Close readings explore three works by Marie NDiaye in which song plays a crucial role. The nature of the song and the singer differs in each text. In La Naufragée [‘The Shipwrecked Woman’], the power of the song of an unattractive sirène (a woman-fish) is expressed through a complex ekphrasis featuring the paintings of J. M. W. Turner. In Un pas de chat sauvage [‘A Wild Cat’s Step’], a nineteenth-century singer is re-created by a twenty-first century avatar. One of her songs is identified but the nature of the others emerges from the historical context, documented in the text. In Mon coeur à l’étroit [ My Heart Hemmed In ], traditional songs call back an estranged daughter to her mother. These dense texts reveal a struggle for control between singer and audience and a racialized tension, both exposed and overcome by the power of music to cut across prejudice and cultures.

What if absence and loss are structuring elements of the post-imperial condition? Not defining elements, as the post-imperial by its very nature remains a slippery and shape-shifting concept; but certainly core, enabling elements that might go a long way towards explaining the strange hold that a post-imperial imaginary has in the present. Keeping in mind that there are as many versions of the post-imperial as there were empires, and more, because even if one considers a specific ‘empire’, say the Portuguese in this case, it never was a homogeneous, consistent, or coherent entity by any stretch of the imagination. One film that makes clear how impossible it is to disentangle the questions of state power, personal survival, and the various traumas inherent in the post-imperial condition is Margarida Cardoso’s forceful and haunting Yvone Kane (2014). The film, in its totality, should also be understood as an allegory, not of the nation or nations, but rather of the conflation of past and present and their implication of a future bereft of simple answers and convenient mythologies. Yvone Kane lets us understand that in order to achieve some kind of redemption, in a human, political sense at least, the structuring dualities at the base of most of our society must be abandoned.

This article explores Violeta Parra’s artistic output through the perspective of hybrid space, a third space, which she herself inhabited. It concentrates on her ethnomusicological research, which resulted in her Cantos folklóricos chilenos , as well as her authorial songs. It also reinforces Parra as the originator of the Nueva Canción Chilena [New Chilean Song]. She preserved and reproduced cultural traditions that were in decline in twentieth-century Chile and Latin America. The ethnomusicologist compiled a repertoire that took her to different parts of Chile and to peripheral urban areas of Santiago, where she sought out the folklore of rural immigrants who had acclimatized to the urban space. Compilation went along with creative activity that juxtaposed the old and the new, the traditional and the experimental, handiwork and technology, and so on. She transformed folkloric expression in Chile and thus inaugurated an ideological musical thirdspace that would later be known as the Nueva Canción Chilena.

Collections of complete works are an unbeatable indicator of the state of a literary culture: in France, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade by Éditions Gallimard has published more than 500 volumes since 1931; other examples include I Meridiani by Mondadori (1969), the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag (1981), and the Libray of America (1982). They are also a fundamental component of any culture’s (nation’s?) heritage. This article discusses the concept of complete works and the difficulties they pose in minor cultures such as Catalan. The discussion will address the following two questions: (1) what part of an author’s work is considered for complete works, and what is not, and (2) what should we do with authors who constantly rewrite their work (Carner, Pla, and in fact much of the literature of the twentieth century), including those who try to hide what they have previously published (Borges, Rodoreda)?

This article addresses a little-known episode in the surrealist movement: the adventurous (if not hindered) integration of surrealism into Iberian literature and art, particularly J.V. Foix’s intervention through critical (in La Publicitat ) and poetical writing ( Gertrudis , 1927, and KRTU , 1932), and his collaboration with Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. Foix accomplished the dynamic process of transforming and reconfiguring the meaning and function of surrealist aesthetics in Catalonia in a complex network and context. Reading Foix not only as a philological issue, but also against an international background, and from the fragmentary writing perspective, will enrich traditional approaches and provide an insight into Catalan surrealism.

This article examines different strategies for staging García Lorca as a presence, either through physical or invisible embodiment, in plays that draw on his own works for inspiration. Ernesto Caballero’s Pepe el Romano (2000) incorporates a character called Federico García in a social structure of toxic masculinity. Alberto Conejero echoes Doña Rosita la soltera in an eerie scenario where an allegedly missing body is searched for Conejero’s Todas las noches de un día (2015), while it also refracts Lorca’s death through alternative political bodies in La piedra oscura (2016) and El sueño de la vida (2019). Both authors acknowledge Lorca’s status as cultural icon and symbol of the country’s unresolved past, while they participate in a search for ways to take the author’s literary legacy beyond biographical determinism. My analysis considers ideas of heritage performance that theorize the body as an archive and as spectre, and also cultural policy as vehicle for reframing legacy.

The history of Franco-Iranian cinematic exchanges is long and complex, with its roots stretching back to the earliest days of film. This chapter will explore the evolution of Franco-Iranian cinema, highlighting the significance of the pairing at key moments in a traditional narrative of French film history, as well as examining the ways in which the relationship plays out through funding and festivals, giving voice to a wider set of cultural and political narratives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The article seeks to explore the extent to which we can see a sustained pattern of creative intersections emerging and the ways in which ‘Franco-Iranian film’ can meaningfully be understood in the context of twenty-first-century cinéma-monde.

This study illuminates franco-lusophone artistic and political dialogues during the 1920s and 1930s by uncovering the life and work of Elsie Houston (1902–43) – a mixed-race, Brazilian, classically trained soprano, folk artist, Trotskyist, and folklorist. Houston performed Afro-Brazilian and South American indigenous folk songs in the operatic mode in Paris from 1926 to 1937. I examine Houston's involvement with the Parisian artistic and political avant-garde. Houston was enmeshed in transnational modernist and surrealist networks in the French capital. In addition, Houston was connected to a network of black Atlantic artistes and intellectuals, and her trajectory therefore provides new perspectives on the black experience in interwar France. This article opens the door to an underexplored history of race, culture, and society in Paris, centring Brazilian identity.