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[First paragraph]Decolonizing the Text: Glissantian Readings in Caribbean and African-American Literatures. DEBRA L. ANDERSON. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 118 pp. (Cloth US$46.95)L'Eau: Source d'une ecriture dans les litteratures feminines francophones. YOLANDE HELM (ed.). New York: Peter Lang, 1995. x + 295 pp. (Cloth US$ 65.95)Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers. MARY JEAN GREEN, KAREN GOULD, MICHELINE RICE-MAXIMIN, KEITH L. WALKER & JACK A. YEAGER (eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. xxii + 359 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Statue cou coupe. ANNIE LE BRUN. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1996. 177 pp. (Paper FF 85.00) Although best remembered as a founding father of the Negritude movement along with Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor was from the very outset of his career equally committed - as both a poet and a politician - to what he felt were the inseparable concepts of la francophonie and metissage. Senghor's has been an unabashedly paradoxical vision, consistently addressing the unanswerable question of how one can be essentially a "black African" and at the same time (in Homi Bhabha's words) "something else besides" (1994:28). In his "Eloge du metissage," written in 1950, Senghor ably described the contradictions involved in assuming the hybrid identity of a metis (an identity that offers none of the comforting biological and/or cultural certainties - about "rhythm," "intuition," and such like - upon which the project of Negritude was founded): "too assimilated and yet not assimilated enough? Such is exactly our destiny as cultural metis. It's an unattractive role, difficult to take hold of; it's a necessary role if the conjuncture of the 'Union francaise' is to have any meaning. In the face of nationalisms, racisms, academicisms, it's the struggle for the freedom of the Soul - the freedom of Man" (1964:103). At first glance, this definition of the metis appears as dated as the crude essentialism with which Senghor's Negritude is now commonly identified: in linking the fate of the metis to that of the "Union francaise," that imperial federation of states created in the years following upon the end of the Second World War with the intention of putting a "new" face on the old French Empire, Senghor would seem to have doomed the metis and his "role ingrat" to obsolescence. By the end of the decade, the decolonization of French Africa had deprived the "Union franchise" of whatever "meaning" it might once have had. The uncompromisingly manichean rhetoric of opposition that flourished in the decolonization years (and that was most famously manipulated by Fanon in his 1961 Wretched of the Earth) had rendered especially unpalatable the complicities to which Senghor's (un)assimilated metis was subject and to which he also subjected himself in the name of a "humanism" that was around this same time itself becoming the object of an all-out assault in France at the hands of intellectuals like Foucault.

Numbed by an official language policy which means they can "grow" across Canada, francophone minorities in the country have somewhat neglected geography. Their territory, carrying memory and processed by the aspirations for the future, influence the transmission of language and culture. Editor geographer Anne Gilbert and eight authors focused on two areas of research: the practices and representations of Francophone communities and the projects of their institutions. The issue of community vitality of the Francophone minority is how to live daily the relationship between individual and collective actors and the tension that emerges. The studies presented in this book as identify traces in the spatial organization of the minority, the linguistic landscape and the networks that it weaves the various spatial scales. The environmental report and majority / minority therein profile also attracted attention from the village to the big city. Such analysis can advance a strong thesis: Francophone communities no longer have the conditions now needed to complete the space that history has bequeathed. The geography is difficult for them

Despite granting independence to her former colonies in West and Central Africa in the early 1960s, France continues to wield considerable power and influence politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Through successive governments the African policy of France has been exceptionally constant and stable. Analyses how this persistent situation of dominance /dependency and continuity in foreign policy can be accounted for. (GAW)

Abstract
In this essay, the author draws on his experience as a trans, francophone, feminist researcher to share his reflections on the difficulties encountered within francophone contexts in the development of knowledge that moves beyond what the TSQ editors call "the familiar and overly simplistic dichotomy often drawn between an exclusionary transphobic feminism and an inclusive trans-affirming feminism." Without reducing the work of the few francophone researchers interested in trans/feminisms, including the author's, to the fight against exclusionary, transphobic feminist theories, policies, and practices, he demonstrates how problematic it is to articulate their work in terms other than the exclusion/inclusion of trans people within feminism. The author offers as a case study the 2015 Seventh International Conference of Francophone Feminist Research, currently the world's most important francophone feminist conference, to illustrate the near total silence on trans issues that reigns in francophone feminist communities.