African Languages and Societies Commons^™

Logiques Urbaines Dans Les Arts Plastiques : De La Filiation De Jean-Michel Basquiat Au Sénégal, Massamba Mbaye

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

ertain Senegalese painters, including Soly Cissé, Camara Guèye, Birame Ndiaye and Samba Fall draw their inspiration from the city’s structure. Attentive to the tensions it produces as well as the daily struggles to survive, they transpose urban walls in their paintings to better transgress them, go beyond pre-imposed limits. One can therefore ask what is the influence of a painter like Basquiat on these contemporary painters ? Approaches and needs found in Senegal differ greatly from those found in the United States ; however interesting links can be traced that allow for a better understanding of present Senegalese art.

Politique Culturelle : Tradition, Modernité Et Arts Contemporains Au Sénégal, 1960-2000, Kinsey Katchka

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This essay approaches contemporary arts in Senegal and their exhibition from the perspective of cultural policy. This is an especially salient approach in Senegal, where policy has played a significant role in exhibition and creative practice since the colonial period. This history is conventionally examined through a distinctly nationalist framework that reveals the government’s clear distinction between "tradition" and "modernity". State exhibition practice and rhetoric have reinforced this dichotomy, serving to position the Senegalese state as purveyor, definer, and arbiter of cultural heritage. However, diverse creative expressions throughout the capital city of Dakar call into question nationalist rhetoric’s rigid distinction …

Les Limites De L’Appartenance : Composition, Intertextualité Et Langue Dans Les Dents Du Topographe Et Méfiez-Vous Des Parachutistes De Fouad Laroui, Carla Calargé

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In this article, I examine two novels by Fouad Laroui, Les dents du topographe (1996) and Méfiez-vous des parachutistes (1999). I analyze the difficulties encountered by their narrators when they try to find and define non alienating cultural and geographical spaces to which they could belong. For that purpose, I study the composition of the two novels, the play of intertextuality as well as the language of the main characters.

La Parole Au Féminin : La Narratrice De Cette Fille-Là De Maïssa Bey, Ana Soler

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Maïssa Bey’s novel, Cette fille-là, the character of Malika serves as a narrative plea for change. Since her childhood, Malika has strived to create an inward, personal imaginary for herself, as a defence mechanism against a hostile environment. In the workhouse, she adopts the role of storyteller for all those companions of hers, excluded as she is, from society. As the receptor of confidential information, she delights in verbally re-enacting their intimate stories, sprinkling them with accounts of her own experiences. By thus establishing Marika’s voice as a “link-route” to the novel’s subjacent vocal polyphony, the character is presented …

La Dimension Cachée De L’Art Sénégalais Contemporain, Allen F. Roberts, Mary Nooter Roberts

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

For nearly fifty years now, Dakar has been an epicenter of contemporary art, not just for continental Africa but for the entire world. Senegalese artists are well known internationally through participation in biennials, exhibitions, and gallery shows ; and many argue that they are contemporary artists from Senegal rather than “Senegalese artists” defined or constrained by their african identity. Among these, however, some match the global techniques and aesthetics of their works with local meanings derived from mystical Islam. Indeed, this “hidden side” can be very significant to the artists themselves even though it may be ignored by cosmopolitan connoisseurs.

Projets De Collection Et D’Exposition D’Art Sénégalais : Être Mécène D’Art À Dakar, Joanna Grabski

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The collection of Bassam Chaitou and its recent exhibition in Dakar offers a focal point to examine issues associated with private projects of collecting and exhibiting Senegalese art in Dakar. This article considers the relationship of Dakar’s collectors to historical patronage under Senghor and Dakar’s contemporary art scene. It proposes that private Dakar-based projects of collecting make visible a story about local propositions and dialogues about art. Dakar-based projects of collecting reveal a great deal about the city’s art scene, its history, artists, and trends.

L’Éthique De La Différence En Traduction : Le Cas De Deux Romans Africains Francophones Et De Leur Restitution En Anglais, Augustine H. Asaah

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Translation advances the cause of the international community as it plays a vital role in global development and understanding. The literary text needs to be translated before readers from diverse linguistic communities can apprehend and enjoy it. To a large extent, the success of the translation enterprise is a function of the accuracy of the target-text. With illustrations drawn from two francophone african masterpieces, Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les soleils des indépendances and Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre, this article seeks to determine the extent to which the target-texts in English respect the spirit and the letter articulated by the source-texts. …

Raharimanana : « Le Viol Des Douceurs », Patricia Célérier

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

constant and paradoxical paradigm, violence is at the core of the Malagasy writer, Jean-Luc Raharimanana’s work. What are its representations, its modulations and functions in his shortstories, his novel, Nour, 1947, and his narrative, L’arbre anthropophage ? His poetic elaboration of violence puts his production at the juncture of postmodern and committed literatures and gives it a singular value in the world of postcolonial literature.

