After French at Stirling: 50 years on…

It is definitely a sign of how busy things have been at Stirling since the start of the year that it’s already the end of March and this is our first blog post of 2024 but it’s a great one to get us started again!

We’re always happy to highlight the progress of our graduates but in this blog post we are delighted to share reflections that go back further than usual. Russ Walker is celebrating fifty years since his graduation from Stirling, and reflecting on what a degree in French led to…

“I graduated from the University of Stirling in the summer of 1974 – hard to believe that it will be fifty years this summer. A degree in French – what to do with it?

I had a chance to work as an ‘intelligence agent’ (spy? they never said) and an opportunity of a post on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean. Instead, I spent my working life based in Scotland in jobs where French was not a requirement. However, it proved surprisingly useful in many of my postings and in my other interests.

The first half of my working career was involved with General Register Office for Scotland which organised and ran the recording of all births, deaths and marriages in Scotland along with the population census. To my surprise, in my first month I found myself back in Paris at the Palais du Luxembourg translating for registration colleagues at the annual meeting of the CIEC – the International Commission on Civil Status.

In the following years we returned as observers at annual conferences in Madrid, Salzburg and Cesme (Turkey), even being invited to present a paper in French on the new Scottish Marriage Law.  I worked on the team that took the new law through Parliament.

As a graduate civil service recruit, I undertook a number of lengthy training courses in London. One of these involved a week studying at ENA Paris (Ecole Nationale d’Adminstration) where we twinned with the future top administrators of France. Emmanuel Macron was a later graduate but went on to close it down.

I was part of the team planning and preparing the 1981 population census and then took charge of overseeing the census in the Edinburgh and Lothians area. This involved around 2,000 temporary workers at a time when the census involved house to house visits.

For most of the 1980s I was a travelling inspector checking and visiting registrars across western Scotland covering the area from the Isle of Lewis down to Gretna. Scotland was covered by three of us with the grand title of “District Examiner” – one of the best jobs it was possible to have! I married and moved back to the Glasgow area. I was free to plan my own timetable and spent many pleasant summer weeks on Lewis, Harris, Barra, the Uists, Skye, Islay and the smaller islands – saving Glasgow and the larger offices for winter visits! It was a great way to learn about my native land and what was happening locally.

My travelling life stopped in 1992 and the second part of my career was a complete change. I started working for the Scottish Government initially on government assistance grants to companies creating new jobs. There were many interesting and ambitious local companies looking for assistance to expand including some of the computer games companies which were just beginning to emerge at that time.

I followed that with a lengthy secondment to Scottish Enterprise, our business development agency, working firstly in the Locate in Scotland (LIS) briefing team. LIS was charged with bringing in and supporting investment from outside the country and we were kept busy briefing government ministers announcing new investment and job creation in some of the new, emerging industries. There were usually lots of TV and newspaper coverage at these events.  Later I took on the German desk (!), supported by my very capable colleague Heike, a formidable Glaswegian German. I followed that with the renewable energy remit, a sector which was just emerging at that point. At that time too I participated in some EU-based courses in Brussels, conducted in French (of course).

The final part of my career was a return to the Scottish Government in various parts of its International relations interests. We ran an international network called ‘Friends of Scotland’ and developed web based material to promote Scotland internationally, with the aim of growing our trade, investment, influence and networks.

One memorable project involved a close connection to my time at Stirling. I had spent the second semester of my third year studies in Montpellier. One of our ‘Friends’ offered the opportunity to leave a permanent reminder there – the partial restoration of Sir Patrick Geddes garden in Montpellier and the installation of a copy of Geddes bust at the College des Écossais – now one of the main centres for courses for teachers in the Hérault. When I was there in 1973 I had no idea then about the college nor any knowledge of Sir Patrick Geddes!

Geddes has since reappeared as one of the great environmentalists and his phrase – Think Global Act Local – is used around the world so it was nostalgic to return to Montpellier for the unveiling of the bust and the project itself was well covered by an article in The Scotsman.

