’institution du nationalisme républicain dans L’Honneur de la tribu de Rachid Mimouni.” Nouvelles Études Francophones 26.1 (2011) : 150-165.
• “Déconstruction et renouveau esthétique: une exégèse narratologique de l’hybride et de la traduction dans Les Soleils des indépendances et Solibo Magnifique.” Alternative francophone 1.3 (2010) : 87-94. (University of Alberta, Canada; Online journal: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/af/article/view/9629.

Book Chapters

• “Entre religion et classe sociale : le couple wolof et musulman dans La Grève des bàttu d’Aminata Sow Fall.” in Les femmes d’islam en littérature, art et film. Ed. Catherine Perry. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2017. 
• “An Onomastic Reading of Ousmane Sembene’s Faat Kiné,” Ousmane Sembène and the Politics of Culture, eds. Lifongo Vetinde and Amadou Fofana. New York: Lexington Books, 2015, 131-143. 
• “Croisées narratives ou nouvelle translation du vécu spatial de l’immigré. Le post-épistolaire et le mémoriel dans Le Ventre de l’Atlantique de Fatou Diome,” Frictions et devenirs dans les écritures migrantes au féminin. Enracinements et négociations, eds. Névine, El Nossery and Anna Roca, Saarbrücken/Sarrebruck: Éditions universitaires européennes, 2011, 235-252. 
• “Modern Medicine, Excess and Tradition in L’Appel des arènes,” Health and Mental Issues in the Literary Imagination, ed. Mamadou Kandji, Dakar: Diaspora Academy Press, 2011, 115-124.  (Special issue on medicine in African literature, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal) 

Book Reviews

• Ayo A Coly. The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood. New York: Lexington Books, French Review 88.1 (2014): 219-220.
• Manthia Diawara, African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics. Munich : Prestel, 2010, in Cahiers d’Études Africaines 213-214 (2014) : 549-553.
• Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Lotte Arndt, et Catalina Lozano, coords. Collecte coloniale et affect. Ramper, dédoubler. Paris: B46, 2016, in Nouvelles Études Francophones 32.1 (2017): 192-195.
• Médoune Guèye, Aminata Sow Fall, oralité et société dans l’œuvre romanesque, 07/04/2012: http://www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=10692.

Genius Envy: Women Shaping French Poetic History, 1801-1900 (2016)

In Genius Envy, Adrianna M. Paliyenko uncovers a forgotten history: the multiplicity and diversity of nineteenth-century French women’s poetic voices. Conservative critics of the time attributed the phenomenon of genius to masculinity and dismissed the work of female authors as “feminine literature.” Despite the efforts of leading thinkers, critics, and literary historians to erase women from the pages of literary history, Paliyenko shows how these female poets invigorated the debate about the origins of genius and garnered considerable recognition in their time for their creativity and bold aesthetic ideas.

This fresh account of French women poets’ contributions to literature probes the history of their critical reception. The result is an encounter with the texts of celebrated writers such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Anaïs Ségalas, Malvina Blanchecotte, Louisa Siefert, and Louise Ackermann. Glimpses at the different stages of each poet’s career show that these women explicitly challenged the notion of genius as gender specific, thus advocating for their rightful place in the canon.

A prodigious contribution to studies of nineteenth-century French poetry, Paliyenko’s book reexamines the reception of poetry by women within and beyond its original context. This balanced and comprehensive treatment of their work uncovers the multiple ways in which women poets sought to define their place in history.

Other recent publications may also be found on Professor Paliyenko’s personal website which can be accessed here.

The Quiet Avant-Garde: Crepuscular Poetry and the Twilight of Modern Humanism

The blending of people and living machines is a central element in the futurist “reconstruction of the universe.” However, prior to the futurist break, a group of early-twentieth-century poets, later dubbed crepuscolari (crepusculars), had already begun an attack against the dominant cultural system, using their poetry as the locus in which useless little objects clashed with the traditional poetry of human greatness and stylistic perfection.

The Quiet Avant-Garde draws from a number of twenty-first-century theories – vital materialism, object-oriented ontology, and environmental humanities – as well as Bruno Latour’s criticism of modernity to illustrate how the crepuscular movement sabotaged the modern mindset and launched the counter-discourse of the Italian avant-garde by blurring the line dividing people from “things.” This liminal poetics, at the crossroad of tradition, modernism, and the avant-garde, acted as the initiator of the ethical and environmental transition from a universe subjected to humans to human-thing co-agency. This book proposes a contemporary reading of Italian twentieth-century movements and offers a foothold for scholars outside Italian studies to access authors who are still unexplored in North American literature.

Poetry on Stage: The Theatre of the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde 

Poetry on Stage focuses on exchanges between the writers of the Italian neo-avant-garde with the actors, directors, and playwrights of the Nuovo Teatro. The book sheds light on a forgotten chapter of twentieth-century Italian literature, arguing that the theatre was the ideal incubator for stylistic and linguistic experiments and a means through which authors could establish direct contact with their audience and verify solutions to the practical and theoretical problems raised by their stances in politics and poetics. A robust analysis of a number of exemplary texts grounds these issues in the plays and poems produced at the time and connects them with the experimentations subsequently carried out by some of the same artists.

In-depth interviews with four of the most influential figures in the field – critic Valentina Valentini, actor and director Pippo Di Marca, author Giuliano Scabia, and the late poet Nanni Balestrini – conclude the volume, providing invaluable first-hand testimony that brings to life the people and controversies discussed.

 

“… a major contribution to this field of study.”

John Picchione, York University

“… meticulous research and outstanding archival work…”

Paolo Chirumbolo, Louisiana State University

“To read Gianluca Rizzo’s fascinating study of the theatre of the Italian neo-avant-garde is to be reminded of how much we still have to learn about key literary movements of the second half of the twentieth century”

Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University

 “Some books are good reads; others are such that you learn things you did not know. Still others reteach you things you thought you knew. Gianluca Rizzo’s Poetry on Stage belongs, undeniably, in the third category.

Luigi Ballerini, UCLA 

On the Fringe of the Neoavantgarde / Ai confini della Neoavanguardia, Palermo 1963- Los Angeles 2013

On October 17th 2013, a group of young scholars and writers gathered in Los Angeles to commemorate another meeting (a much more fateful one) that had taken place in Palermo fifty years earlier, on October 3rd 1963 to be exact, at the Hotel Zagarella and the Sala Scarlatti of the Conservatorio. Back then, the main attraction had been the Festival Internazionale della Musica Nuova, a long-established music festival that had brought to Sicily some of the most interesting experiments from all over the world. An investigation on the latest developments in contemporary literature, the organizers thought, would have made a nice addition to the events already planned: it was the beginning of the ‘avant-garde by wagon-lit,’ as Umberto Eco famously (and humorously) dubbed it. Fifty years later, and over ten thousand miles away, that same avant-garde is still inspiring a lively discussion, the end of the line being nowhere in sight.