Département des Etudes du Monde Anglophone

This article expands my work on the "Cool Britannia" period explored in my article on Sarah Kane by examining the manifestations of the British national allegory from the 18th century to the contemporary moment defined by Brexit. Contrary to popular thinking, Britannia is not a nationally insular figure but one who has sealed Britain's "special relationship" with the United States, as well as the country's scepticism towards the European mainland continent. It figures as part of the reading list of the research group in illustration studies « Illustratio » and has been identified as a useful resource for teaching civilisation on English MEEF programmes.

Building on the final chapter of my book, in which I compare Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis to Beckett's Not I, and my work on irony in feminist visual cultures, this article positions Kane's theatre as a parody of Beckettian themes. Kane’s "In-Yer-Face" style of theatre is considered as both paying homage to her idol Beckett as well as a critique of the Irish playwright’s representations of women.

Published in the Dramaturgies series by Peter Lang, this book identifies how the Theatre of the Absurd can speak meaningfully to contemporary US-American audiences in the 21st century. Combining a focus on US productions with dramaturgical analysis - in particular textual elements that encourage certain types of spectator "gaze" - the book demonstrates how past Absurdist plays can resonate with #Blacklivesmatter, the Prison Industrial Complex, queer culture, gender exceptionalism, and the hyperreal mediatization of the Iraq war.

Consolidating my argument that feminist dramaturgies can revive the Theatre of the Absurd, this essay proposes that Bernard Frechtman's English translation of Jean Genet's The Maids contains a subversion of stereotypes surrounding murderesses lost in the text's updated French guise (the signature version circulating in France today). Focusing on various North American performances, it identifies dramaturgical strategies to bring out this understanding in a contemporary American setting. It was published in the high impact Theatre Journal and was identified by the French national library as a useful revision aid for those preparing the Agrégation subject in 2021 on Jean Genet.

This article reflects on American queer theory's entry in France by turning to two critics, Marie-Hélène Bourcier and François Cusset. It analogizes these critics' claims as a battle of the ‘archons’ as conceptualized by Derrida in Archive Fever.

This article explores the queer qualities of feminist scientist Donna Haraway's ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985). The article references the African-American, Chicana and Asian-American feminist sociology, theory, literature and history that ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ takes up. Haraway's white-authored text is not as an authoritative voice on decolonial feminist queerness. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ may rather be seen as a bibliographical work that readers may reference in their exploration of decolonial feminist beginnings of queer theory.

Developing on my research on humour of the Absurd, this article explores the presence of the rape joke in contemporary American stand-up comedy. It analyses the circulation of rape jokes among both white dominant and minoritised cultures in the US. The article was published in the high impact journal in Gender Studies, Signs. It was also selected as part of the "Teachable Signs Article" in 2015.

As part of my interest for the way "French theory" inflects the construction of French cinema stars abroad, this article reflects on the feminist potential of a contemporary form of French female cinema stardom that John Orr (2004) names ‘free-fall’. The free-fall star embarks on a journey of ‘ontological descent’, self-destruction and Kristevan abjection, but we cannot know her reasons for such actions.

This work considers the writings of French and American second-wave feminists on the work of Judith Butler, Jose Esteban Munoz, Lee Edelman, Paola Bacchetta, and Jack Halberstam. The special issue establishes a transatlantic dialogue to trace a genealogy of influence between the second-wave past and the queer present.

Building on my interest in the transatlantic circulation of French philosophy, this chapter compares Isabelle Huppert's role in Michael Cimino’s Hollywood Western Heaven’s Gate (1980) to the concepts of French theory as they operate in the American academy.  The result is a break with certain staples of the American Western: the notion of the frontier as a necessary battleground for "progress", and the idea (inspired by Lockean political thought) of the self-made man who owns the land he works.

The article extends my work on Frenchwomen in the Hollywood Western from Isabelle Huppert's role in Heaven's Gate to a a corpus of spanning a fifty-year period between 1931 and 1980. Just like Huppert's Ella Watson, Frenchwomen in these films are prominent agents on the Western frontier. Issuing from a general climate of American post-war Francophilia, Frenchwomen in the Hollywood Western incarnate an “admirable alterity,” and are often compared to indigenous and Mexican women. They are positioned in a similar vein to another Catholic nationality, the Irish, whose white identity would be acquired over the course of nineteenth- and twentieth-century US history.

Can satire, a genre believed to have originated from the work of English and Irish men in the eighteenth century ever be re-appropriated by women, particularly women of colour? This chapter, published in the Macmillan Student Handbook to Gender and Humor, studies this question by looking to transatlantic travels of satire by women of colour, concentrating on the work of Asian American social activist Suey Park and Franco-Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah. These women harness satire to critique patriarchy at the intersections of gender, race, and religion.

A review of the digital theatre festival on the work of Adrienne Kennedy, understudied in relation to the American Black Arts Movement and aligned with the Theatre of the Absurd in the USA. Her work has been drastically underreprested on American stages.

This essay explores the prominence of US art in the inaugural collection of François Pinault at Paris’s Bourse de Commerce. African American culture, the Far West, and queerness are three key motifs that articulate the idea of America in this exhibit.

An early example of my idea that dramaturgy can help the revival of past avant-gardes for the present day (the argument of my book), this article deploys the production history of Ionesco's most famous play, La Cantatrice chauve, to demonstrate how the play has been a source of aesthetic experimentation for contemporary theatre-makers.

