African Languages and Societies Commons^™

On The Transportation Of Material Goods By Enslaved Africans During The Middle Passage: Preliminary Findings From Documentary Sources, Jerome S. Handler

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Murambi Et Moisson De Crânes Ou Comment La Fiction Raconte Un Génocide, Josias Semujanga

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article shows how literary fiction is able to narrate the event of genocide so as to shatter the rational explanations of the world that are the accepted framework for discourse. It studies two texts written on the Rwandan genocide: Murambi by Boubacar Boris Diop and Moisson de crânes by Abdourahman Waberi.

La Représentation Du Politique Dans La Littérature Gabonaise, Jean René Ovono Mendame

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

From which viewpoint do Gabonese writers relate to the realities of the political and social policies of their country and what place do political players occupy in their works? Why do they hesitate so much to denounce the problems of their society? Why is there such a pronounced silence within their literary works? This article raises these delicate and complex questions. The report produced on the evolution of Gabonese writing affirms that writers’ silence is the product of self-censorship. They are condemned to fear saying anything, not only because of potential reprisals, but because they are, for the majority, political …

L'Islam En Termes Chrétiens : Quand L’Aventure Ambiguë « Croise » Pascal Et Saint Augustin, Mbaye Diouf

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

If it is recognized that The Ambiguous Adventure is one of Africa’s most studied texts, it should also be noted that most analyses of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s novel are general sociological commentaries on a mythologized Africa or on a society that is caught in the snares of its own mythic “values.” These commentaries often forget that the text is also the passage through a history that was imposed on Africa, and one which the writer tries to interpret in his own way. If Kane’s text plunges into the Christian faith by invoking Pascal and Augustine, it is in order to …

L’Historiographie Positiviste Au Miroir De La Fiction Littéraire, Kasereka Kavwahirehi

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In its study of L’Écart by V.Y. Mudimbe, this article examines the critical and ironic mirroring of the discourses of the social sciences. By highlighting the pretensions of scientific discourse, Mudimbe’s fiction reveals the ambiguity and the limits of positivist methodology in a postcolonial context.

L’Espace Sexué Dans Riwan Ou Le Chemin De Sable De Ken Bugul, Antje Ziethen

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Riwan ou le chemin de sable by Ken Bugul, the protagonist lives in the interstice between her own house and that of her husband’s, between the life of a woman educated in Europe and the life of a wife subjected to the laws of mouridism. In her circular movement along the sandy road evoked in the novel’s title, she gradually creates a space that allows her to reconcile the two facets of her identity. Merging different genres, stories and languages, the text itself enacts the symbolism of the road as a transitional sphere.

La Traversée Des Savoirs Dans Le Roman Africain, Justin K. Bisanswa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The African novel refers to a socio-political as well as a literary History, but does so with guile, expressing this History from an angle. Referring constantly to the social and human sciences, to the point of competing with them, the novel vacillates between dependency and autonomy. It thus proposes a specific knowledge of society, its functioning, and the individuals who constitute it. However, its true intention is not to copy the world, nor even to imitate its life, but to provide a miniaturized replica of both, and set itself up as a vast metonymic duplicate of a certain universe.

Le Romancier Africain Et L'« Énigme D'Arrivée », Bernard Mouralis

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The theme of travel occupies an important place in African literature for two reasons. The earliest African writers wanted to substitute their own discourse for the one that had been produced by the West for centuries and which was long considered to be the sole legitimate discourse on Africa. By portraying African heroes and/or narrators who embarked on voyages to Africa or to Europe, African writers showed that the African too could be a traveler. The second reason is linked to generic considerations. Since the time of Don Quixote, the novel unfolds as an itinerary moving from one point to …

La Polygamie Vue Et Vecue Dans Une Si Longue Lettre Par Mariama Ba Et Xala! Par Ousmane Sembene Simone, Simone A. Feaster-Armour

MALS Final Projects, 1995-2019

Le dictionnaire Larousse donne cinq definitions pour le mot ' mariage'; dans ce cadre nous n' avons pas besoin que deux. La premiere definition illustre l' acte individuel qui devient !'institution sociale: "Acte solennel par lequel un homme et une femme etablissent entre eux une union dont les conditions, les effets et la dissolution sont regis par les disposi-tions juridiques en vigueur dans leur pays." (Larousse 628) La deuxieme definition, "combinaison, reunion de plusieurs choses, organismes, etc.,'' exprime parfaitement les influences culturelles extemes qui s' imposent sur les maries dans n' importe quel pays ou culture. (628) Dans cette dissertation, …

Gabriel Okara In Conversation With Professor Azuonye, Chukwuma Azuonye, Gabriel Okara

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

Gabriel Imomotimi Gbaingrain Okara, was born on April 21, 1921, in Bomandi in present day Bayelsa State. After his primary education in both his home state and in the Army School, Creek Road, Port Harcourt, he was admitted to the elite Government College, Umuahia, from where he went to the Yaba College, Lagos. Thereafter, he trained as a book binder at the Federal Government Printer, after what he calls “an adventure” in pig-trading. Armed with an exposure to art, at Umuahia, where he was a student of Ben Enwonwu, he set out for an career in fine art, in 1946, …

Gabriel Okara In Conversation With Professor Azuonye, Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

No abstract provided.

Review : Female Identity In Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction By Katrin Berndt., Ann Elizabeth Willey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Good Words - August 2006, Vol. 8, No. 2, Brethren In Christ Church In Africa

Good Words / Amazwi Amahle

Busani Nkomo, editor of Good Words / Amazwi Amahle

Les Enfants De La Guerre : Adolescence Et Violence Postcoloniale Chez Badjoko, Dongala, Kourouma Et Monénembo, Koffi Anyinefa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This essay deals with the representation of African child-soldiers in three novels and an autobiography. Why do children take part in African postcolonial civil wars? How are they portrayed? These children are not —as public opinion would often have it— only the victims of postcolonial violence, but are also agents of social change. Their violent involvement in political affairs constitutes the most radical form of their determination to be heard, and the most eloquent form of their protest against their precarious living conditions in a postcolonial Africa in crisis.

