IAS is pleased to announce our new interim director Professor Subha Xavier. In addition to actively serving as a core faculty member of the Institute of African Studies, Prof. Xavier is an associate professor in the Department of French and Italian Studies.
Professor Xavier’s first book, The Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global French Literature (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016) brings together a corpus of recent novels by immigrants to France and Quebec, suggesting that these diverse works extend beyond familiar labels such as francophone and postcolonial to forge a new mode of writing that deserves recognition on its own terms. Xavier shows how both external and internal factors shape migrant production in contemporary French literature, arguing that these texts should be situated precisely at the intersection of the financial mandates of literary production and the textual strategies the writer deploys to resist—but also profit from—these conditions. Xavier proposes a new framework for studying immigrant writing as a strategic mode of materialist practice that combines — but does not defer to — postcolonial theory, racial politics and nationalist discourses.
Her second monograph, now nearing completion is entitled Transcultural Fantasies: China, France and the History of Sino-French Literary Exchange. Surveying over a century of cultural relations between China and France, the book disentangles the complexities of translation and mis-translation that occur as cultural products travel across languages, cultures and thought traditions. Drawing on a diverse archive of comparative French and Chinese thought — from 19th century race theory to world politics and modernist philosophy — Transcultural Fantasies illuminates the fraught dynamics of a recent body of literary and film texts by Chinese authors in France, who cull a fragile beauty from the onerous weight of the past.
Subha Xavier is also working on a third project entitled Wretched of the Sea: Migrant Boat Narratives that considers refugee crossings from an international perspective, reexamining the legacy of slave and war narratives in the context of present-day mass migrations and climate change.