Let me start by stating what I will not do in this article: I will not argue 'for' free speech or 'against' it. The debate is, to my mind, both volatile and internecine, with pro-and anti-censorship camps becoming all too often more entrenched in their own views the more they attempt to argue with the opposing side. I sympathize with liberal arguments that censorship does more harm than good when it comes to promoting tolerance and inclusion. 1 At the same time, alongside the advocates of #cancelculture-whose origins, it is important to remember, lie in Black Twitter and calls for accountability 2-I also consider that those most empowered to do and say as they will should learn to keep quiet once in a while, particularly if this means minoritized individuals are empowered to speak their truths. With the situated nature of my viewpoint in mind, I am interested in how those subordinated for their gender and sexual orientation, but privileged for their race and class, may be better allies to people, especially women, of colour. As I explore in the following, Judith Butler's Excitable Speech (1997) is a helpful aid. This is not because it is attuned to the concerns of intersectionality; indeed, as I point out, the text is highly problematic in this respect, preferring to side with the 'boys' club' of the French theorists rather than confront the intersectional scholarship on gender, race and class-based discrimination in an American domestic context. But rather, Butler offers us a strategy to think through-albeit by way of supplementary voices such as legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher George Yancyhow white women may find an 'insurrectionary' form of speech that is both embodied and attentive to how we stand in the pecking order of public sphere expression and exchange. 3

Les réfugiés font de leur cas une des problématiques actuelles du droit international. La question est de savoir si les pays Européens ont vocation à accueillir ces réfugiés. Il ne faut pas confondre migrants et réfugiés. Les réfugiés sont des individus fuyant un danger de mort immédiat ou un danger environnemental immédiat (le cas nouveau des réfugiés climatiques du Pacifique par exemple). Les migrants, quant à eux, sont des individus fuyant une crise économique, ou cherchant une meilleure situation sans que leur vie (sur l'ensemble des individus) soit en danger. La question est donc de savoir si un État, la France par exemple, peut se permettre d'accueillir des réfugiés d'une population étrangère. En les considérant comme réfugiés, elle reconnaît par la même l'existence d'un conflit illégitime dans un pays et donc fait preuve d'ingérence diplomatique envers l'État ayant provoqué cette guerre. Dans un communiqué de Human Rights Watch (HRW) daté du 4 septembre 2015, l'organisation met en exergue le problème latent des réfugiés. D'après eux, les politiques n'agissent pas suffisamment face à la vague de réfugiés actuelle, en grande partie due au conflit syrien. Le fait est que l'organisation (HRW) ne se concentre que sur la vision humanitaire de cette problématique. Elle omet qu'une action unilatérale de la part d'État d'accepter des réfugiés sous motif politique entraîne des conséquences diplomatiques vis à vis du pays soit en guerre, soit qui oppresse ces populations. La dénonciation, même indirecte, de l'action militaire se revndiquant souveraine d'un état est de l'ingérence. La question humanitaire est donc importante, mais les problèmes juridiques et diplomatiques le sont tout autant et ne doivent pas être omis. Les États qui sont en possibilité d'accepter les réfugiés font donc face à des problèmes diplomatiques directs, et ainsi il est libre à eux, dans le cas de la souveraineté des États, de les accepter ou non. L'acceptation de réfugiés entraîne donc une crise de souveraineté du côté du pays en cause, car le pays refuge dénonce l'action militaire. De plus, la pression purement médiatique des organisations humanitaires pousse les États européens à faire fi de leur souveraineté, de leur pouvoir de décision, en acceptant sans conditions des réfugiés sur son territoire. Cependant, comme l'indique le projet de recommandation de la commission Européenne des migrations du 13 mars 2014, l'Europe a juridiquement la responsabilité de protéger les personnes qui demandent une protection internationale, et qu'elle a une longue tradition en la matière. La commission avance donc le fait que l'Europe a déjà accueilli des réfugiés dans le passé, et qu'il faut continuer sans trouver d'autres solutions. Cette doctrine européenne est entérinée dans l'Article 78 du Traité sur le Fonctionnement de l'Union Européenne, sous la forme suivante « L'Union développe une politique commune en matière d'asile, de protection subsidiaire et de protection temporaire visant à offrir un statut approprié à tout ressortissant d'un pays tiers nécessitant une protection internationale et à assurer le respect du principe de non-refoulement ». L'article indique qu'une solution temporaire doit être appliquée pour les demandeurs d'asile, les réfugiés, ce que les articles et les recommandations d'ONG ne précise pas. La question des réfugiés ne doit pas seulement être vu sur une vision à court terme, en accueillant sans conditions des réfugiés sans savoir leur avenir au sein d'un pays, mais aussi à long terme, en prenant des dispositions permettant de supprimer le problème de base, c'est à dire le conflit ou la crise, et ainsi permettre aux exilés de revenir dans leur patrie. Certains politiques et théoriciens du droit européen avancent que nous devons accueillir ces réfugiés apatrides. Mais le fait est qu'ils n'ont pas perdu leur nationalité, que nous n'avons donc pas à leur donner une nouvelle nationalité (comme précisé dans la Constitution Française par exemple, où nous ne pouvons par refouler des apatrides sans leur avoir trouvé une nouvelle nationalité) Une solution temporaire, construite et institutionnalisée sous mandat de l'ONU qui donnerait à chaque État de l'Union Européenne des rôles selon leurs ressources serait plus efficace que critiquer des politiciens qui eux doivent composer dans l'intérêt de leur État.