Background:
Bessora is a French writer, born in Brussels from a Gabonese father and a Swiss mother. She has lived in many countries including the US. After studying finance and anthropology, she now dedicates herself to writing. She is the author of seven novels and three collections of short stories.
Bessora’s writings focus on the Representations of identity, taboos and the need to categorize people. She questions the path to finding one’s own identity and the difficulty of relationships in a globalized and technology-oriented world.
Bessora will present Cyr@no, her latest novel published in 2011 by Belfond. Cyr@no is a free reinterpretation of the play by Edmond Rostand Cyrano de Bergerac. Roxane is a XXIst century actress, Cyrano her imaginary friend, Christian her former lover, and Cyr@no the avatar Roxane created on the net in an attempt to regain the love of Christian. Her witty and funny story mixing slang, numeric language and language from the XVIIth century is a satire of the constant readjustment of identity, promoted by the web.
For more information, please contact fll-events@mit.edu
Date: Tuesday March 5, 2013
Time: 5:00 PM
Location: E51-057
Come practice your Portuguese speaking skills in a relaxing setting. Improve your pronunciation, build up your vocabulary and enjoy one hour of fun learning about the Lusophone cultures.
Thursday March 7, 2013
Thursday April 4, 2013
Thursday May 2, 2013
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Room 14N-417
Free and open to the community!
Book Launch:
"The Soul of Anime"
Professor Ian Condry (MIT FLL / CMS)
Why is Japan the world leader in animation? Come hear anthropologist Ian Condry give a multimedia presentation on his newly published book "The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story" (2013, Duke University Press), which is based on fieldwork in Tokyo's leading animation studios and includes a behind-the-scenes look at famed director Mamoru Hosoda's creative process.
Date: Thursday March 14, 2013
Time: 4:00-5:30 PM
Location: E51-149
Film Screening:
"Wolf Children" (2012, Dir. Hosoda, Japan) - New England Premiere!!
Anime screening followed by Q/A with director Mamoru Hosoda
MIT COOL JAPAN is thrilled to present the brilliant third feature from Mamoru Hosoda, whose Summer Wars (2009) and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) have established him as one of the world’s top creative forces in animation. One day Hana spies a mysterious outcast sitting in on her college lecture. A romance ensues, even though her new beau is part wolf. Before long Hana gives birth to two children, Ame (Rain) and Yuki (Snow), rambunctious bundles of joy who share their father's secret. Brimming with Hosoda’s trademark visual splendor, Wolf Children is his most emotionally resonant film to date, a stunningly animated and heart-felt fable about growing up, growing apart, and the choices faced along the way. Appropriate for all ages. Japanese w/ English subtitles.
Date: Thursday March 14, 2013
Time: 7:00 PM (one screening only)
Location: 26-100
Both events free and open to the public
Special thanks to Studio Chizu, NTV, Funimation, MIT Japan, and ANA for their support.
For more information, please contact fll-events@mit.edu
The Foreign Languages and Literatures section is pleased to announce the opening of The MIT Research Seminar in French and Francophone Studies. RSFFS aims to bring together MIT faculty, instructors, and graduate students interested in the study of French and francophone cultures across disciplines.
Each semester, leading American and international scholars in the field of French and francophone studies will present their research. RSFFS will also be a space for discussing current research projects by MIT faculty, instructors, and graduate students, as well as recent readings and translations.
If you want to contribute yourself, or discuss a specific reading or theme, please contact: Professor Bruno Perreau (bperreau@mit.edu)
For more information, please contact fll-events@mit.edu
Program for Spring 2013
Sex Talk, Race Talk, Empire Talk: The “Arab Man” in French Debates about Violence and Sex in the 1970s
Professor Todd Shepard (Johns Hopkins)
Todd Shepard will explore how French discussions over the course of the 1970s about sodomy and rape which in many other ways replicated debates then taking place in the US and elsewhere turned around the figure of the “Arab man.” While scholars at the time (notably feminists and Foucault) remarked that these discussions raised crucial questions about the relationship between “acts” and “identities,” Todd Shepard suggests that they were also sites where questions about empire, racism, and colonial violence (notably the Algerian War) shaped understanding of how politics functioned.
Todd Shepard is Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of the Program in the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Johns Hopkins University. His first book The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006) won numerous awards, including The Council of European Studies’ 2008 Book Prize. He is now working on three book projects: Voices of Decolonization (A Brief History with Documents) (forthcoming, Bedford/St. Martin); La France, le sexe et les arabes (1962 à 1979) (forthcoming, Payot); and Affirmative Action and the End of Empires: ‘Integration’ in France(1956-1962) and the Race Question in the Cold War World.
