Welcome

Welcome to our bilingual French/English multimedia website, Francophone Identities. In order to access the materials presented herein, you will need Adobe Reader as well as RealPlayer. Both are available to download free of charge.

This site, created by the Center for European Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is a pedagogical website with an essentially educational purpose. It is presented to both teachers and students who wish to discover the multiplicity of francophone identities as well as further their knowledge of contemporary Europe. We must say right away, this site does not claim to be an exhaustive presentation of all francophone identities but illuminates a certain number of representative examples. Neither does the site offer a means of doing in-depth research on a given subject, although certain links presented here may lead to such research.

To put it briefly, this site aims to provide teacher and student certain points of reference, interesting materials and practical information to spark reflection or to examine the various questions or exercises given. This site constitutes an excellent complement to class and each chapter presented could be the object of a week of the course or one class period only. Another major advantage of the site is that an entire class will have the opportunity to navigate the same information and links rather than to navigate the web at random and risk not finding reliable sources of information. To this end, we have assured that the links presented in each chapter and those on the main page of our site are well established and entirely adapted for teaching. The first link presented, that of the European Union, is in itself an object for study in several languages on the subject.

As you will see in using the site, numerous parallel themes are elaborated from one chapter to another. We invite you to to make such connections particularly through the chapters entitled Francophone Art and A la Carte.

Finally, this project would never have seen the light of day without the expertise and hard work of an entire team of teachers, researchers and web developers who composed the materials in each chapter:

 

William Acree,
Brice McGowen.................		 Design and development
Sahar
Amer ....................................		 Muslim Women in France
Martine Antle...................................... Icons of France, Francophone Art,
A la Carte
Allison Connolly............................... Negritude
Sarah Hutchison............................ Sumptuous Minimalism
Jennifer Deville.................................. 1001 Nights
Typhaine Leservot.............................. Creole
Debbie Reisinger............................. The Tour de France

 

One last point. We have labored to construct a bilingual site and whenever possible we have provided the same material in both languages. When that was not possible, we furnish relevant texts on the same subject in each language.

Once again, welcome to our site on Francophone Identities!

Bon travail!

Martine Antle