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The article focuses on the manifold ways in which the spectre of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra manifests itself in Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983), a play which is to a large extent about a Trinidadian theatre company’s attempt to put on a production of Antony and Cleopatra. It argues that this spectre circulates trauma but it is also part of a process of re-articulation of the stage as a place where the ‘familiar’ and the ‘foreign’ interrogate one another. In particular, by responding to the spectre, the play marks a movement from a ‘writing against or without’ Shakespeare to a more complex sense of writing with Shakespeare, which is not, however, an uncritical appropriation of the Bard.

Kamau Brathwaite’s genre-crossing piece ‘The Namsetoura Papers’ (2005) is a polemical and intensely lyrical intervention into an ecologically destructive instance of tourism development in present-day Barbados. It portrays Brathwaite’s struggle against eviction from his home in CowPastor in the south-east of the island due to the proposed construction of what he describes as an ‘unnecessary and unethical’ airport access road. Spurred by his visionary encounter with the ghost of Namsetoura, a slave woman who asks him to defend her burial ground, Brathwaite suggests that the proposed development of CowPastor threatens not only to transform the visible landscape but also to destroy a site of deep historical and spiritual significance. In this paper, I explore how Brathwaite’s representation of Namsetoura’s ghost complicates the implementation of ecologically destructive and historically insensitive development in postcolonial Barbados. By highlighting the importance of understanding the spiritual and sacred dimensions of landscape in relation to one of its previously silenced ghosts, Brathwaite insists on a mode of evaluating natural environments (and opposing unsustainable development) which reclaims some of the island’s buried histories. I address specifically how Brathwaite’s opposition to the proposed development is discursively reinforced by his inclusion of a photograph he has taken of Namsetoura which challenges reductively dualistic divisions between the visible and the invisible, the corporeal and the incorporeal. I proceed to suggest that Brathwaite’s poetic re-evaluation of local landscape and the spirits of its past paradoxically adds touristic value to the very site that is due to be transformed as a result of tourism industry demands. As such, the ghost of Namsetoura can be read as a powerful agent in the process of creating more sustainable tourism futures.

Though, as Gelder and Jacobs, have pointed out, ‘the ghost story in Australia is a minor genre, a marginal genre’, the semantic field of ghosts and haunting is repeatedly pressed into service whenever Anglo-Celtic Australia’s relationship with its colonial past is under discussion. It might legitimately be argued, in fact, that contemporary white Australia is haunted by its origins. Such was not always the case. The extremely violent nature of Australia’s colonisation was, until recent decades, concealed, glossed over, banished from the collective memory of the nation’s settler descendants. While the brutal dispossession of Aboriginal tribes and the frontier rhetoric that clamoured for the extermination of these ‘savage’ peoples were passed over in silence, the founding myth of Terra Nullius and the reassuring fiction that Australia was peacefully settled dominated historical accounts of the colonial era. But the past did not go away, it merely went underground, taking up residence in the white Australian subconscious. In the last few decades, however, a new generation of historians and a combination of historical circumstances (the ‘Mabo’ decision, the report on the ‘Stolen Generations’ and the launching of the Reconciliation process) have conspired to shatter ‘the Great Australian Silence’. Suddenly, repressed memories of rapine, theft and ‘dispersals’ have risen to the surface, disrupting settler descendants’ image of themselves as a civilised, ‘fair do’, egalitarian society. Among the recent literature that mirrors white Australia’s painful efforts to come to terms with the ghosts of its colonial past is Kate Grenville’s award-winning novel, The Secret River (2005), short-listed for this year’s Booker Prize. The paper I propose will analyse Grenville’s handling of her (real-life) convict ancestor’s experience of settling ‘vacant’ territory on the Hawkesbury River and the culmination of that experience in the massacre of an Aboriginal tribe—a fact-based fictional event that haunts both the novel’s main protagonist and the author’s imagination.

This paper takes as its starting point Derrida’s notion of spectrality, which ‘is at work everywhere’, and uses this theoretical concept to advance a new reading of The Diviners itself, one which sees it as a ghostlike manifestation of the other. The Diviners not only develops its own detailed blueprint of personal hauntings, but is also a broad philosophical meditation on the entire spectral process associated with the Canadian sensation of cultural unease. As part of this overview, Laurence devotes close attention to the question of literary hauntology, displaying considerable ambivalence towards it. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues—the prospect of losing our self and being taken by another, unfamiliar self, literary phantoms which haunt the Canadian imagination etc.— which they raise. But my central purpose will be to re-read the spectral condition of water on the base of Bachelard’s essay L’eau et les rêves. I will reflect on the importance of liquid images which represent the inner world of Canadian dreams, the socio-cultural spectres that return in a sort of a ghostly act of disfiguration with important consequences for the phantasmatic condition of Canada, in which representation is fragmented.

Nalo Hopkinson’s collection of short fiction, Skin Folk (2001) includes imaginative and innovative variations on classic fairy tales, including ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘The Fairies’ and ‘Bluebeard’. My contention is that as she rewrites these stories from a postcolonial perspective, Hopkinson inflects them to explore body politics as she combines issues of gendered and racial identity, encapsulated in the central metaphor of ‘skin’. Further, by submitting the European tale of magic to a process of cultural translation, Hopkinson practices a form of literary voodoo that gives it new life and bite by challenging the norms and values encoded in the traditional, and naturalised, versions. While her de-centering of Perrault’s literary tales (among others) enacts the struggle with the fairy tale canon represented by the French writer, she also invokes him as a ‘Papa Legba’ figure who opens up new possibilities and facilitates a dialogue between Europe and the West Indies, the dead and the living, past and present.

