Dr Andrew Asibong
BA (Oxford) MA PhD (London)
Senior Lecturer in 20th- and 21st-century French Studies
Co-Director, Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship & Community (BRAKC)
Programme Director, MA Modern Languages (French) and MA Aesthetics of Kinship and Community
Tutor for Admissions, MA ML (French); MA AKC; all BA French programmes and short courses
Contact details
Department of European Cultures and Languages
Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PD
Tel: 020 7631 6176
E-mail: a.asibong@bbk.ac.uk
Profile
Andrew Asibong's teaching and research interests lie in recent French (and other francophone) film, writing and critical theory. He is especially interested in the ethico-political implications of "fantastical" representation and in the aesthetic reconfiguration of social, sexual and familial communities.
He is programme director of the MA Modern Languages (French), and convenes MA options on ‘The French Fantastic’, ‘Representations of "Race" and Racism in French and Francophone Culture’ and ‘Reinventing the Family in French Film’. He is also programme director of the MA Aesthetics of Kinship and Community.
He is currently supervising a number of doctoral theses: one, by Chantal Quiquine, considers spectral, melancholic and behavioral traces of enslaved African women in the novels of Maryse Conde; another, by Pauline Eaton, deals with the complex representation of mothers and mothering in the work of Marie NDiaye; a third, by Geoffrey Brown, focuses on innovative conceptualisations of community in the recent films of Claire Denis. He is co-supervising (with Joanne Leal) a fourth PhD project, an analysis of Eastern and Western interactions in recent European cinema, by Kamil Zapasnik.
Before coming to Birkbeck in 2006, Andrew taught at the University of Paris X (Nanterre), King's College London (where he completed his doctoral thesis, 'Metamorphosis and the Métèque', a study of the racial politics of fantastical transformation in French, Algerian and Haitian literature and film), and the University of Nottingham. He is an affiliate member of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe (CISSGE) and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA).
With Nathalie Wourm he is the co-founder and co-director of the Research Centre Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community (BRAKC).
Publications
Monographs
Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, in preparation)
La Sorcière (introductory guide) (University of Glasgow French and German Publications, in preparation)
François Ozon (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2008)
Edited volume
(with Shirley Jordan) Marie NDiaye: L'Étrangeté à l'oeuvre (Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, coll. Revue des Sciences Humaines [293], 2009)
Articles in refereed journals
‘Claire Denis’s Flickering Spaces of Hospitality’ in L’Esprit Créateur (51:1), spring 2011 (special issue ‘Watch This Space: Women’s Conceptualisations of Space in Contemporary Film and Visual Art’, edited by Marie-Claire Barnet and Shirley Jordan).
‘Radically Fantastical: The Politics of the Truth-Event in the Metic Novels of Mohammed Dib and Marie NDiaye’ in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, September 2010 (14:4).
'Unrecognisable Bonds: Bleeding Kinship in Pedro Almodóvar and Gregg Araki' in New Cinemas (7:3), December 2009.
'Travel Sickness: Marie NDiaye, Hervé Guibert, and the Liquidation of the White Fantasy-Subject' in International Journal of Francophone Studies, January/February 2009 (12:1, special issue ‘Alterity and Identity: From Organic Hybridity to Politicized Difference’ edited by Helen Vassallo and Nadia Kiwan).
‘Meat, Murder, Metamorphosis: The Transformational Ethics of François Ozon’ in French Studies, July 2005 (59:2).
‘Mulier Sacra: Marie Chauvet, Marie Darrieussecq, and the Sexual Metamorphoses of “Bare Life”’ in French Cultural Studies, June 2003 (14: 2).
Chapters in books
'Nouveau Désordre: Diabolical Queerness in 1950s French Cinema’ in Queer 50s (eds. Heike Bauer and Matt Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2011).
