Cities, those concentrated centres of human energy, exert their own form of gravity. They pull in people, resources and capital, and transmute these ingredients into what is considered metropolitan progress. But the cultural glare of cities tends to throw everything that is not-city into the shade. Terms devised to describe everything that exists at the periphery of cities – the regions, the provinces – are often used pejoratively.
But can there ever be a real divide between a centre and its periphery? Neither has an existence without the other. And this may be also true of nation-building culture, argues UNE Associate Professor Valentina Gosetti. Metropolitan centres may be the crucible of the intellectual activity that defines an age, but the provinces make their own particular contributions, each carrying the unique imprint of locality.
Backed by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award, Gosetti is now deep into a project that seeks to identify how much of the work of nation-building might occur, unsung, beyond cities. Titled “Provincial Poets and the Making of a Nation”, Gosetti’s work focuses on the literature of France. The French nation exemplifies the centre-periphery model: Paris is so central to French-language thought that it is the norm against which cultural difference is measured.
“My aim is to rediscover and analyse prominent regional voices swept aside by the powerful forces constructing national identity in nineteenth-century France,” Gosetti says. “I am advocating for a positive view of provincialism, for the value of internal multilingualism, and challenging the division between central and peripheral cultures.”
“This project is seeking to promote a more inclusive and representative literary canon, a new awareness of the crucial role of regional poets, and a new ‘transregional’ theoretical framework to revalue the potential of locality.”
To illustrate an important but neglected regional voice, in her article for the Bulletin, Gosetti is shining a light on the work of Amélie Gex (1835-1883) from the Alpine province of Savoie, in south-eastern France. Despite being one of the most important poets of that region, Gex has been largely forgotten. Gosetti’s ambitions of visiting the Gex archives in Chambéry were long frustrated by Covid travel restrictions, but this year she was finally able to read Gex’s correspondence, and her manuscript poems written in French and in what Gex would have called “patois Savoyard”, a variety of Francoprovençal.
“Behind the male pen name of Dian de la Jeânna that she chose in order to combat gender stereotypes, Amélie Gex emerges as a polymath and a central figure of her region’s intellectual life,” Gosetti observes.
“Not only did she write poetry in at least two languages, but, having run a farm, she was an expert on rural issues. She was the first woman to direct a periodical and an almanac in her region, she wrote articles about rural education, the education of women, horticulture, rural economy, gardening, plant diseases, history, political issues (expressing republican, anticlerical, and democratic views, all hot topics in fin-de-siècle France), religious issues, spiritism, and much more.”
“She also sustained a vivid correspondence with writers based in other regions, thus becoming a hub in this network of intellectual exchanges, rather than a marginal figure as a Paris-centric outlook would suggest.”
Understanding the value embodied in the work and lives of figures like Amélie Gex helps “reclaim provincialism” as a cultural value, rather than a derogatory term, Gosetti argues.
In a recent essay for Human Geography, co-written by Gosetti with Professor Adrian Walsh (UNE) and Daniel A. Finch-Race (University of Bologna), the authors acknowledge that there is still much to do to see “provincialism as an empowering way of being”, but “recognising the empowering value of provincialism is a step in the right direction…”.
The new special issue of French Studies Bulletin considers the value of provincialism from 13 perspectives, the result of an international online multi-platform debate hosted by Gosetti and Professor Heather Williams, whose research on cultural interfaces focuses on ‘lateral networks’ between minoritized cultures.
Supported by Gosetti’s blog Transferre, the UNE Literary Worlds Research Group, headed by Dr Giulia Torello-Hill, and the UNE Department of Literatures, Languages, Linguistics and Cultures (LLLC), the debate revolved around the question of whether it is possible, and fruitful, to “bypass Paris” – that is, to look beyond the French capital and consider the provinces, the so-called peripheries, as a relevant source of national and transnational intellectual culture.
To combat “Zoom fatigue” people were invited to submit 10-minute podcasts, videos or, alternatively, 1000-word statements, to interact and debate on Padlet for a couple of weeks, and later, if they so wished, to come along to an international Zoom debate and discussion.
Some of the resulting discussion forms the basis of the pamphlets now published in French Studies Bulletin. A joint editorial by Gosetti and Williams introduces the issue, which is also available in open access by following this link
Contents
Valentina Gosetti (UNE), Heather Williams (University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies), Introduction: Bypassing Paris? Se Passer de Paris?, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 1-4, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad014
Armelle Blin-Rolland (Bangor University, UK), Beyond Centralism, Beyond Anthropocentrism: French Studies in Posthuman Times, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 5-8, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad011
Josephine Goldman (University of Sydney, Australia), Oceanic Minor Transnationalisms: Bypassing Paris Through the Seas, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 9-13, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad012
Murray Pratt (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), Franck in Villefranche, or the Box Sets at the End of the World, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 14-17, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad015
Alistair Rolls (University of Newcastle, Australia), Bypassing Paris, Horizontally and Vertically, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 18-21, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad010
Clara Sitbon (University of Sydney, Australia), Beyond the Island, Paris and the Nation: For a Transnational Corsican Crime Fiction, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 22-26, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad009
Françoise Grauby (University of Sydney, Australia), ‘Ruser avec l’illégitimité’? Festivals du livre et éditions indépendantes en Occitanie, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 27-31, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad013
Kathryn N Jones (Swansea University, UK), The 1947 Welsh Delegation to Brittany: Paradiplomacy and Propaganda, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 32-35, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad008
Natalie Edwards (University of Bristol, UK), Christopher Hogarth (University of South Australia), Privileging the Peripheral: Representations of the Regional in French-Australian Writing, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 36-39, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad006
Mannaïg Thomas (Centre for Breton and Celtic Studies, University of West Britanny, France), La Consécration littéraire peut-elle se passer de Paris?, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 40-43, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad007
Marion Krauthaker (De Montfort University, UK), Marie-Aimée Méraville, une voix sans voie ou le destin d’une auteure rurale, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 44-47, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad016
Valentina Gosetti (University of New England, Australia), Under Ideal Conditions: Provincializing the ‘French’ Poetic Canon with Amélie Gex (1835-1883), French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 48-62, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad017
Heather Williams (University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, UK), For a Welsh French Studies: Breton Poets ‘Writing to Wales’, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 63-66, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad019
Oliver Whitmore (University of California, Berkeley, US), But I Don’t Speak Breton…? Teaching Regional & Minority Languages & Cultures of France, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 44, Issue 167-168, Autumn 2023, Pages 67-70, https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad018
