This chapter thinks about ways that language is lived interstitially – between registers, accents, national histories, and personal travels – as something that (embarrassingly) always spills out or crops up when one is least ready for it to do so, revealing or mis-revealing a particular linguistic genealogy. Looking closely at Québécois poet Michèle Lalonde’s iconic 1967 poem-manifesto Speak White, and various recorded performances of this poem by speakers offering distinctive manners of accenting or pronouncing the bilingual (English–French) relations and agonisms enacted in the poem, this chapter further reflects autoethnographically or autocritically at ways the author’s own transnational and hybrid relation to these languages further helps to complicate national and international narratives. At once personal and political, historical, and critical, the chapter reflects on ways that language performatively offers an affective archive of one’s embodied and ancestral trajectories, and fails ever quite to account for how we experience the migrations and misalignments of our everyday.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian elite used a plethora of languages, situated in a complex web of shifting social values. This chapter charts the development of this multilingualism. Looking closely at the nature of language hierarchies in imperial Russia through a close study of a variety of archival materials, it questions the oft-repeated narrative of a Russian high society speaking predominantly French, to the detriment of their Russian skills. The chapter also examines whether the Russian case is, as is often claimed, unique, and argues that multilingualism in Russia shared characteristics with elite multilingualism found in other places and times.

In this chapter, I provide a historical and linguistic account of the ways in which French was introduced and spread to some parts of the African continent and then diversified along a basilect-to-acrolect continuum. I show the different communicative functions it plays in the new ecologies where it evolved. In environments where major African languages are used as vehicular languages, French enjoys limited communicative functions, mainly restricted to formal interactions such as in school, public administration, and government. Conversely, in ecologies where no indigenous lingua franca had emerged, it is used in daily interactions to communicate across ethnolinguistic groups. I then address the questions of why schooling hasn’t contributed to the spread of French in the post-colonial era despite the significant increase of the school population and why it has not speciated into different regional varieties drastically different from those of the former metropoles (viz., France and Belgium). Finally, I present contrastive examples of Camfranglais/Francanglais (Cameroun) and Nouchi (Côte d’Ivoire) and argue that the latter may be the only variety that has speciated into a new one very different from that of France.

This chapter engages with the tensions between periphery and centre that are displayed by all forms of world crime fiction but that are especially telling in crime fiction in French. The notion of ‘French crime fiction’ is analysed, including the tensions inherent in Frenchness itself (the Francophone debate) and those between literature and genre fiction. Case studies include the nouveau roman, especially Michel Butor’s Passing Time, which stages the rules of crime fiction while simultaneously mapping them overseas; the nexus formed by Albert Camus’ The Outsider and Kamal Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation; the territorial and literary double spaces of Didier Daeninckx’s Murder in Memoriam; and questions of decapitation in Georges Simenon’s Maigret and the Headless Corpse and Marguerite Duras’s L’Amante anglaise. Additionally, the relationship between France, the Caribbean and Québec is traced in the genre-bending works of Maryse Condé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Fred Vargas and Anne Hébert. Through these texts, their points of intersection and their generic and geographical movements, crime fiction in French will be shown to exemplify the mobilities of world crime fiction.

This chapter theorizes francophone international theatre festivals as sites of cultural struggle where aesthetic judgements are negotiated alongside political agendas via notions of human universalism and cultural difference. It explores how artists from France’s former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean navigate the festival circuit: how they are categorized and how they resist, subvert, benefit from, and transform festival structures. The first part focuses on the precarious positioning of post-colonial artists on Avignon’s mainstages. The second examines the festivals, in Limoges and New York, that played major roles in constructing an image of ‘Francophone theatre’, a term associated with non-French, often post-colonial, French-language playwrights. Lastly, a brief history of Aimé Césaire’s Festival of Fort-de-France, positioned in opposition to the presumed centrality of France, illuminates how this Caribbean-based festival repurposes French notions of republican universalism. It concludes by gesturing towards recent festivals as new models for cultural exchange that circumvent France to support works by African writers and foster civic participation.