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Anomia: Nostalgia for a Forbidden Sense, Ezza Agha Malak(trans. Cynthia Hahn), (2009) New Orleans: University Press of the South, 137 pp., ISBN: 1-931948-89-5, $29.95 How Belgium colonized the mind of the Congo: Seeking the memory of an African people, LieveSpaas, (2007) Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 236 pp., ISBN 978-0-7734-5167-4,Hardback As French as Everyone Else? A survey of French Citizens of Maghrebin, African and Turkish Origin, Sylvain Brouard and Vincent Tiberj (trans. Jennifer Fredette), (2011) Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 131 pp., ISBN 978-14399-0296-7,Paperback, $23.95 Rewriting the Return to Africa: Voices of Francophone Caribbean Women Writers, Anne M. François, (2011) Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 111 pp., ISBN 978-0-7391-4826-6, Hardback, $59.99/ £37.95 The Wounded Soul of a Black Elephant & A Prayer to the Ancestors, Gabriel MwènèOkoundji(trans.Peter Figueroa with assistance from Carol Sanders), (2008) London: Books of Africa, 72pp., ISBN 97809566380-7-6,Paperback, £12 Images of Switzerland. Crossing Frontiers: Cultural Exchange and Conflict – Papers in Honour of Malcolm Pender, Barbara Burns and Joy Charnley (eds), (2010) Amsterdam &New York: Rodopi, 268pp., ISBN 978-90-420-2997-2, Paperback, €54/ US$ 73 Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination, Paul B. Miller, (2010) Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 230 pp., ISBN 978-0-8139-2980-4,Paperback, $21.50 Toussaint Louverture:The Haitian Revolution, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, (2008) London &New York: Verso, 123 pp., ISBN 978-1-84467-261-5, 16.95 / £7.99 De l’acteur vedette au théâtre de festival. Histoire des pratiques scéniques montréalaises 1940–1980, Sylvain Schryburt, (2011) Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 400 pp., ISBN 978-2-7606-2240-1, C$ 34.95, €31 Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography, Natalie Edwards, (2011) Newark: University of Delaware Press, 171 pp., ISBN 978-1-61149-030-5, Hardback, £37.95 The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures, Ayo A. Coly, (2010) Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 176 pp., ISBN 978-0-7391-4511-1, Hardback, $62.99 (£39.95) Diversité littéraire en Algérie, Najib Redouane (éd.), (2011) Paris: L’Harmattan, 300 pp., ISBN 978-2-296-11979-6, €28 L’Œuvre romanesque de Gérard Étienne: E(cri)ts d’un Révolutionnaire, Redouane Najib et Yvette Bénayoun-Szmidt (eds), (2011) Paris: L’Harmattan, coll. Espaces littéraires, 254 pp., ISBN 978-2-296-54382-9, Paperback, €23.50 Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier’s Middle Ages, Michelle R. Warren, (2010) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 379pp., ISBN 978-0-8166-6526-6,Paperback, $25 Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society, Valérie K. Orlando, (2011) Athens: Ohio University Press, 190 pp., ISBN 978-0-89680-281-0, Paperback

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What Jules Verne charts in his Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours isn't just the itinerary that his famous character Phileas Fogg traverses in his quest to travel around the world in eighty days. Instead, what we witness are the workings of a colonial-capitalist discourse that reduces the entire planet to an easily exchangeable commodity. This paper analyses how Fogg's journey resituates indigenous landscapes according to a colonial grammar. Vernien geography authorises only those fictional spatial and temporal paradigms that are consistent with the colonial project of capitalistic expansion.

Colonialism advanced its project of territorial expansion by changing the very meaning of borders and space. The colonial project scripted a unipolar spatial discourse that saw the colonies as an extension of European borders. In his monograph, Mohit Chandna engages with narrations of spatial conflicts in French and Francophone literature and film from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. In literary works by Jules Verne, Ananda Devi, and Patrick Chamoiseau, and film by Michael Haneke, Chandna analyzes the depiction of ever-changing borders and spatial grammar within the colonial project. In so doing, he also examines the ongoing resistance to the spatial legacies of colonial practices that act as omnipresent enforcers of colonial borders. Literature and film become sites that register colonial spatial paradigms and advance competing narratives that fracture the dominance of these borders. Through its analyses Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces shows that colonialism is not a finished project relegated to our past. Colonialism is present in the here and now, and exercises its power through the borders that define us.