Happy European Day of Languages!

For the past few years, as our way of celebrating the European Day of Languages (tomorrow – 26 September 2020), we’ve posted articles with details of the wide and varied range of languages spoken by students and staff in French at Stirling. Every year, the list changes slightly and every year, we’re amazed to see just how multilingual a group we are, and this year is no different. Once again, amidst the bustle of the first fortnight of a new semester, our students have kindly taken the time to send details of their languages, and, this year in particular, we really are grateful to them for having done so.

And so, with no further ado, here’s this year’s list! Staff and students at Stirling speak (in no particular order): French, Spanish, English, Catalan, Italian, Russian, German, Turkish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Varesotto dialect, Portuguese, Mandarin, Romanian, Arabic, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Serbian, Scots Gaelic, Norwegian, Latin, Cantonese, Pavese dialect, Greek, Armenian, Hungarian, Korean, Basque, Japanese, Bulgarian, Welsh, Asturian…

And, in keeping with our annual tradition, to all those who took the time to get back to us: merci, gracias, thank you, gràcie, grazie, Спасибо, Dankeschön, teşekkürler, dziękuje, díky¸ vďaka, hvala, Obrigada, xie xie, Mulțumesc,  شكرا , Dank je, kiitos, tack, hvala, Tapadh Leibh, Tusen takk, Grātiās tibi ago, 唔該 , at ringrasi, Ευχαριστώ, Շնորհակալությունy, köszönöm, 감사합니다, eskerrikasko, Arigatou, Благодаря, diolch, gracies…

I’m sure there are others out there, too, spoken by other colleagues and students so, if you’re reading this and your language or languages aren’t in the list, feel free to drop me an email and I’ll very happily add to this. Mainly, though, a Happy European Day of Languages to everyone!

Petit Pays: From Week 1 teaching to conferences

It’s hard to believe that we’re already reaching the end of Week 1 of our new academic year at Stirling and we’ll hopefully get a chance to post some news about what we’ve all been up to over the next little while. For the moment, though, I’m really pleased to be able to post the following article by our colleague, Hannah Grayson, who has been doubly busy this week with Week 1 teaching, on the one hand, and a presentation at a conference, on the other:

‘When I read of one of our students reading Petit Pays by Gaël Faye on his time abroad, I wanted to write a short post to encourage more people to do so! A couple of students who were in touch with me over the summer looking for reading recommendations have already been pointed to this text, but the more readers the merrier.

I spoke about this text this week as part of a virtual research workshop hosted by the University of Warwick and organised by Pierre-Philippe Fraiture. The workshop was titled ‘Central Africa and Belgium: Empire and Postcolonial Resonance‘ and the range of papers interrogated all kinds of connections between the past and present, forms of cultural representation, and ongoing debates about decolonising museums. All kinds of things our French at Stirling students cover in their modules. My paper was titled ‘Récit d’enfance, récit de distance. Gaby as implicated subject in Gaël Faye’s Petit Pays’.

Petit Pays, published in 2016, has received critical acclaim for its lyrical depiction of a childhood universe set alongside the violence of Burundi’s civil war and the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It tells the childhood story of Gabriel (or Gaby) as he comes of age in Burundi. We are given a picture of his everyday life, and gradually the disruption and destruction of various forms of violence, both at a domestic and broader regional level.

A number of critics who’ve examined Petit Pays have claimed the story is about a ‘paradis perdu’ or lost paradise where the perfect innocence of childhood is interrupted by the violence of war and genocide. I disagree with these readings, and find that instead the text shows a far more complex, ambivalent, and therefore more interesting experience of childhood. The protagonist, Gaby, gets involved in all kinds of scuffles, but what the author really brings to fore is the number of small-scale moral dilemmas he faces.

I spoke about this presentation of a child as an ‘implicated subject’, using a term proposed by Michael Rothberg in his 2019 work The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. With ‘implicated subject’, Rothberg provides an umbrella category for those who participate in injustice, but in indirect ways. My previous research into the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda has focused on the stories of adults who lived through it, so it was fascinating for me to consider this figure of Gaby as a child protagonist who is entangled in all kinds of systems of privilege and power. Anybody interested in reading/talking about this more can get in touch with me.

Beyond all this, it’s a great read. So I wish you bonne lecture!’

Many, many thanks, Hannah, for having found the time to write and send through the blog post, and enjoy the rest of the conference!

New Semester!

And we’re off! Today was the first day of our new semester and new academic year at Stirling and we’d just like to welcome and welcome back all our students. Whether you’re starting Year 1 or entering your final year, we’re looking forward to working with you, and getting to know you, over the semesters ahead. It’s going to be a rather strange semester, of course, with online delivery our norm for the time being and there will be technical challenges to work around, not to mention the general strangeness of not actually being in the same space as our students, but we’ll get there.

There’ll be more news and more detail over the days and weeks ahead but, in the first instance, we just wanted to say hello and welcome (back)!