These are articles I am currently working on, or have submitted:

  1. Cemeteries and Heterotopia in 19th Century Travel Literature.
  2. Silent Natives, Vocal Destruction: Inventing the Americans, or, the History of How We Failed To Decolonize Travel Studies.
  3. Introduction to a collection of essays on femininity and women in cinema.
  4. A translation of Alain Flajoliet’s Essay on Sartre’s Early Psychology.

 

  1. Abstract:

This article considers the possible uses of Michel Foucault’s spatial concept of heterotopia, usually reserved for spatial theorists, to comment on the structure of travel writing in Isabelle Eberhardt’s work. By commenting on examples of heterotopic spaces in Eberhardt’s travel journals, this article explains the continuity and novelty of her Maghrebine texts compared to her European life, showing how the author builds her Self.

2. Abstract:

This article is primarily a pedagogical one: by relying on the experience of teaching Jean de Lery’s Histoire d’un Voyage at Cornell University, it questions the idea that by teaching compassionate readings of the Other we decolonize the curriculum, and posits that the destructions of the Natives in South America prefigures the West’s inability to comprehend nature as anything else than conquerable. This article draws parallel in mental categories of travelers between two travel journals, and points out that in judging positively Léry, we also teach him as void of mental pre-constructed categories, and opt for a low bar in assessing his contribution to ethnography– bar that posits that anyone who thinks a Native American is better alive than dead is “compassionate”.

3. Abstract:

This introduction traces the many changing aspects of the depiction of women and femininity in visual materials, from the early years of cinema in France to the boom of digital films, and postcolonial national film traditions. This introduction was written in collaboration with Claire Menard, Cornell University. The volume has been accepted for publication and is in revisions.

4. Translation:

This translation has been submitted and is under review.