HFRN 2025 Online Summer Workshop - Bios and Abstracts - Transnational and Postnational Historical Fictions

Aug 21, 2026

Upload by Logic

The “HFRN 2025 Online Summer Workshop: Bios and Abstracts” assembles faculty bios and research abstracts examining transnational and postnational historical fictions. Contributions analyze how novelistic and cinematic narratives reframe colonial histories and political repression through allegory, memory, diaspora, and shifting boundaries between private life and public history. Topics include Caribbean literary critique, postnational methods for reading trauma and resistance, and African-American and global perspectives on Algeria’s colonial violence, identity, and remembrance.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages11

Reading Time28 min

AccessFree to download

Bios and Abstracts

Transnational and Postnational Historical Fictions

Author Bios and Research Focus

Historical Fiction, Colonialism, and Memory

HFRN 2025 Online Summer Workshop Transnational and Postnational Historical Fictions Bios and Abstracts Allan, Keisha Dr. Keisha Allan is an assistant professor in the Department of Black & Latinx Studies at Baruch College. She is the recipient of the McKittrick Book Award. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, she examines Caribbean literature by women writers who critique social and political inequities in their societies. She examines how selected female authors from the Caribbean create fictional worlds that have the effect of subverting patriarchal perspectives and paradigms. She interrogates society and artistic responsibility, with women presented as creatively engaged in revolutionary activities aimed at reshaping ideas and perspectives in the national imaginary. Historical Fiction Without Borders: Postnational Critique and Transnational Memory in Amour This paper examines the transnational and postnational dimensions of historical fiction in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s novel Amour (from her 1968 trilogy Amour, Colère et Folie), situating it within a broader framework of non-national historical narratives. In Amour, Chauvet engages in a veiled critique of Francois Duvalier’s brutal regime in Haiti, using her fictional narrative space to protest against social and patriarchal repression. Chauvet camouflages her critique of the Duvalier dynasty by setting the story in 1939, four years after the United States ends its twenty-one year occupation of the nation. Although Chauvet masked the novel’s political connection to Duvalier by inserting the historic events after the American occupation in 1939, her fiction is read as exposing and interrogating the reality of Duvalier’s regime of terror to her readers. Set in a thinly veiled version of mid- 20th-century Haiti under authoritarian rule, Amour foregrounds a deeply personal and psychological account of life under political repression. While embedded in a specific national context, the narrative resists containment within a singular national framework. Through its use of allegory, intimate subjectivity, and aesthetic strategies that transcend national realism, Amour articulates a historical consciousness shaped by exile, diaspora, and global structures of power. This paper argues that Amour performs a postnational critique by destabilizing the boundaries between private and public, memory and history, and self and nation. I argue that Chauvet’s work exemplifies how historical fiction can reimagine history beyond national boundaries and contribute to a broader, transnational discourse on trauma, resistance, and the politics of remembrance. Baghli Berbar, Souad Dr Souad Baghli Berbar (she/her) teaches Anglo-American literature at Tlemcen University, Algeria. Her interests include travel literature, Orientalism and computer-assisted literary criticism. She is an active member of the Language, Literature and Culture research lab at Tlemcen University, of SELVA (the association for the study of Anglophone travel literature) and Managing Editor of the Journal ELLiC. [https://journals.univ](https://journals.univ)[tlemcen.dz/ELLIC/index.php/ELLIC](tlemcen.dz/ELLIC/index.php/ELLIC) [https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4091-2306](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4091-2306)" Colonial Algeria in the African-American Gaze: William Gardner Smith’s Novel The Stone Face (1963) Historical narratives about Algerian colonial past took various forms, ranging from chronicles and travel books, to epic poems, novels and even films, mediating the divide between fact and fiction, and providing complementary perspectives on the subject. Algerian as well as French authors, due to their primary concern with the matter, have certainly contributed their vision of “the years of fire” in Lakhdar Hamina’s words. What is less known is that colonial Algeria has also been documented by British novelists such as Norman Lewis and Allan Sillitoe, sympathising in fict

FAQs

What kind of works does the workshop focus on regarding history and fiction?

The workshop centers on transnational and postnational dimensions of historical fiction across literary and cinematic narratives, emphasizing how fiction reframes history beyond national boundaries.

How do the included abstracts describe the political function of historical fiction?

They highlight that historical fiction can veil or expose critiques of authoritarian regimes, colonial violence, and patriarchal repression, using strategies such as allegory and intimate subjectivity.

What themes recur across the bios and abstracts?

Recurring themes include identity and race, exile and diaspora, trauma and resistance, and the politics of remembrance, often tied to colonial histories.

Aug 21, 2026

Upload by Logic