Over the last two decades, the experiences of colonization and decolonization, once safely relegated to the margins of what occupied students of history and literature, have shifted into the latter's center of attention, in the West as elsewhere. This attention does not restrict itself to the historical dimension of colonization and decolonization, but also focuses upon their impact upon the present, for both colonizers and colonized. The nearly fifty essays here gathered examine how literature, now and in the past, keeps and has kept alive the experiences - both individual and collective - of colonization and decolonization. The contributors to this volume hail from the four corners of the earth, East and West, North and South. The authors discussed range from international luminaries past and present such as Aphra Behn, Racine, Blaise Cendrars, Salman Rushdie, Graham Greene, Derek Walcott, Guimarães Rosa, J.M. Coetzee, André Brink, and Assia Djebar, to less known but certainly not lesser authors like Gioconda Belli, René Depestre, Amadou Koné, Elisa Chimenti, Sapho, Arthur Nortje, Es'kia Mphahlele, Mark Behr, Viktor Paskov, Evelyn Wilwert, and Leïla Houari. Issues addressed include the role of travel writing in forging images of foreign lands for domestic consumption, the reception and translation of Western classics in the East, the impact of contemporary Chinese cinema upon both native and Western audiences, and the use of Western generic novel conventions in modern Egyptian literature.

L’identité, a toujours semblé dire Pierre Savard, ne doit pas être cherchée dans ce qui isole, ce qui sépare. Elle est une construction spécifique dont la dynamique, riche de la quantité ainsi que de la diversité des relations et des pratiques dont elle s’est nourrie, finit par exercer sur ces dernières une grande influence. C’est à ce dialogue entre les constructions identitaires et les pratiques sociales qu’a été consacré ce colloque, tenu à l’Université d’Ottawa et dédié à la mémoire de Pierre Savard. Les textes réunis en ces pages sont le fruit de cette rencontre pluridisciplinaire, qui, en plus de rendre hommage à un collègue trop tôt disparu, a présenté une vingtaine de communications tournant autour d’un thème très présent dans les débats actuels en sciences humaines, celui des constructions identitaires. Le colloque a voulu notamment mettre en évidence comment les acteurs, collectifs aussi bien qu’individuels, font et refont leur identité, et s’en servent, le plus souvent inconsciemment, pour orienter leurs activités; et comment, en retour, ils laissent aux pratiques le soin de donner une coloration particulière à leur identité. Puissent tous les articles issus de cette rencontre perpétuer le souvenir de Pierre Savard, l’homme et le scientifique, le professeur et l’éternel voyageur, celui qui, partout où il se trouvait, éveillait sympathie et enthousiasme.

Warriors, Martyrs, and Dervishes: Moving Frontiers, Shifting Identities in the Land of Rome (13th-15th Centuries) focuses on the perceptions of geopolitical and cultural change on Byzantine territories between thirteenth and fifteenth centuries through intersecting stories on Turkish Muslim warriors, dervishes, and Byzantine martyrs.

If, as we believe, the history of languages is the history of the construction of an ideal artefact that permits a specific interpretation of the linguistic reality and helps to approve and assimilate a certain zone of diversity, enabling the accumulation of collective historical knowledge and making us identify it with a social community and a territory, then it must be agreed that languages are extremely complex entities. The new linguistic diversity that cultural globalisation and recent population movements have installed in most traditional linguistic territories has probably put the ideology of the national language into a state of crisis and, as a consequence, has made the ancient, intrinsic diversity of all languages visible, at least to the extent that this is still possible. Nowadays, then, the old linguistic diversity of dialects, of parlances, of local lexicons and the cultural forms that are reflected in these, of varieties and previously unsuccessful linguistic entities has been given a new opportunity in a world where the cohesion of societies and the welfare of citizens must be guaranteed using all available means. Looked at this way, the intricacy of languages may even open up an opportunity for local economic and social development.

"The lists were written by Byzantines who believed that western Christians had fallen into heresy and impiety. Systematically addressing each fault enumerated in the lists - including the Filioque, fasting on the Sabbath, prohibiting clerical marriage, eating unclean food, and crossing themselves the wrong way - Kolbaba traces the likely explanations of the differences in custom and ritual between eastern and western Christians."--BOOK JACKET.