Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment
Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment

Author: Odile Cazenave

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2011-02-02

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0813931150

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By looking at engagée literature from the recent past, when the francophone African writer was implicitly seen as imparted with a mission, to the present, when such authors usually aspire to be acknowledged primarily for their work as writers, Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment addresses the currrent processes of canonization in contemporary francophone African literature. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier argue that aesthetic as well as political issues are now at the forefront of debates about the African literary canon, as writers and critics increasingly acknowledge the ideology of form. Working across genres but focusing on the novel, the authors take up the question of renewed forms of commitment in this literature. Their selected writers range from Mongo Beti, Ousmane Sembène, and Aminata Sow Fall to Boubacar Boris Diop, Véronique Tadjo, Alain Mabanckou, and Léonora Miano, among others.

The Contemporary Francophone African Intellectual
The Contemporary Francophone African Intellectual

Author: Natalie Edwards

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2013-07-29

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1443851213

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The Contemporary Francophone African Intellectual examines the issues with which the contemporary African intellectual engages, the fields s/he occupies, her/his residence and perspective, and her/his relations with the State and the people. In an increasingly economically deprived Africa, in which some states are ruled by dictators, what chances do people have of becoming intellectuals, using their critical faculties to challenge hegemony, enacting the transformative power of ideas in a public forum? Do intellectuals who remain in Africa run the risk of being swallowed into a vortex of hagiography? What is the responsibility of the intellectual in the face of an event such as the Rwandan genocide? What influence does religion have upon the contemporary intellectual’s work? Is migration one of the only paths available for African intellectuals, a number of whom have been critiquing their continent from within Europe? This volume focuses on the intellectual’s engagement across literature, philosophy, journalism and cultural criticism. It contains studies of established writers and philosophers as well as new voices. An African writer and public intellectual describes her own experience in and out of Africa in one chapter; a Philosophy Professor discusses his intellectual trajectory in another. Overall, this timely volume, which includes analysis of the work of intellectuals from North, East, West and Central Africa, problematizes our current understandings of the intellectual legacy of Africa and opens up new avenues into this understudied area.

Francophone African Poetry and Drama
Francophone African Poetry and Drama

Author: Richard J. Gray II

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-09-23

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0786475587

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Scholars examining literature from former French colonies sometimes view it wrongly as simply an outgrowth of colonial literature. By suggesting new ways to understand the multiple voices present, this book explores how Francophone African poetry and theatre in particular, since the 1960s, constitute both an organic cultural product and a reflection of the diverse African cultures in which they originate. Themes explored in five chapters include the many kinds of African identity formation, the resistance to former notions of literary composition as art, a remapping of social responsibility, and the impact of globalization on Francophone Africa's participation in world economics, politics and culture. This study highlights the inner workings of Francophone African literature and suggests a canonization of modern Francophone works from a world perspective.

Sharing the Burden of Stories from the Tutsi Genocide
Sharing the Burden of Stories from the Tutsi Genocide

Author: Anna-Marie de Beer

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-04-23

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 3030420930

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This book deals with literary representations of the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. The focus is a transnational, polyphonic writing project entitled ‘Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire’ (Rwanda: Writing by Duty of Memory), undertaken in 1998 by a group of nine African authors. This work emphasizes the Afropolitan cultural frame in which the texts were conceived and written. Instead of using Western and Eurocentric tropes, this volume looks at a so-called ‘minority trauma’: an African conflict situated in a collectivist society and written about by writers from African origin. This approach enables a more situated study, in which it becomes possible to draw out the local notions of ubuntu, oral testimonies, mourning traditions, healing and storytelling strategies, and the presence of the ‘invisible’. As these texts are written in French and to date not all of them have been translated into English, most academic research has been done in French. This book thus assists in connecting English-speaking readers not only to a set of texts written in French with significant literary and cultural value, but also to francophone trauma studies research.

Engagement in 21st Century French and Francophone Culture
Engagement in 21st Century French and Francophone Culture

Author: Helena Chadderton

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2017-11-08

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1786831198

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In the face of the contested legacy of engagement in the Francophone context, this interdisciplinary collection demonstrates that French and Francophone writers, artists, intellectuals and film-makers are using their work to confront unforeseen and unprecedented challenges, campaigns and causes in a politically uncertain post-9/11 world. Composed of eleven essays and a contextualising introduction, this volume is interdisciplinary in its treatment of engagement in a variety of forms, as it reassesses the relationship between different types of cultural production and society as it is played out in the twenty-first century. With a focus on both the development of different cultural forms (Part 1) and on the particular crises that have attracted the attention of cultural practitioners (Part 2), this volume maps and analyses some of the ways in which cultural texts of all kinds are being used to respond to, engage with and challenge crises in the contemporary Francophone world.

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature
The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature

Author: Lokangaka Losambe

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-16

Total Pages: 591

ISBN-13: 1040013988

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The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors. Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world, this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave (1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing up outside Africa). Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration, which is more of a process than the community of settled African people involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings. This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.

Writers and Social Thought in Africa
Writers and Social Thought in Africa

Author: Wale Adebanwi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-02

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 1317378628

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Social theory and social theorizing about Africa has largely ignored African literature. However, because writers are some of the continent’s finest social thinkers, they have produced – and continue to produce – works which constitute potential sources for the analysis of social thought, and for constructing social theory, in and beyond the continent. This comprehensive collection examines the relationship between African literature and African social thought. It explores the evolution and aesthetics of social thought in African fiction, and African writers’ conceptions of power and authority, legitimacy, history and modernity, gender and sexuality, culture, epistemology, globalization, and change and continuity in Africa. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

The Dictator Novel
The Dictator Novel

Author: Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2019-07-15

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 081014042X

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Where there are dictators, there are novels about dictators. But “dictator novels” do not simply respond to the reality of dictatorship. As this genre has developed and cohered, it has acquired a self-generating force distinct from its historical referents. The dictator novel has become a space in which writers consider the difficulties of national consolidation, explore the role of external and global forces in sustaining dictatorship, and even interrogate the political functions of writing itself. Literary representations of the dictator, therefore, provide ground for a self-conscious and self-critical theorization of the relationship between writing and politics itself. The Dictator Novel positions novels about dictators as a vital genre in the literatures of the Global South. Primarily identified with Latin America, the dictator novel also has underacknowledged importance in the postcolonial literatures of francophone and anglophone Africa. Although scholars have noted similarities, this book is the first extensive comparative analysis of these traditions; it includes discussions of authors including Gabriel García Márquez, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Mármol, Esteban Echeverría, Ousmane Sembène , Chinua Achebe, Aminata Sow Fall, Henri Lopès, Sony Labou Tansi, and Ahmadou Kourouma. This juxtaposition illuminates the internal dynamics of the dictator novel as a literary genre. In so doing, Armillas-Tiseyra puts forward a comparative model relevant to scholars working across the Global South.

The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French
The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French

Author: Oana Panaïté

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2017-05-11

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1786948141

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This book explores the 'colonial fortune' in light of contemporary concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt and the persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation.

Mind the Ghost
Mind the Ghost

Author: Sonja Stojanovic

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2023-01-16

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1800854897

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Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.