In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of public apologies for historical atrocities as a form of post-colonial exorcism. What does it mean for heads of state or churches to apologize for events in which they did not materially participate? What do such acts of apologizing tell us about the contemporary meaning of the events themselves, about a nation’s or church’s sense of corporate identity that extends to the past, and about the role of the aggrieved people in this discourse? One useful way of imagining this dialectic is for us to see these apologies as attempts to exorcise the ghosts of colonialism. The presence of ghosts is perhaps most symptomatic of unresolved lives, of failed closure, of the thwarting of the revelation of truth. Those who were wrongfully killed haunt the sites of their violation until the truth is revealed and their souls allowed to rest. This paper will examine a representative public apology in order to explore in what ways we can say who is haunted—the descendants of the victims or the descendants of the victimizers—and who benefits, and how, from a discursive act that simultaneously represents and exorcises the effects of the past.

This essay explores the rhetoric of the ghostly in postcolonial literary and critical contexts. With reference to the work of Simon Gikandi and Salman Rushdie, it considers, firstly, the ways in which the vocabulary of ghostliness has been used to expose the violent origins of modern subjectivity in the bloody business of colonialism. At the end of empire, the ghosts of colonialism return with ‘unfinished business’ to haunt the scene of subjectivity and point to shadowy histories of subaltern subjecthood. The essay then considers a second form of postcolonial ghostliness: the haunting presence of those lives attenuated by colonial modernity’s quest for legitimate identity—projected lives which have not been allowed to develop and might be thought of as raising up ‘business unbegun’. These forms of spectral subjectivity are articulated in the work of Jackie Kay, whose writings on adoption and race both build and set such subjectivities against the embodied legitimate identities of modernity. The essay concludes by engaging with Pauline Melville’s short fiction, where the difficult business is raised of raising the forgotten ghosts of modernity and colonialism while enabling their exorcism in order to begin a new future.

As liminal beings, ghosts seem particularly appropriate to define, question or challenge hybrid cultures where several, seemingly irreconcilable, identities coexist. The present volume wonders how they manifest themselves in the English-speaking world, and whether there is a specifically postcolonial kind of haunting. The twenty-two articles deal with textual, translational or historical ghosts, and take us to Canada, Australia, Africa, India or the Caribbean. Poems by Gerry Turcotte literally haunt the volume, which thus juxtaposes theory and practice in a dynamic and fruitful way. De par leur liminalité, les fantômes semblent particulièrement adaptés pour définir, interroger ou remettre en question des cultures hybrides où coexistent plusieurs identités apparemment inconciliables. Ce volume explore leurs diverses manifestations dans le monde anglophone, se demandant s’il existe une hantise proprement postcoloniale. Les vingt-deux articles nous présentent des fantômes historiques ou textuels, et nous emmènent du Canada à l’Australie, de l’Afrique à l’Inde ou à la Caraïbe. Des poèmes de Gerry Turcotte hantent littéralement le volume, qui juxtapose ainsi théorie et pratique de façon dynamique et féconde.

When it took over from colonial Rhodesia in 1980, Zimbabwe had to recover from decades of civil war aimed at overcoming a political system based on racial discrimination. But in observing the political evolution of the country in the last decade, we may now wonder whether Cecil Rhodes’s ghost is not still hovering over Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The object of this paper is to ask whether the political and ideological system of Southern Rhodesia has really been exorcised when independence was granted. Assessing the weight of Southern Rhodesia’s history on Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, this presentation proposes to study the phenomena through which the former colony’s ghost has revealed itself in the governance of the state since 1980. Indeed, the way Robert Mugabe conceives power and his own relation to power is still marked by a colonialist-inspired idea of what the ‘majority’ is, therefore preventing the emergence of a definition of the nation which would now be based on objective criteria. Still haunted by the ghost of its own past, contemporary Zimbabwe still has to undergo the catharsis of the colonial system which presided over it creation.

This essay looks to Amitav Ghosh’s generically-mixed text In an Antique Land (1992) in order to explore the ways in which the writer stages the conjunction of types of writing that seem to find their discursive origin within the disciplines of anthropology and history respectively. In this meeting of modes, it is argued, a haunted space is opened which speaks of the past but is always orientated toward an ethical revisioning of the present and, more significantly still, of the future. Ghosh’s engagement with ghosts within his accounts of twelfth-century cosmopolitan connections and of the realities of contemporary Egyptian rural life allows him to develop an oppositional stance that stands outside of modernity’s enforced divisions. In attempting to speak to the ghosts that cannot be contained in an easily imagined past, but become manifest instead in the present, he finds a way of writing about a lost history that is more than just nostalgia, and a way of presenting ethnography that is always marked by a disruptive potential set into motion by the problematised position of the recorder.

David Malouf’s writing, notably The Conversations at Curlow Creek and Remembering Babylon, is informed by the notion of exile and the opposition between centre and periphery, which are crucial issues in postcolonial societies. A sense of alienation pervades the texts, emphasising the difficulty of coming to terms with otherness. In Remembering Babylon, set in nineteenth-century Australia and the First World War, the experience of Gemmy—a white boy who shared the life of an Aboriginal community—illustrates the historical encounter between Aborigenes and Europeans, while his in-betweenness haunts the white settlers who come to interrogate their certainties about humanness and animality, the evolution of man and the primacy of whiteness. Malouf’s writing evokes the ongoing trauma of the beginnings of the colony. But if redemption is intimated by The Conversations at Curlow Creek, Remembering Babylon suggests that historical wounds are far from being exorcised, and that reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians will be a long and difficult process.

This paper examines a number of recent ghost stories produced by minority writers in Australia and Canada—from Tracey Moffatt to Thomas King—to highlight the way such tales have been used to interrogate dominant systems of control. If Derrida is correct that ‘haunting is central to any hegemony’, but also that we must learn to ‘talk’ with ghosts, then the way the spectres of minority and dominant structures are negotiated says a great deal about relations of power, especially in the context of race, ethnicity and whiteness. This paper argues that where once Indigenous and minority ethnic writers were metaphorised as spectral within dominant hegemonic structures in order to effect actual political disenfranchisement, contemporary writers and filmmakers have repossessed the spectres of nation to critique, interrogate and reverse such deterritorialising practices. The contestatory politics that have played out as a result of these strategic interventions have in effect ‘ghosted’ dominant players, highlighting the racial dimensions of whiteness and spectralising dominant agency in complex and intriguing ways. This paper will examine films such as Atanarjuat and Bedevil, and novels by Thomas King and Tomson Highway to consider the way this spectral discourse has come to dominate contemporary texts.