In my personal life I was able to use my French quite regularly for many years. My department was very supportive of assisting further learning so I took a number of courses at the French Institute in Edinburgh including its Diploma in Commercial French as well as enjoying some French Government sponsored courses in France (a week visiting Champagne producers around Reims, for example!)

I was quite involved in athletics for many years and as part of its European City of Culture in 1990, Glasgow hosted the European Indoor Championships. I helped to recruit most of the interpreter/liaison volunteers to work with the overseas teams and I acted in that capacity for the French team. An Italian/Ugandan friend from my Stirling days came up do the same with the Italian team.

Another interest is in philately – stamps, postal history, postcards etc – and that has called on my French from time to time. I attended the Salon Philatélique d’Automne for a few years helping some dealer friends sell material to French collectors. We also established very friendly links to the New Caledonia stamp club (Caledonia being the initial link!) and I gave a presentation to its members in the Maison de la Nouvelle Calédonie near the Paris Opera. I am now investigating whether my fairly large collection of French North Africa might be of interest to the university. Over the centenary years of the First World War my philatelic society worked with the French Institute and Goethe Institute in Glasgow to put on a number of displays there showing material from the war.

And Brel? Well we did organise a memorial dinner for more than 20 at Bar Brel in Glasgow to mark the 25^th anniversary of his death. Of course with ‘frites et moules’.

Il nous fallut bien du talent
Pour être vieux sans être adultes

Finally, another memory from Stirling in the summer of 1974. Monty Python came to film nearby at Doune. The University invited 175 students to take part in a Python battle scene in its May 20 1974 newsletter. The advert stated: “While pay for the day is rather humble at £2 a head, transport to and from the film set is free, as is the food, including elevenses, hot lunch and tea. An added attraction, of course, will be a bunch of crazy antics coupled with the fact that the film is a full feature length film – going out on international release. Transport, in the form of buses, will be leaving from the back of Pathfoot at 8am (on May 25) – yes, that early, so that the makeup and costume girls can do a good job on you. Who knows, this could be your chance for stardom!”

I volunteered along with our two French Assistantes – we have dined out on that story ever since!”

So many of our graduates have gone on to such a diverse range of careers, further studies and adventures after they’ve completed their studies at Stirling but this has to be one of the most diverse posts we’ve been able to add so many, many thanks to Russ for taking the time to send this through and we look forward to tales of further French-related adventures.

  

From Cincinnati to Saarbrücken: Stirling’s September

As well as heralding the start of a new academic year for our students, September also saw French at Stirling staff giving invited lectures at conferences in Germany and the US.

On 6 September, Bill Marshall was invited to give a guest lecture at Saint Louis University entitled ‘Rethinking Francophone Film: World Cinemas and World History’ and a keynote at the World Cinema and Television in French Conference at the University of Cincinnati. These talks sought to link the question of cinéma-monde to the longue durée of world history, via four films: A tout prendre (Jutra, 1963), Quest for Fire (Annaud, 1981), Avant les rues (Leriche, 2016) and Stavisky (Resnais, 1974).

From 29 September to 2 October, Fiona Barclay was an invited speaker at the 10th annual conference of the Francoromanistes allemands, which took place at Saarbrücken in Germany. Dr Barclay was invited to speak on the subject of ghosts and haunting North Africa, and her lecture was accompanied by a number of papers on the same broad theme delivered by delegates from across Germany, the United States, France and Morocco. The conference also benefited from the presence of Kebir Mustapha Ammi, the Moroccan-born novelist, who participated in the scholarly debates, and who gave a well-attended reading of his work during one of the evening events. Intriguingly, Kebir Ammi cites Scotland as his favourite area of the UK, and the work of Robert Louis Stevenson as one of the earliest influences on his writing. Perhaps Stirling will have the opportunity to invite him to renew his ties with Scotland in the near future!

