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AbstractThis article proposes to show how African writers' relationship to exile is, in many respects, ambiguous and fantastical. Exile gives rise to disenchantment: the elsewhere enters into tension with the here and talks of the completion of a movement from the elsewhere towards the here (and its fusion in the here: the elsewhere becomes the here), while miming as well the completion of the journey from the elsewhere to the here. This tension produces an effect of rupture between the memory of the elsewhere and that of the here, and tells of grasping a surprising world, with no reference points. Exile is no longer a problem of self to foreign earth or culture, but of self to self. This brings us far, therefore, from the concepts of wandering, rhizome, nomadism, since what concerns us henceforth is the idea of crossing over.

SUMMARYIn this article mental illness is presented in a sociological perspective, giving prominence to social-interaction factors which, in many cases, are responsable for the permanence of this type of illness. Its thereotical base comes !form the psychology of social-interaction developped by G.H. Mead and his disciples. This perspective defines the social human being as derived from successive interactions, beginning, at birth, with maternal contacts and extending progressively to the entirety of the members of the community of which the individual is a part. This interactional network is comprised of messages, of responses, and of expectations which make up the norms and values which in turn from the basis for the distribution of roles and statuses- From these roles and statuses derive the behaviours acceptable to a given collectivity. Among other theoretical developments, interactionist sociology gave birth to formulations on deviance which became known, in american terminology as "labelling theory". In the case of mental illness many sociologists interested in the phenomenon have studied it, using the framework elaborated by the proponents of this approach to deviance. Thus, rather than considering the deviant as abnormal in himself, deviance is viewed as a process; that is, as the result of a series of interactions confronting the individual who is not, or does not behave like the collectivity as a whole and the milieu in which he lives. When the reaction of the entourage is negative, the so-called deviant is subjected to sanctions such as avoidance, rejection, exclusion, confinement, etc... This process terminates generally in stigmatization which wraps the deviant in a label from which he will probably never free himself. The studies cited demonstrate this interactional process at different stages of mental illness, these being; d) at the point of medical diagnosis, b) during hospitalisation, c) on leaving We psychiatric institution, d) and after the return to society. The conclusion leads to an appreciation of the drama experienced by psychiatric ex-patients, for most of whom the label "mentally ill" constitutes an apparently irreversible stigmatization.

Keywords: spectacles, dix-neuvième siècle, publics, auteurs, spectateurs, rencontres, shows, nineteenth century, audiences, authors, spectators, encounters

Written as the author's contribution to a roundtable held at the Canadian Historical Association's annual conference in Regina on Nora Jaffary's, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905, recipient of the 2017 Ferguson prize, the article utilizes a popular nineteenth century Mexican novel, Los bandidos de Río Frío, as a lens through which to reflect upon childbirth, the construction of various systems of medical knowledge, contraception, virginity, monstrosities, the written word, and national imagining in Jaffary's book. Both authors see a close connection between childbirth and the project of nation building in Mexico: Payno, to foreground the importance of inheritance, and Jaffary, to stress the ways in which laws, learning, institutions, and traditions shaped reproduction and its outcomes. Notable in Jaffary's work is the eschewing of traditional periodizations of Mexican history in favour of the testing of hypotheses and a focus on the agency of women. Also compelling is Jaffary's interest in the emergence of the discursive category of the “general public,” a construct that links her work to that of others interested in the “lettered city.”

In this paper, I argue that principled criminalization does not have to rely on critical objectivity. It is not necessary to demonstrate that conduct is criminalizable only if it is wrong in a transcultural and truly correct sense. I argue that such standards are impossible to identify and that a sounder basis for criminalization decisions can be found by drawing on our deep conventional understandings of wrong. I argue that Feinberg's harm principle can be supported with conventional accounts of harm, and that such harms can be identified as objectively harmful when measured against our deep conventional understandings of harm. The distinction that critical moralists make between truly harmful conduct and conventionally objective harmful conduct is unsustainable because many conventional harms impact real victims in social contexts. The best that we can do is to scrutinize our conventional conceptualizations of harm and badness, but that scrutiny is constrained by the limits of epistemological inquiry and our capacity for rationality at any given point in time. Many acts are criminalizable because they violate social conventions that are shareable by communally situated agents.