In his autobiography Apan Katha [my own words/stories] (1946), the renowned artist and writer Abanindranath Tagore (1871- 1951) imputes an amazing historicity to space. An ancestral home, writes Tagore, ‘lives’ only through the ‘company of people’. In his characteristic lyrical style Tagore further elaborates this connection between history and location. According to him when the people leave the house, the ‘cobwebs of memory’ fly away in the wind and it is then that the house ‘truly dies’. What can we make of this beautiful connection between location and history or space and time? In particular, what do we make of his transposing the organicity of living and dying onto space in this evocative manner? In this paper I am going to advance Tagore’s claim about this relationship between history and spatiality in the context of Calcutta as a colonial city. I am going to argue that spaces acquired a certain kind of past-ness or the patina of antiquity through a very specific rhetoric related to death and dying, that of haunting. We are going to look at haunted spaces as locations of history from two separate perspectives: British and Indian; this is so because each side was invested in sets of very different arguments about Calcutta’s status as a city with a past, or its respectability as an old city. Ghosts, both Bengali and British, we will argue, determined and/or disputed the antiquity of the city and in turn questioned or consolidated the future of British rule.

This paper is about the psychological, political, and artistic declinations of the figure of the ghost in Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg. By using as his center of intelligence the historical Dostoevsky at the time he was preparing to write The Possessed, a political novel about nihilism and revolution and by manipulating facts and fiction, Coetzee writes a dark and poignant tale which subtly investigates the complex relationship between reality and art, historical discourse and private drama. While hinging on the experience of mourning and guilt, in itself a Dostoevskian and a post-colonial epitomatic theme, the novel provides an indirect commentary on post-colonial South Africa in the throes of repressive authority and dangerous radicalism. The ghosts to exorcise in this novel are not just those of pre-revolutionary Russia which so closely resemble South Africa poised on the brink of upheaval, or those of fatherhood adumbrated in the theme of generational strife—the divide between a disillusioned and conservative father who rejects vengefulness and the Nihilist, radical and self-destructive views espoused by the young; they are those of a man who, distraught by remorse, in the end finds himself unable to wring meaning and redemption from his work.

In most ghostly fashion, the plot of this tetralogy presents vague and blurry contours, but its capacity to terrify its spectator remains potent. It tells of an afterlife journey on a river which seems always to lead farther than Hell, of reaching beyond our human, contingent experience, of a fragmentation of the individual being as we think we know him or her; it tells of an odyssey which stages protagonists who, to all intents and purposes, appear as apparitions. The said journey is also composed of memory traces which not only haunt the characters but seem to constitute them, so much so that they are finally bestowed in turn a spectral identity, that they seem both present and absent to the world, visible and invisible; their unstable ontology allows them to swap identities, along the lines of one of the main postcolonial literary themes. The present paper will attempt to show to what extent the tetralogy is inserted within a time that takes place after the disaster, a time that comes too late, and where only a ‘second death’ (it is the title of the third book in Palace of the Peacock) could take place to break up a time that seems perenially stopped. Such a time, which is merely that of lingering memories, is also that of intertextuality. Intertextuality densely proliferates in The Guyana Quartet, and works through embedding. Such a textual memory leads straight to the amnesia which lies at the core of the journey, which directs its course and may explain away its apparent failure. Indeed, this spectrality is also, and lastly, a reverie around a lost world: more so, perhaps, than any other Caribbean author, Harris interrogates the disappearance of the Indian world, he sets these hardly perceptible echoes, these pieces of a lost language, into texts. Intertextuality becomes a sheer substitute to a spectral idiom which no one can grasp any longer. The ‘namelessness’ which occupies the dark centre of these four texts might eventually be the most stable attribute of the ghost which passes through them.

Ghosts do not roam in limbo. They only come into existence when they are met. They have no other place than their apparition. When they disappear, they do so completely. They have no inner life, they do not have a life somewhere else, they have neither psychology nor memory. They do not suffer. They are born because we are haunted by them—we light them and blow them, poor, oscillating candles. They are only for us. Marie Darrieussecq. This collection of essays springs from an international co...

For Harris, all entities and identities are translational in the sense that they undergo constant transformation, and for human beings this necessarily involves processes of interpretation and expression. The translational nature of existence and human identity takes artistic form in narratives, or stories; folklore and myth, which bear witness to the past yet at the same time treat universal, timeless themes and evoke the perennial presences of the natural world, can function as translational vehicles that facilitate a movement across the gulf separating the past from the present and future. In Harris’s fiction the living regularly encounter the dead, who haunt the present in the form of traces, consequences, or ‘ghosts, ’ with which the contemporary generation must come to terms. The verbs translate, transform, and their variants occur repeatedly in Harris, and this essay turns to concepts of translation to analyze his visionary project, focusing on a lesser-known work that illustrates well his innovative splicing of New World and Old World folklore and myth. Translations between the living and the dead support a larger idea that his novels poetically reach toward: the interrelatedness of being and the obligation for each contemporary generation to come to terms with the past in order to continue the always unfinished making of the world.

