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SUMMARYThis article is about young people of 15 to 18 who live as street prostitutes in the downtown area of Montreal. They are described as traumatised victims of the social system because no adult ever understood their affective needs which in turn made them feel rejected early in their life. Moving from their natural family to a «Welcome Center», they then find themselves on the street, barely surviving, without work, roof or food. They are soon part of a prostitution ring which only leads to a dead end and despair. In short, those youngsters are victims of a drifting society.

Denis Vanier's poetics describes a universe marked by the interaction of various fluids which, combined with the isotopias of desert and heat, allow us to detect a set of themes associated with thirst. Vanier attempts to multiply the liquids incorporated in his poems as he carries out a symbolic purification related to the gradual destruction of the stereotype of the countercultural writer with which he was identified throughout his career. Our thematic analysis focuses on the polymorphous presence of thirst in four of his books representing each of his poetic periods. Examples drawn from this analysis will enable us to define the functions of the various liquids in order to produce a linear interpretation of the books and a synthesis of Vanier's metaphysics.

Although pornographic cinema has long existed on the fringes—and often behind the back—of cinema and popular culture, today the boundaries between these worlds are crumbling and becoming porous, such that we are witnessing several visual discourses becoming overrun with codifications proper to pornography. Taking this cultural context as its point of departure, this article addresses the demonstration of desire in cinematic eroticism—what Linda Williams calls the “frenzy of the visible”—based on the idea that this cultural logic of making-pornographic finds itself faced with the problem of never being able to show enough. By rereading Williams' Foucauldian ideas from the perspective of a contemporary Lacanian logic, the author examines these issues through an analysis of the films Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011) and Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013). Ultimately, it is a question of showing how the relations between desire, fantasy and cultural making-pornographic can be (re)thought in the context of contemporary film spectatorship.

Women in the African diaspora have been scarred by the traumatic sexualized heritage of slavery; an inheritance that affects their ability to build relationships and identities.  In the context of this heritage Condé explores in two different media the impact of trauma and racism on the ability of two different women of the African diaspora to find love and develop identities.  In the first work, a play Pension les Alizés, the protagonist an exotic dancer in Paris, cannot rid herself of the stain of slavery or establish lasting relationships and in old age lives lost in illusions clinging to her identity as a once highly desired dancer.  In a subsequent work, a novel Histoire de la femme cannibale Condé is more hopeful, the protagonist is able to separate herself from the legacy of slavery; she begins to forge a new identity as she identifies with a time before slavery.   Given the two decade separation we see the evolution of Condé's thinking about possible responses to the collective historical trauma of slavery.

Keywords: Maryse Condé, la Traite, le traumatisme, l'identité, l'amour, Maryse Condé, slave trade, trauma, identity, love

The play La paix des femmes by Véronique Côté, presented at the Théâtre La Bordée in Quebec from September 13 to October 8, 2022, then webcast for three months, problematizes the commodification of women's bodies. To understand this multifaceted phenomenon, it is important to first expose the social context which gave rise to the creation of the play, because it already establishes its relevance. I will then examine the polemical and feminist nature of its content. Then I will continue the thread downstream to study the imprints left by the dramatic text and especially its stage production by highlighting the different nature of these imprints and their varied origins. Finally, I will compare Côté's play to its cultural background in order to show how it stands out.

This article is based on the hypothesis of a dialogue between the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem and the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius, portrayed under a transparent pseudonym in Le Devoir de Violence. As early as 1910, Frobenius wrote a collection of African stories entitled The Black Decameron, in homage to Boccaccio. This article examines the intertextual and intermedial fate of this largely unknown text, which was adapted for the screen by the Italian film-maker Piero Vivarelli (1972) and set to music by the Cuban composer Leo Brouwer (1981).

Keywords: érotisme, intermédialité, Yambo Ouologuem, ethnographie, histoire littéraire intégrée

“To unsettle: that is my role.” This quote by André Gide could apply to Kettly Mars, as it perfectly captures the Haitian writer's literary practice. Indeed, in her novels, Kettly Mars shakes the conventions generally accepted by Haitian society. Since L'heure hybride (2005), she tackles—sometimes obliquely, sometimes head-on—topics often considered taboo within the Haitian bourgeoisie and middle class, thus calling out both Haitian and foreign readers. We analyze the novelist's narrative strategies from this perspective, through some of her novels: L'heure hybride, Fado (2008), Saisons sauvages (2010), Aux frontières de la soif (2013), Je suis vivant (2015) and L'ange du patriarche (2018).