Over the past 25 years, Rwanda has undergone remarkable shifts and transitions: culturally, economically, and educationally the country has gone from strength to strength. While much scholarship has understandably been retrospective, seeking to understand, document and commemorate the Genocide against the Tutsi, this volume gathers diverse perspectives on the changing social and cultural fabric of Rwanda since 1994. Rwanda Since 1994 considers the context of these changes, particularly in relation to the ongoing importance of remembering and in wider developments in the Great Lakes and East Africa regions. Equally it explores what stories of change are emerging from Rwanda: creative writing and testimonies, as well as national, regional, and international political narratives. The contributors interrogate which frameworks and narratives might be most useful for understanding different kinds of change, what new directions are emerging, and how Rwanda's trajectory is shaped by other global factors. The international set of contributors includes creative writers, practitioners, activists, and scholars from African studies, history, anthropology, education, international relations, modern languages, law and politics. As well as delving into the shifting dynamics of religion and gender in Rwanda today, the book brings to light the experiences of lesser-discussed groups of people such as the Twa and the children of perpetrators.

Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France offers a critical assessment of the ways in which French writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists descended from immigrants from former colonial territories bring their specificity to bear on the bounds and applicability of French republicanism, "Frenchness" and national identity, and contemporary cultural production in France. In mobilizing a range of approaches and methodologies pertinent to their specialist fields of inquiry, contributors to this volume share in the common objective of elucidating the cultural productions of what we are calling post-migratory (second- and third-generation) postcolonial minorities. The volume provides a lens through which to query the dimensions of postcoloniality and transnationalism in relation to post-migratory postcolonial minorities in France and identifies points of convergence and conversation among them in the range of their cultural production. The cultural practitioners considered query traditional French high culture and its pathways and institutions; some emerge as autodidacts, introducing new forms of authorship and activism; they inflect French cultural production with differen 'accents', some experimental and even avant-garde in nature. As the volume contributors show, though post-migratory postcolonial minorities sometimes express dis-settlement, they also provide an incisive view of social identities in France today and their own compelling visions for the future.

The 2007 manifesto in favour of a 'Littérature-monde en français' has generated new debates in both 'francophone' and 'postcolonial' studies. Praised by some for breaking down the hierarchical division between 'French' and 'Francophone' literatures, the manifesto has been criticized by others for recreating that division through an exoticizing vision that continues to privilege the publishing industry of the former colonial métropole. Does the manifesto signal the advent of a new critical paradigm destined to render obsolescent those of 'francophone' and/or 'postcolonial' studies? Or is it simply a passing fad, a glitzy but ephemeral publicity stunt generated and promoted by writers and publishing executives vis-à-vis whom scholars and critics should maintain a skeptical distance? Does it offer an all-embracing transnational vista leading beyond the confines of postcolonialism or reintroduce an incipient form of neocolonialism even while proclaiming the end of the centre/periphery divide? In addressing these questions, leading scholars of 'French', 'Francophone' and 'postcolonial' studies from around the globe help to assess the wider question of the evolving status of French Studies as a transnational field of study amid the challenges of globalization.

Postcolonial literature has often tended to invite readings that focus on the relation between texts and political contexts, not surprisingly perhaps, given the fraught historical moments of colonialism and decolonisation with which it frequently engages. Nevertheless, critics such as Nicholas Harrison have argued for attention to the literary as literary, and have explored the ways in which literary representation makes any assumed ideological content necessarily indeterminate. Taking into account this call for attention to the literary, this volume investigates more specifically the idiosyncrasies of postcolonial poetics, including postcolonial literature’s use of and experimentation with genre and form. However, this attention to poetics is not intended to replace political engagement, and, rather than privileging the literary at the expense of the political, this volume analyses how texts use genre and form to offer multiple distinct ways of responding to political and historical questions. Postcolonial texts engage with the political world in a variety of ways, directly or indirectly, and it is in their specific uses of genre and form that they alter or develop our understanding of the particular contexts with which they grapple. According to Graham Huggan, postcolonial studies is inherently plural and interdisciplinary, in that it is made up of literary and cultural analysis as well as political theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, history and philosophy. It is in the combination and manipulation of such forms of analysis that postcolonialism is able to imagine alternative identities and societies. This volume of postcolonial poetics therefore probes some examples of different kinds of literary writing, its blurring with other discourses and its manipulation of genre and form, in order to achieve a better understanding of its transformatory power.This exploration of the poetics of genre also sheds light on how different kinds of texts offer specific, distinct modes of thought.