This paper analyzes the use of the Indian ghost motif in Thomas King’s writings within the framework of postcolonial criticism about spectral narrativity, and in the light of both Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny and Derrida’s notion of spectrality. King outlines a politics and poetics of haunting that wholly contradicts Canada’s alleged ghostlessness, as expressed not only by pioneer Catharine Parr Traill in her famous 1833 statement about the complete banishment of ghosts and spirits from a ‘too matter-of-fact country for such supernaturals to visit’, but also by Earle Birney, who concluded his poem ‘Can. Lit.’ asserting: ‘it’s only by our lack of ghosts/we’re haunted’. Unlike other instances of the genre, King’s textual hauntings are never horrific because the presence of spectral Native figures in his novels and short stories does not include any malevolent or macabre elements. Yet the subversive humor which often pervades these mysterious appearances and other fantastic manifestations in King’s poignant scenes of magic realism becomes an amazingly effective strategy to revise colonial history and raise important issues concerning the present day lives of Natives in North America, such as stereotyping, cultural appropriation and commodification, sovereignty, environmental degradation and territorial claims.

Does the fact that Commonwealth membership criteria now focus not only on a historic constitutional association with an existing Commonwealth member but on the respect of the Commonwealth’s core values—rule of law, democracy, human rights, human development—mean that all British imperial ghosts have been banished from the Organisation? Has the true transformation from the British Commonwealth to the Commonwealth of Nations really occurred? The emergence of Canada as an increasingly influential developed member in the Organisation, the affirmation of South-South diplomacy and the establishment of a successful Secretariat, based in London but apparently free from British dominance, seem to prove the point. Yet many of the values, institutions and modes of working of the Commonwealth are indebted to the British past of the vast majority of its members. This article will attempt to address these issues by focusing on the ambivalence at the heart of the Commonwealth’s diplomatic dynamics: while Commonwealth identity was built against British dominance and while the leaders of the new Commonwealth nations in the post-independence era strove to make it the negation of empire, the Commonwealth has kept alive a number of ideals that do seem to emanate from Britain. But the presence of ghosts does not necessarily mean that the Commonwealth is a form of neo-colonialism, even in disguise, as a comparison with the French post-colonial model might show. Ultimately, the objective here is to assess to what extent the Commonwealth has transformed colonial and post-colonial relations into a fully evolved form of multilateral diplomacy between independent States.

For Caribbean authors exploring new ways in their work of navigating the various hyphens and margins they straddle in their experiences of travel, displacement and exile, and of moving beyond the processes of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, reincarnating Legba, a metaphorical correlate of ‘the crossroads, ’—the hybrid space of dichotomous experience— emerges as a mechanism through which the production of liminality and difference helps redefine and construct political and social Caribbean postcolonial identity. Legba’s reincarnates, these postcolonial ghosts, including the transvestite, transsexual, and the mixed ethnic, are emerging as haunting presences in contemporary Caribbean fiction. Like Legba, bridge between the powerful and the powerless, the aged and the young, the disabled and the strong, within these crossroads characters resides the power to mediate, regenerate, disintegrate and transform normalizing narratives of oppression into resistance strategies. As Caribbean subjects, both real and imagined, attempt to articulate and negotiate the relationship between territory/place, political structures, cultural traditions, and the national and cultural identity schisms that characterize the postcolonial experience, Legba becomes one of the primordial influences in the contemporary literary re-imaginings of these complex negotiations.

As that which keeps returning, the ghost is a highly suitable figure for thinking the postcolonial. However, the seminal theoretical text of contemporary ‘ghost studies’, Derrida’s Specters of Marx, does not include the postcolonial subject as an agent and places the ghost in a distinctly western tradition. This paper uses Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road to argue for the need to explore the ghost as a culturally specific concept whose workings cannot be generalized. Although Derrida’s western notion of the ghost as a figure of temporal disturbance and disjointing is pertinent to Okri’s text, its African setting prompts a supplementary theorization of the ghost through the work of the Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe and his conceptualization of ghostly power and violence through the notions of living in death, specular experience, the wandering subject and necropolitics. Whereas Mbembe tends to present ghostly power as an oppressive force wielded by the state or the autocrat, The Famished Road illustrates in several ways how ghostly power is not invincible, but can be interrupted and turned against itself, precisely because of its ungraspable, shimmering status. In the end, therefore, neither Derrida’s nor Mbembe’s perspective on the ghost is fully vindicated by The Famished Road. Rather, the novel brings the two together in a syncretic move that preserves Mbembe’s idea that the ghost can be an oppressive, deadening force aligned with the state, as well as Derrida’s notion of spectrality as a resistive force and possible figure of justice.

In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, rises from the dead and haunts her rivals’ stage. Like a ghost, she appears as a supernatural vision from the past, and is called a ‘poor mortal living ghost’ by the Duchess of York who labels Margaret a ghostly vision. She certainly serves as an echo of dynastic loss; she stalks the Yorkist court, cannot undertake any action, and instead waits as a cursing shadow demanding vengeance for the murder of her family. In a production, she might resemble the ghosts that later visit Richard III and curse him. Margaret is not a ghost; and yet she is. The question is whether her appearance might be classified alongside similar visions. This paper examines the nature and function of Margaret’s apparitions as ghostlike scenes, not unlike those of a revenge tragedy and claims that she can be labelled a ghostly figure. Dans Richard III de Shakespeare, Marguerite d’Anjou, épouse d’Henri VI, ressuscite d’entre les morts et hante la scène de ses rivaux. Telle un fantôme, elle apparaît comme une vision surnaturelle du passé, et est qualifiée de « pauvre mortelle vivante » par la duchesse d’York qui voit en Marguerite une figure fantomatique. Elle fait certainement écho à la perte dynastique ; elle hante la cour des York, ne peut entreprendre aucune action, et attend plutôt comme une ombre maudite réclamant vengeance pour le meurtre de sa famille. Sur scène, elle peut ressembler aux fantômes qui rendront plus tard visite à Richard III et le maudiront. Margaret n’est pas un fantôme, et pourtant elle l’est. La question est de savoir si son apparition peut être classée parmi les visions similaires. Cet article examine la nature et la fonction des apparitions de Margaret en tant que scènes fantomatiques, qui ne sont pas sans rappeler celles d’une tragédie de la vengeance, et montre qu’elle peut être considérée comme une figure fantomatique.