In coming weeks, Stirling colleagues will be giving invited papers in Liverpool, at the Africa in Motion film festival, in Dakar and in Montpellier… And French at Stirling staff will be giving lectures and introductory talks at public and schools screenings as part of the annual French Film Festival at the MacRobert in November. We’re also hoping to welcome one of our Erasmus partners, Laurence Gourievidis, from Blaise-Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand to Stirling in early-December. News on all of these to follow…

Islam in Francophone Culture – PG Study Day

Jamal Bahmad, one of our PhD students, recently organised a Postgraduate Study Day at Stirling, examining the location of Islam in Francophone Cultures from a range of different perspectives. Here’s his report on the day’s events:

SFPS Postgraduate Study Day

“Allah n’est pas obligé: The Location of Islam in Francophone Cultures”

The 2013 postgraduate study day of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies took place at the University of Stirling on 20 June. The event was co-sponsored by the host institution. Doctoral and postdoctoral researchers from four continents came together to debate the location of Islam in Francophone cultures. The choice of theme was motivated by the insufficient amount of scholarship on Islam in Francophone postcolonial studies. Rigorous scholarship on the location of Islam in the French-speaking world, past and present, is susceptible of yielding novel ways of seeing in Francophone postcolonial cultural studies. The study day was also motivated by the belief that young researchers in the field are best positioned and stand to gain a great deal from paying critical attention to Francophone Islam in an increasingly interconnected world.

Divided into three panels, a publishing workshop and a keynote address, the study day examined the history and current trends in the cultural representations of Islam around the Francophone world. Under the heading ‘Screening Islam’, the first panel addressed the location of this faith system as an everyday practice and political ideology in the production and reception of North African cinema. In her paper, Stefanie Van de Peer (University of St Andrews) explored the politics of laïcité in the often controversial reception of Nadia El Fani’s documentary films. The next speaker, Rym Ouartsi (King’s College London), presented a critical account of the polemical reception of Laila Marrakchi’s Marock (2005) in her native Morocco. The feature film was panned by the Islamists and defended by the secular forces in a polarised public sphere. Finally, Jamal Bahmad (University of Stirling) provided a contrapuntal analysis of Islam in Marock. Through a close reading of the structuring absence of the urban poor in this accented autoethnography of Casablanca’s French-speaking upper class, he unveiled the spectral role of radical Islam in subverting Marrakchi’s project of granting postcolonial agency to her suburban characters.

The second panel looked at Islam in Francophone Europe through two papers by Amina Easat-Daas (Aston University) and Chloé Gill-Khan (University of South Australia). The first speaker examined some methodological questions in her current research project on political participation amongst second-generation Muslim women in France and Francophone Belgium. Gill-Khan’s paper explored how Islam has emerged as a critical paradigm in the literary and cinematic articulations of North African identities in France since the 1980s.

The last panel comprised three papers with a shared focus on Western literary and historical representations of Islam and the Muslim world since the eighteenth century. In the first paper, Mauro Di Lullo (University of Stirling) looked at violence and terror in Jean Genet’s encounter with the Muslim world. The next speaker, Kirsty Bennett (University of Sussex), examined Isabelle Eberhardt’s invention of her Islamic identity in opposition to French colonial power in Algeria. Lastly, Karima Lahrach-Maynard (New York University) delivered a comparative reading of the representations of Islam in France during the crusades of Saint Louis and the Egypt Expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte.

David Murphy (University of Stirling) led a publishing workshop with a focus on the implications of recent developments in academic publishing for young researchers in Francophone postcolonial studies. He offered practical advice to an audience of postgraduate and early-career researchers on how to survive and prosper in a rapidly changing job environment. Getting published enough in the right places at the right time are essential survival skills to find a (stable) job and get established as an academic.

The study day concluded with a keynote address by Phil Dine (National University of Ireland, Galway). It was a very incisive and original survey of the place of Islam in the evolution of colonial and postcolonial discourses and societies in North Africa and metropolitan France. He spoke to key historical periods and seminal colonial and postcolonial texts across a variety of genres and fields. Dr. Dine considered their accumulative contribution to shaping North African subjectivity in its diversity and worldliness from pre-colonial times to the ‘Arab Spring’ protests.

Jamal Bahmad (University of Stirling)