Femme Nue, Femme Noire : Tribulations D’Une Vénus, Lydie Moudileno

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article examines the return, in two contemporary novels, of the figure of the “naked black woman” as an emblematic site of difference. Two women of African origin take back this twice-appropriated figure and use it to question the ways in which the materiality of the body is again being written into contemporary postcolonial society. The aim of the essay is to underline the means and meaning deployed in these new appropriations of African icons, while pointing to some possible limits to the symbolic passage from the colonial imagination to a postcolonial one.

Hannah Arendt, Boris Diop Et Le Rwanda : Correspondances Et Commencements, Isabelle Favre

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

While the social and political sciences account for a relatively large number of books on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, there are still very few literary texts on the subject. Taking Hannah Arendt’s concept of beginning as its point of departure, this article begins with an analysis of the “act of writing” before going on to examine the dynamic interplay between philosophy and literature via Boris Boubacar Diop’s novel Murambi, le livre des ossements (2000).

Le Système Des Personnages Dans Corruption De Pramoedya Ananta Toer Et L’Homme Rompu De Tahar Ben Jelloun, Magda Ibrahim

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

A comparison of the character systems of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Broken Man and Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Corruption (transmitter text) has made it possible to identify the same type of protagonist at the core of each novel. He is, in short, a mere functionary overburdened with social responsibilities, leading a cramped life and trying to live and breathe. But the portrayal of him in The Broken Man is more precise, and has greater depth. Moreover, the character systems as a whole is richer, more complex and subtle in this last novel, compared with that

Sony Labou Tansi : La Question Du Bas Matériel Et Corporel, Boniface Mongo-Mboussa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the material and corporeal “lower stratum” includes the symbols that refer to the nether regions of the human body. By adopting this approach to writing in a dictatorship, Labou Tansi most likely wanted to protect his work and himself from possible reprisals by his country’s political authorities. More importantly, however, this move constitutes a strategy of subversion of Marxist ideology: the focus on the material and corporal “lower stratum” (indistinguishable from the carnivalesque) is a form of resistance to what Bakhtin calls official discourse, and becomes a way of reclaiming the writer’s literary autonomy.

De L’Économie Politique À L’Économie De La Différence Corporelle. Représentations Du Spectacle Sportif Dans L’Imaginaire De La Jeunesse Africaine, Jean Sob

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Today’s African youth have chosen the economy of corporal performance over political economy, as a way of reconquering the dignity that was lost to them lost in the collapse of African countries. The undeniable success of African athletes all over the world has given rise to diverse representations in people’s imaginations: while young Africans consider sports to be a unique way of gaining both national and international recognition, a particular strain of racism in Western countries would use black athletes to procure certain warm and reassuring emotions for “civilized” populations frozen into the permafrost of consumer society.

Good Words - May 2006, Vol. 8, No. 1, Brethren In Christ Church In Africa

Good Words / Amazwi Amahle

Busani Nkomo, editor of Good Words / Amazwi Amahle

Gender And Resistance At North Bend Plantation: The Beginnings Of An Interdisciplinary Study Of An Enslaved Community, Kelley Deetz

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Writing African History, Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Paul Laurence Dunbar's Legacy Of Language

Joanne Braxton

Defending The Peoples Railway In The Era Of Liberalization, Jamie Monson

Faculty Work

No abstract provided.

L’Idéologie Du "Topicalisme" Thématique Dans Les Romans Africains : De Yambo Ouologuem À Calixthe Beyala, Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

This presentation stems from the debate on the quality of the African novel each time an African work — here the novel — is awarded a literary prize. This has been the case since René Maran’s Batouala and until recently with Calixthe Beyala’s Les honneurs perdus (1996). The paper examines discursive elements both constant and new foregrounded at each period of the debate. There are two competing theories at the heart of the discussion that are trying to neutralize each other. On the one hand, there is the entrenched belief of the African continent still in need of epistemological assistance. …

African And African American Studies Newsletter, Fall Quarter 2006, African And African American Studies

African and African American Studies Newsletter

This four page newsletter created by the Wright State University African and African American Studies Program documenting course offerings and participating faculty.

African And African American Newsletter, Spring Quarter 2006, African And African American Studies

African and African American Studies Newsletter

This eight page newsletter created by the Wright State University African and African American Studies Program documents course offerings, faculty and student reflections, a schedule of local events, and more.

Feminist Or Simply Feminine? Reflections On The Works Of Nana Asma’U, A 19th Century West African Woman Poet, Intellectual & Social Activist, Chukwuma Azuonye

Chukwuma Azuonye

No abstract provided.

"The World And Africa": World-Systems Theories And The Erasure Of East Africa From World History, Jesse Benjamin

Jesse Benjamin

The article examines how some world historical and world systems narratives have or not have integrated Africa or various parts of the African continent into their models. It focuses on East Africa, a place which has experienced a considerable revolt against colonial biases since the 1960s. Moreover, a review of several and most popular and acclaimed scholars of world historical scholarships were presented with the aim of demonstrating that the colonial biases of African negation have not been swept aside. They include Fernand Braudel, Andre Gunder Frank, Janet Abu-Lughod, and Eric Wolf. It had suggested that scholars must guard against …

Squatters, Resistance To "Development," And Magic As A Tool Of Subaltern Power: A Case From Coastal Kenya, Jesse Benjamin

Jesse Benjamin

No abstract provided.