L’émergence de villes fantômes est parfois comprise aujourd’hui comme étant le symptôme d’un monde en constante mouvance. En France, la désertion des habitants des centres-villes sous l’effet du déploiement des activités tertiaires, de la finance et du tourisme se montre un facteur critique des conditions d’habitabilité de la ville moderne, risquant parfois d’affecter une certaine idée de l’identité française au sein des imaginaires. La production romanesque de Patrick Modiano, ces dernières années, a mis en scène toute une série de personnages plongés au cœur même de ce Paris déserté, capitale appréhendée sous le prisme de la ville fantôme. Qu’il s’agisse des Boulevards de Ceintures ou bien encore du Quartier Perdu, ces récits aux titres évocateurs déploient un large éventail de personnages – souvent exilés, apatrides, portant le statut de réfugié et convoitant la naturalisation française, autant d’entités subjectives pour lesquelles l’identité française demeure à la fois source de fascination (quête) et de répulsion (fuite). Considérant la mesure dans laquelle cette récente fascination artistique pour les espaces urbains abandonnés et autres espaces « blancs » de la ville interroge profondément les marqueurs d’une condition urbaine à la fois française et contemporaine, il s’agira d’analyser plus en détails le cas spécifique de la ville fantôme mise en place par Patrick Modiano, à l’intérieur de laquelle différentes modalités de la « francité » se dessinent et méritent d’être abordées dans le contexte d’aujourd’hui.

Le théâtre yiddish est né à la fin du XIXe siècle de la volonté de quelques-uns de créer un théâtre en yiddish pour un public yiddichophone. Avrom Goldfaden est ainsi désigné comme étant le père du théâtre yiddish : le premier spectacle a lieu en octobre 1876 en Roumanie. À partir de cette date, il ne cessa de se développer et de se propager, aussi bien en Europe de l’est qu’en Amérique. De nombreuses troupes voient le jour et une abondante littérature dramatique est créée. Ce théâtre est un théâtre populaire, la langue yiddish étant, au contraire de l’hébreu, la langue du peuple ; c’est un théâtre festif et participatif ou, en d’autres termes, un théâtre du jeu mêlant musique, chant et danse. La lecture des textes ne peut être séparée de l’examen de l’événement dans sa totalité. L’événement spectaculaire est d’ailleurs inscrit dans les textes-mêmes : la présence de personnages de fantômes, de personnages métathéâtraux comme un metteur en scène ou un écrivain de théâtre, l’intégration de formes spectaculaires populaires au sein même des pièces de théâtre, etc., font du théâtre yiddish un théâtre de la reconnaissance où le quatrième mur n’est pas de mise. Théâtre poétique et ludique, le théâtre yiddish est un théâtre au présent. En effet, le théâtre est le lieu où le peuple et les acteurs se réunissent afin de vivre ensemble un moment de plaisir et de ressentir des émotions collectives. Yiddish Theatre was born at the end of the XIXth century when authors wanted to create a theatre in Yiddish for Yiddish speaking people. Avrom Goldfaden is seen as its father : the first show was given in October 1876 in Romania. From then on, it developed in Eastern Europe as well as in the USA. Many companies were founded and a broad dramatic literature emerged. Yiddish Theatre is a popular theatre since Yiddish, contrary to Hebrew, is the language spoken by the people. Thus, Yiddish Theatre is a celebratory and participatory theatre. It is a theatre of performance including music, songs and dance. The reading of texts cannot be separated from the whole event. The show is included even in the texts : ghost characters, meta-theatrical characters (such as a director or a playwright), insertion of spectacular popular forms in the plays etc., define it as a theatre of recognition, where the fourth wall does not matter. As a poetical and ludic theatre, it is a theatre of the present. In fact, the theatre is the place where the people and the actors get together to share a moment of pleasure and feel emotions collectively.

date prévue mars-avril 2022; International audience

Breast cancer detection in an asymptomatic patient, ideally at an early stage of the disease, is essential. This type of cancer is indeed the most common and the most fatal in women. The type of diagnostic imaging used is of great importance here. Indeed, even if the risk involved diagnostic procedure has been deemed acceptable compared to the mortality rate observed in the absence of diagnostic examination, it is still appropriate to reduce the radiation dose which is the cause. It is therefore not surprising to see a great amount of effort being put into research aiming at an ever greater dose reduction while maintaining image quality. It is in this context that the XPulse project finds its place, and in which the work of this thesis has been performed.The XPulse project is a partnership that brings together several researches with the objective of building a prototype mammography machine based on phase-contrast imaging using X-rays generated by intense laser.The aim of this thesis was to develop a virtual model of this mammography machine in Geant4, a Monte Carlo simulation tool, in order to meet the following three objectives. Firstly to determine the optimum energy of monochromatic primary photons, in the interval 10 keV to 100 keV, that would ensure a minimum radiation dose. Secondly to produce a reference table of the energy deposited in several “phantoms” representing breast as a function of the energy of the monochromatic primary beam. This table would allow flexible reconstruction of the energy deposited by a polychromatic beam. The energy range of primary photons was extended to 300 keV in order to account for high energies during the creation of X-rays by laser and thus to quantify their impact in terms of deposited energy. Finally, the last objective was to quantify the risk of radiation-induced cancer and the number of potential deaths in a cohort of 100,000 women as a function of the screening program and the total radiation dose deposited in several phantoms., La détection de cancer du sein chez une femme asymptomatique, au mieux à un stade précoce du cancer, est primordiale de nos jours. Ce type de cancer est en effet le plus fréquent et le plus mortel chez la femme. Le type d'imagerie diagnostique utilisée a ici une grande importance. En effet, même si le risque pris lors d'une irradiation en imagerie diagnostique a été jugé acceptable comparé au taux de mortalité observé en absence d'examen diagnostique, il est toujours de mise de réduire la dose de radiation qui en est la cause. En ce sens, de nombreuses recherches affluent dans l'objectif d'une réduction de dose toujours plus grande tout en conservant une qualité d'image au moins équivalente à celle obtenue de nos jours. C'est dans ce contexte qu'intervient le projet XPulse, et dans lequel se situent ces travaux de thèse.Le projet XPulse est un partenariat qui rassemble plusieurs unités de recherche dont l'objectif est de construire un prototype de mammographe utilisant une imagerie par contraste de phase exploitant des rayons X générés par laser intense.L'enjeu de ces travaux de thèse est d'élaborer une modélisation d'un mammographe sur Geant4, un outil de simulation Monte Carlo, afin de répondre à trois principaux objectifs. Le premier d'entre eux est la détermination de l'énergie monochromatique optimale des photons primaires, entre 10 keV et 100 keV, pour une dose de radiation minimale. Le deuxième objectif est de réaliser une table de référence des énergies totales déposées dans plusieurs « fantômes » imitant le sein en fonction de l'énergie monochromatique du faisceau primaire. Cette table permet une reconstruction flexible d'un spectre polychromatique. De plus, la gamme énergétique des photons primaires a été étendue jusqu'à 300 keV afin de prévoir ces énergies lors de la création des rayons X par laser et ainsi de pouvoir en quantifier l'impact en termes d'énergie déposée. Enfin, le dernier objectif est de pouvoir quantifier le risque de cancer radio-induit et le nombre de morts potentiels sur 100 000 femmes en fonction du choix du programme de dépistage et de la dose de radiation totale déposée dans le fantôme étudié.

