Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music

This publication benefited from the support of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame.

This collective volume concentrates on the concept of transposition, exploring its potential as a lens through which to examine recent Francophone literary, cinematic, theatrical, musical, and artistic creations that reveal multilingual and multicultural realities. The chapters are composed by leading scholars in French and Francophone Studies who engage in interdisciplinary reflections on the ways transcontinental movement has influenced diverse genres. It begins with the premise that an attentiveness to migration has inspired writers, artists, filmmakers, playwrights and musicians to engage in new forms of translation in their work. Their own diverse backgrounds combine with their awareness of the itineraries of others to have an impact on the innovative languages that emerge in their creative production. These contemporary figures realize that migratory actualities must be transposed into different linguistic and cultural contexts in order to be legible and audible, in order to be perceptible―either for the reader, the listener, or the viewer. The novels, films, plays, works of art and musical pieces that exemplify such transpositions adopt inventive elements that push the limits of formal composition in French. This work is therefore often inspiring as it points in evocative ways toward fluid influences and a plurality of interactions that render impossible any static conception of being or belonging.