'Haitian Bride of Frankenstein: Disintegrating Beauty, Monstrousness and "Race" in Jacques Stephen Alexis's "Chronique d'un Faux-Amour"' in The Beautiful and the Monstrous: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture (eds. Amaleena Damlé and Aurelie L'Hostis, Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).
'Spectres of Substance: François Ozon and the Aesthetics of Embodied Haunting', in Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature, Theory, Film and Photography (eds. Kate Griffiths and David Evans, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009).
'Tou(te)s mes ami(e)s: Le problème de l'amitié chez Marie NDiaye' in Marie NDiaye: L'Étrangeté à l'oeuvre (eds. Andrew Asibong and Shirley Jordan, Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, coll. Revue des Sciences Humaines [293], 2009).
'Viral Women: Singular, Collective and Progressive Infection in Hiroshima mon amour, Les Yeux sans visage and Trouble Every Day' in Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in Modern and Contemporary Francophone Contexts (eds. Helen Vassallo and Paul Cooke, Bern: Peter Lang, 2009).
‘The Killing of Sister Catherine: Deneuve’s Lesbian Transformations’ in From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve (eds. Lisa Downing and Sue Harris, Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2007).
‘Moja sestra: Marie NDiaye and the Transmission of Horrific Kinship’ in Transmissions: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Cinema (eds. Isabelle McNeill and Bradley Stephens, Bern: Peter Lang, 2007).
Encyclopaedia entries
‘Comte de Lautréamont’, ‘Jean Genet’, ‘Patrick Chamoiseau’, ‘Julio Cortázar’, ‘Gabriel García Márquez’, ‘Alejo Carpentier’, ‘James Baldwin’, ‘Catherine Deneuve’, ‘Jane Fonda’, ‘vodun’, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ and ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ (1000 words) in France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, History (ed. Bill Marshall, Oxford/Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2005).
Translation
Christian Jambet, ‘Some Comments on the Question of the One’ in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, August 2003 (8:2, special issue: ‘The One or the Other: French Philosophy Today’, ed. Peter Hallward).
Reviews
"Henri-Georges Clouzot by Christopher Lloyd" in French Studies, October 2008 (62:4).
"Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature by Martin Munro" in Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 2008 (6:1).
Current projects (2010-12)
1. Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition. This monograph, commissioned by Liverpool University Press, will be the first full-length study in English devoted entirely to Prix Goncourt winner Marie NDiaye’s remarkable corpus (ten novels, five plays, one collection of short stories, three children’s books, a co-authored film screenplay, and a number of other co-authored and unclassifiable pieces). It structures chronological readings of NDiaye’s work around the writer’s repeated representations of essentially monstrous cultural situations, situations wherein stigmatized fictional subjects find themselves compelled to undergo a seemingly endless series of (often unrepresentable) transformations in order to secure an impossible guarantee of acceptability and integration.
2. La Sorcière: an introductory guide to NDiaye's 1996 novel, commissioned by University of Glasgow Introductory Guides to French and German Literature.
3. ‘Visions of the Coming Community’: an international conference on French studies and the question of community, co-organised with departmental colleagues and members of the BRAKC steering committee, Damian Catani, Akane Kawakami, Ann Lewis and Nathalie Wourm, which will take place at Birkbeck on 30/6/2011 – 1/7/2011.
4. ‘The Carnival is Over: Unmasking Projects of Liberation in Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud': an article proposed for inclusion in Race/Sex, a project by Heike Bauer and Jonathan D. Mackintosh.
Future project (2012-15)
Fantastical Kin and Conjured Carers: Creativity and Community beyond the Family Romance: this will be a major, inter-disciplinary project, which will explore the aesthetic, psycho-therapeutic and ethico-political stakes of real and fantasmatic forms of 'unthinkable' parental relation across a range of different cultural, artistic and linguistic contexts: from magic to classical tragedy to psychoanalysis, and from the fiction of Cervantes and Toni Morrison to the cinema of Val Lewton and David Lynch.