Les apparitions surnaturelles jouent un rôle central dans le théâtre de Shakespeare. Elles font de la scène un lieu revisité, hanté par le passé, par la répétition du même, par les revenants. On se propose ici de montrer comment l’espace onirique ou psychique que ces spectres évoquent se confond avec l’espace matériel du théâtre. On verra comment Shakespeare fait de la scène, par ce biais notamment, un lieu qui accueille les obsessions les plus puissantes, mais aussi un lieu qui invite, au-delà de leur stricte répétition, à une invention artistique toujours renouvelée. Ghosts play a central part in Shakespeare’s plays. They turn the stage into a revisited place, haunted by the past, by endless repetitions. Our purpose is to show how the oneiric or psychological space created by these ghosts blends in with the physical space of the theatre. We shall see how Shakespeare transforms the stage into a place suited for the most powerful obsessions, and a place suited for their artistic reenactment as well.

La chair est à un « tournant ». Cette formule ne vaut pas uniquement en raison du primat phénoménologique de la « chair » (Leib) sur le « corps » (Körper), mais surtout en cela que la traduction de Leib par « chair » ne va pas de soi. Il faut remonter à Paul Ricœur et Maurice Merleau-Ponty, à l’inverse d’Emmanuel Lévinas, pour trouver l’origine de cette décision linguistique de la traduction de Leib par « chair ». Une décision impensée dont nous mesurons aujourd’hui les effets dans l’« embardée de la chair » au mépris du « corps ».

Les continuateurs des Histoires prodigieuses font de Satan le maître des prodiges. En revanche, en dépit des illustrations de l’ouvrage, Boaistuau adopte une conception orthodoxe des pouvoirs du démon : il ne saurait modifier l’ordre naturel du monde sans autorisation divine. Aussi Satan est-il avant tout celui qui, en suscitant schismes et hérésies, menace le chrétien. Les Histoires prodigieuses sont au service d’un discours apologétique qui ne contredit pas les dogmes de l’Église catholique.

International audience; Que le revenant revienne, quoi de plus normal ? Le fantôme est fidèle. Il hante, inlassable, mêmes lieux et mêmes gens ; ou, à défaut, leurs descendants. Du reste, à quoi le reconnaîtrait-on s’il ne revenait pas ?Aussi n’est-ce pas ce retour-là qu’interrogent les quinze auteurs, venus d’horizons très divers, réunis dans ce numéro spécial : c’est la hantise généralisée qui caractérise notre époque. Les fantômes ont la vie dure, nous le savions. Mais pouvions-nous deviner qu’en ce début du XXIe siècle ils investiraient tout le domaine de l’humain ?« Je ne crois pas aux fantômes, mais j'en ai peur », disait la spirituelle Madame du Deffand. Nous n’en avons plus peur, mais sommes-nous bien sûrs de ne pas y croire ? « L’avenir appartient aux fantômes », prophétisait Jacques Derrida. Leur temps est-il venu, revenu ? Telle est la question que pose 'Critique' à travers cette petite anthologie de l’« hantologie », coordonnée par Irène Salas et Yves Hersant.PrésentationYves HERSANT: Spectres de Derrida (et d’ailleurs) - Sylvain PIRON: L’incertitude que procurent les fantômes - Irène SALAS: Fantômes de la Renaissance et de l’âge baroque - Adam PASEK: Daniel Sangsue, pneumatologue - Philippe BAUDOUIN: (Dés)habiller les fantômes - Jean-Pierre NAUGRETTE: Présences fantomatiques chez Henry James - Caroline CALLARD: Fantômes historiographes - (ENTRETIEN) Jérôme PRIEUR: « Capturer ce qui survit » - Mireille BERTON: Cinéma, fantômes et médiums - Alice LEROY: Une romance macabre à l’ombre des neurosciences - Raymond BELLOUR : L’improbable - Yolaine ESCANDE: « Sans forme » et « âmes errantes - Christine BERGÉ: Les ombres d’Hiroshima - Marielle MACÉ: Des fantômes dans le paysage - Martin RUEFF: Le philologue au banquet des morts.

