Étienne Achille and Oana Panaïté on Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature: French Writers, White Writing

Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This discussion is with Dr. Étienne Achille and Dr. Oana Panaïté. Dr. Achille is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Villanova University. His publications include the monograph Mythologies postcoloniales. Pour une décolonisation du quotidien (2018, co-authored with L. Moudileno;) and the volume Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France (2020, co-edited with C. Forsdick and L. Moudileno). Dr. Panaïté is a Ruth N. Halls Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Des littératures-mondes en français. Écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine (2012), The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French (2017), and Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory (2022). In this conversation, we discuss their monograph, Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature where they analyze the works of contemporary French novelists and explore the white literary gaze in a contemporary French context.