Date: Tuesday April 2, 2013
Time: 5:00 PM
Location: 14E-304
Around the World in Eighty Moves: Bets, Races, and a Brief History of the Game of the Goose
Professor Marie-Hélène Huet (Princeton)
In her talk, Marie-Hélène Huet will examine the origins of the game of the goose and its role in an adventure novel written by Jules Verne in 1900: Le Testament d’un excentrique (The Will of an Eccentric).
Marie-Hélène Huet is M. Taylor Pyne Professor of French at Princeton. Professor Huet has written extensively on cultural history, historiography, 18th- and 19th- century literature, and the French Enlightenment. She is the author of L’Histoire des voyages extraordinaires, Essai sur l’oeuvre de Jules Verne (Minard, 1973); Le Héros et son double (Corti, 1975); Rehearsing the Revolution. The Staging of Marat’s Death, 1793-1797 (University of California Press, 1982); Monstrous Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1993), which was awarded the Harry Levin Prize in Comparative Literature; Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and The Culture of Disaster (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Fall 2012).
Date: Monday April 22, 2013
Time: 4:30 PM
Location: 14E-304
Soccer Empire: Thinking Empire, Immigration, and Race Through Sport
Professor Laurent Dubois (Duke)
In this discussion, Laurent Dubois will present a chapter from his book ‘Soccer Empire’ and discuss some of the methodological and theoretical questions raised by using soccer as a way to think through the history of French empire, decolonization, and immigration. How does the study of sport -- which remains relatively marginal in French Studies -- allow us to re-think our approach to the categories of analysis and methods we use in understanding these topics?”
Laurent Dubois, a specialist in the history and culture of France and the Caribbean, is Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University, and co-director of the Haiti laboratory of the Franklin Humanities Institute. He is the author of most recently, of Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (University of California Press) and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (Metropolitan Books, 2012).
Date: Thursday May 2, 2013
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: 14E-304
David Novak (Assistant Professor,Music Department University of California Santa Barbara) Author, Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation
David Novak’s work deals with the globalization of popular music, media technologies, experimental culture, and social practices of listening. He is the author of recent essays in Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, and Popular Music, as well as the book Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke University Press). NOISE, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience, despite remaining deeply underground.
HOW did the submergent circulations of Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization, intercultural exchange and participatory media at the turn of the millennium? Novak will trace the “cultural feedback” of Noise through the productive distortions of its mediated networks: its recorded forms, technologies of live performance, and into the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners.
Date: Thursday April 4, 2013
Time: 5:00 PM
Location: 4-231
Sponsors: CoolJapan Research Project, MIT Comparative Media Studies, MIT Foreign Languages & Literatures
For more information, please contact fll-events@mit.edu or Prof. Ian Condry, condry@mit.edu
Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History and Ethnic Studies Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA), Brown University
Date: Thursday April 4, 2013
Time: 4:00-5:30 PM
Location: W20-491
For more information, please contact fll-events@mit.edu
MIT Foreign Languages & Literatures, with the support of Camões, Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua, Portugal, presents:
A Conversation with Award-Winning Portuguese Author, Dulce Maria Cardoso
Dulce Maria Cardoso, born in Northern Portugal in 1964, is one of today’s most important Portuguese literary voices. After having spent her childhood in Angola, she returned to Portugal in 1975, shortly after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution and Angola’s declaration of independence. She earned a law degree at the University of Lisbon, worked as an attorney and wrote multiple scripts for cinema. Her premier novel, Campo de Sangue, published in 2002, and written with the support of a Fund for Literary Creation from the Portuguese Culture Ministry, was distinguished with the Acontece de Romance Grand Prize. Cardoso has since received other prestigious prizes for her work, such as the European Union Prize for Literature in 2009 for Os Meus Sentimentos and the Portuguese PEN Prize 2011 for O Chão dos Pardais. O Retorno, her latest novel, has been acclaimed by both critics and readers alike, and was awarded the Special Prize of the Critics 2011 in Portugal and selected as Book of the Year 2011. Her books have been translated into multiple languages and have been published in France, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Serbia, and the Netherlands.
Light dinner will be served.
Date: Tuesday May 7, 2013
Time: 5:30 PM
Location: 14E-304
For more information, please contact fll-events@mit.edu