Iron accumulation plays a key role in the physiology of brain aging and in the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's disease (PD) and multi- system atrophy (MSA). The quantification of intracerebral iron by Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a major issue in current neuroimaging. To measure iron accumulation, one approach to quantitative MRI is the determination of T2* tissue relaxation characteristics (R2*=1/T2*). R2* mapping is generally calculated by adjusting the T2* decay signal of multiecho gradient acquisition data by a mono-exponential adjustment. Recent studies suggest a multi-exponential T2* to characterize tissues at the subvoxel level. The clinical utility of the latter methods is not yet established. Multi-echo gradient acquisition is disturbed by noise, introducing a bias in mono-exponential regression and even more so in multi- exponential regression. In this thesis, we proposed to develop a method for processing multiecho T2* brain images allowing a bi-exponential resolution (Bi-R2*). To overcome the low signal-to-noise ratio of these images, work on noise reduction has been conducted. Numerical simulation studies of signal decay made it possible to determine a selection criterion for determining subvoxel levels for the Bi-R2* method. The validity of the method was tested by further simulations, by an MRI phantom study and by a study of healthy young subjects. We have thus proposed a T2* acquisition method that optimizes bi-exponential resolution. Finally, we used the bi- exponential method on T2* MRI data from two previous studies (where the T2* acquisition method is not optimal) were analyzed: (i) a study aimed at cerebral modifications related to normal aging (ii) a study aimed at determining cerebral modifications between different neurodegenerative pathologies. The objective of this last part is to determine whether the bi- exponential method provides additional relevant information to the classical mono- exponential method., L'accumulation de fer joue un rôle clé dans la physiologie du vieillissement cérébral et dans la physiopathologie des maladies neurodégénératives, telles que la maladie de Parkinson (MP) et l'atrophie multi-systématisée (AMS). La quantification du fer intracérébral par Imagerie par Résonance Magnétique (IRM) est un enjeu majeur de la neuroimagerie actuelle. Pour mesurer l'accumulation de fer, une approche de l'IRM quantitative est la détermination des caractéristiques de relaxation des tissus T2* (R2*=1/T2*). La cartographie R2* est généralement calculée en ajustant le signal de décroissance T2* des données d'acquisition multiécho de gradient par un ajustement mono-exponentiel. Des études récentes suggèrent un T2* multi-exponentiel pour caractériser les tissus au niveau sous-voxel. L'utilité clinique de ces dernières méthodes n'est pas encore établie. L'acquisition multiécho de gradient est perturbée par le bruit, introduisant un biais dans une régression mono-exponentielle et encore plus dans une régression multi-exponentielle. Dans cette thèse, nous avons proposé de développer une méthode de traitement des images cérébrales multiécho T2* permettant une résolution bi-exponentielle (Bi-R2*). Pour s'affranchir du faible rapport signal/bruit de ces images, un travail sur la réduction du bruit a été conduit. Des études de simulation numérique de décroissance du signal ont permis de déterminer un critère de sélection à la détermination des niveaux sous-voxels pour la méthode Bi-R2*. La validité de la méthode a été testée par d'autres simulations, par une étude sur fantôme IRM et par une étude de sujets sains jeunes. Nous avons ainsi proposé une méthode d'acquisition T2* optimisant la résolution bi-exponentielle. Enfin, nous avons utilisé la méthode bi-exponentielle sur des données d'IRM T2* de deux études précédentes (où la méthode d'acquisition T2* n'est pas optimale) ont été analysées : (i) une étude visant les modifications cérébrales liées au vieillissement normal (ii) une étude visant à déterminer les modifications cérébrales entre différentes pathologies neurodégénératives. L'objectif de cette dernière partie est de savoir si la méthode bi-exponentielle apporte des informations pertinentes supplémentaires à la méthode classique mono-exponentielle.

The new radiotherapy treatments, such as stereotactic radiosurgery, Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IRTM) or Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT), require to precisely irradiate the living tissues and to know the effective delivered dose. A computer-based method par TPS (Treatment Planning System), is normally used to define the radiation therapy treatment plan, but it requires specific 3D information. The conventional detectors, such as ionizing chamber, thermoluminescent detectors or films, allow to 1D or 2D measurements whereas, with a chemical dosimeter, it is possible to obtain a 3D dosimetry which allows to control the treatment plan for the patient, independently on the radiation type or on the radiation flux. A chemical gel which presents physico-chemical properties as well as texture morphology proximal to those of biological living tissues, is important in order to control the adsorbed doses in organ-at-risk. In this research two different strategies have been followed, firstly the formulation of new gels, equivalent tissue for breast (adipose tissue) lung and bone has been checked depending their interaction with photons, electrons and neutrons; then their use with low energy photon flow has been verified. The dosimetric characteristics, that have been studied, follow the recommendations of ICRU (International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements) and show a good agreement between these gels and the biological tissues as recommended by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). Physico-chemical studied have been performed in order to characterize the equivalent tissue gels, such as viscosity, diffusion, mechanical properties, oxygen concentration, gel and cooling time, and the absorbed doses in the conditions of radiation therapy treatment. We have been interested also in validating the equivalent breast gel for low energy photon flow as in the case of Intraoperative radiation therapy using Intrabeam. The final goal was to prepare an anthropomorphic phantom to use in planning the radiation treatment; actually, this first prototype allows to determine the effective delivered dose only near the equivalent lung and bone; some modifications in the IRM sequences as well as in the formulation of the equivalent tissues have been planned to improve the phantom., Les nouvelles modalités de traitement en radiothérapie comme les irradiations en conditions stéréotaxiques et à modulation d'intensité (IRMT/VMAT) nécessitent des irradiations très précises avec une augmentation de la dose au niveau des volumes cibles mais également de diminuer et de contrôler la dose aux niveaux des organes à risques. Ce calcul, habituellement réalisé par les TPS, exige des outils 3D précis et rapides. Les détecteurs conventionnels (chambre d'ionisation, détecteurs thermoluminescents, films, ...) ne permettent que des mesures en 1D ou 2D. Il est nécessaire de développer une technique de dosimétrie 3D précise et rapide avec une résolution élevée en dose et spatiale. La dosimétrie chimique 3D répond à ces critères. Elle permet le contrôle qualité global du plan de traitement dans les conditions d'irradiation du patient quels que soit le rayonnement et le débit de dose utilisés. La création de gel chimique correspondant aux différents organes est donc un défi important pour le contrôle de la dose dans les organes à risques. Dans cette thèse, deux études ont été menées en parallèle : la formulation de nouveau gel équivalent sein (tissus adipeux), poumon et os en termes d'interaction avec les photons, les protons et les neutrons ainsi que le contrôle de leurs propriétés physico-chimique et la validation de leurs utilisations pour les photons de faibles énergies. Plusieurs caractéristiques dosimétriques ont été étudiées selon les recommandations du groupe de travail de l'ICRU (Journal of the International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements). Les résultats obtenus montrent une bonne concordance entre nos gels et les tissus pris comme référence et recommandés par le NIST. Une étude des propriétés physico-chimiques détaillée de ces gels équivalents tissulaires a été réalisée : diffusion, propriétés mécaniques, viscosité, des mesures d'oxygène dissous, des mesures de temps de gel et de temps de refroidissement ainsi que des mesures des doses absorbées en conditions de traitements de radiothérapie. Nous nous sommes intéressés aussi à la validation de notre gel équivalent sein concernant le dépôt de dose de photons de basse énergie (50 keV) par Intrabeam utilisé en radiothérapie peropératoire (IORT). L'objectif final était de réaliser un premier fantôme anthropomorphe qui pourra être un outil fiable et utilisé en clinique pour aider les planifications de traitements de radiothérapie. Ce prototype de torse permet pour l'instant de connaître la dose au voisinage des poumons et de l'os.

The new radiotherapy treatments, such as stereotactic radiosurgery, Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IRTM) or Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT), require to precisely irradiate the living tissues and to know the effective delivered dose. A computer-based method par TPS (Treatment Planning System), is normally used to define the radiation therapy treatment plan, but it requires specific 3D information. The conventional detectors, such as ionizing chamber, thermoluminescent detectors or films, allow to 1D or 2D measurements whereas, with a chemical dosimeter, it is possible to obtain a 3D dosimetry which allows to control the treatment plan for the patient, independently on the radiation type or on the radiation flux. A chemical gel which presents physico-chemical properties as well as texture morphology proximal to those of biological living tissues, is important in order to control the adsorbed doses in organ-at-risk. In this research two different strategies have been followed, firstly the formulation of new gels, equivalent tissue for breast (adipose tissue) lung and bone has been checked depending their interaction with photons, electrons and neutrons; then their use with low energy photon flow has been verified. The dosimetric characteristics, that have been studied, follow the recommendations of ICRU (International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements) and show a good agreement between these gels and the biological tissues as recommended by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). Physico-chemical studied have been performed in order to characterize the equivalent tissue gels, such as viscosity, diffusion, mechanical properties, oxygen concentration, gel and cooling time, and the absorbed doses in the conditions of radiation therapy treatment. We have been interested also in validating the equivalent breast gel for low energy photon flow as in the case of Intraoperative radiation therapy using Intrabeam. The final goal was to prepare an anthropomorphic phantom to use in planning the radiation treatment; actually, this first prototype allows to determine the effective delivered dose only near the equivalent lung and bone; some modifications in the IRM sequences as well as in the formulation of the equivalent tissues have been planned to improve the phantom.; Les nouvelles modalités de traitement en radiothérapie comme les irradiations en conditions stéréotaxiques et à modulation d'intensité (IRMT/VMAT) nécessitent des irradiations très précises avec une augmentation de la dose au niveau des volumes cibles mais également de diminuer et de contrôler la dose aux niveaux des organes à risques. Ce calcul, habituellement réalisé par les TPS, exige des outils 3D précis et rapides. Les détecteurs conventionnels (chambre d'ionisation, détecteurs thermoluminescents, films, ...) ne permettent que des mesures en 1D ou 2D. Il est nécessaire de développer une technique de dosimétrie 3D précise et rapide avec une résolution élevée en dose et spatiale. La dosimétrie chimique 3D répond à ces critères. Elle permet le contrôle qualité global du plan de traitement dans les conditions d'irradiation du patient quels que soit le rayonnement et le débit de dose utilisés. La création de gel chimique correspondant aux différents organes est donc un défi important pour le contrôle de la dose dans les organes à risques. Dans cette thèse, deux études ont été menées en parallèle : la formulation de nouveau gel équivalent sein (tissus adipeux), poumon et os en termes d'interaction avec les photons, les protons et les neutrons ainsi que le contrôle de leurs propriétés physico-chimique et la validation de leurs utilisations pour les photons de faibles énergies. Plusieurs caractéristiques dosimétriques ont été étudiées selon les recommandations du groupe de travail de l'ICRU (Journal of the International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements). Les résultats obtenus montrent une bonne concordance entre nos gels et les tissus pris comme référence et recommandés par le NIST. Une étude des propriétés physico-chimiques détaillée de ces gels équivalents tissulaires a été réalisée : diffusion, propriétés mécaniques, viscosité, des mesures d'oxygène dissous, des mesures de temps de gel et de temps de refroidissement ainsi que des mesures des doses absorbées en conditions de traitements de radiothérapie. Nous nous sommes intéressés aussi à la validation de notre gel équivalent sein concernant le dépôt de dose de photons de basse énergie (50 keV) par Intrabeam utilisé en radiothérapie peropératoire (IORT). L'objectif final était de réaliser un premier fantôme anthropomorphe qui pourra être un outil fiable et utilisé en clinique pour aider les planifications de traitements de radiothérapie. Ce prototype de torse permet pour l'instant de connaître la dose au voisinage des poumons et de l'os.