Biennale Et Effervescence Artistique Au Sénégal : Conjonctions Et Passerelles, Hélène Tissières

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The Dakar Biennial, Dak’Art, plays a key role and is the only event of this kind on the african continent. Held in a country where there is an abundant artistic production, it prolongs Senghor’s objectives (underlining the importance of the collective, intertwining art forms, investing mystical positions). Made of an “In” and “Off”, its structure dismantles divisions between popular/theoretical, accessible/obscure, autodidact/trained and promotes a dialog between people and approaches. Many Senegalese artists proceed in a similar fashion, assembling concepts (orality, signs, cultural references, categories), drawing from the world at large. Inscribing memory, they invite us to interrogate our future beyond …

Mariama Khain Interviews Yema Janga About Kim Language, George Tucker Childs

The Kim and Bom Languages of Sierra Leone

Audio file of Mariama Khain interviewing Yema Janga about the Kim language, and inquiring why Kim is no longer spoken by the people.

African And African American Studies Newsletter, Spring Quarter 2008, African And African American Studies

African and African American Studies Newsletter

This ten page newsletter created by the Wright State University African and African American Studies Program features course offerings, faculty and student reflections, a quiz, and more.

Language Death Within The Atlantic Group Of West Africa, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article presents an overview of the less widely spoken languages of the Atlantic Group (Niger-Congo), as representing the most seriously threatened language group in West Africa. Study of this group indicates that language endangerment is real and widespread. The basis for this claim comes from the literature on these languages, from personal research on the Atlantic languages dating back to 1984, and from recent and ongoing fieldwork on several highly endangered languages of Sierra Leone and Guinea.

Language Endangerment In West Africa: Its Victims And Causes, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper catalogues the forces at work threatening the Atlantic languages of Guinea and Sierra Leone. Compared to Mande, the other major language group in the area, and to figures for Africa in general (Sommer 1992), the Atlantic Group is beset by ominous forces. These include what could be considered ecological features (e.g., Mufwene 2001): the Mande Expansion (Niane 1989), colonialism, the spread of Islam, and globalization. There are other forces to be sure, such as the influence of Christian missions (Welmers 1971; cf. Mühlhäusler 1990), urbanization (a sub-category, perhaps, of globalization), and climatic changes (Brooks 1993, Fairhead and Leach …

Benediction And Malediction In Fulani Culture: Exploring An Afro-Muslim Perception Of The Socio-Spiritual Dimensions Of Success And Failure, Mohamed Camara

Humanities & Communication - Daytona Beach

This article is a discussion of the Fulani belief in barki (benediction) and kuddi (malediction) in an attempt to show how it informs this deeply religious West African society's perception of success and failure and how, in turn, this perception affects the society's understandings of the political and economic challenges in Africa. Because the Fulani are an Afro-Muslim society, the article is also a discussion of the convergence of indigenous African traditions and Islamic ones as observed in the socio-religious beliefs of the Fulani of Guinea.

Radicalism And Cultural Dislocation In Ethiopia, 1960-1974, Messay Kebede

Philosophy Faculty Publications

During the 1960s and early 1970s, a majority of Ethiopian students and intellectuals adopted a Marxist-Leninist ideology with fanatic fervor. The leading force in an uprising against the imperial regime of Emperor Haile Selassie, they played a decisive role in the rise of a Leninist military regime. In this original study, Messay Kebede examines the sociopolitical and cultural factors that contributed to the radicalization of the educated elite in Ethiopia, and how this phenomenon contributed to the country's uninterrupted political crises and economic setbacks since the Revolution of 1974.

Offering a perspective garnered from his direct participation in the student …

Mural, Painting And Art Education Project With African Refugees And The African Community Center Of West Michigan, Carrie Schoenborn, Jill Eggers

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

In starting the project at the African Community Center, we spent time getting to know the center, the people who use it and how it is used. We began by simply being at the center and helping with whatever needed to be done. We answered phones, met people who came and cleaned the donation closet. Yaka, the director, brought us to visit many of the families that use the center and we talked to both the refugees and Yaka about the experiences these individuals had coming to the United States; the difficulties they faced in Africa, on their journey to …

Benediction And Malediction In Fulani Culture: Exploring An Afro-Muslim Perception Of The Socio-Spiritual Dimensions Of Success And Failure, Mohamed S. Camara

Security Studies & International Affairs - Daytona Beach

This article is a discussion of the Fulani belief in barki (benediction) and kuddi (malediction) in an attempt to show how it informs this deeply religious West African society's perception of success and failure and how, in turn, this perception affects the society's understandings of the political and economic challenges in Africa. Because the Fulani are an Afro-Muslim society, the article is also a discussion of the convergence of indigenous African traditions and Islamic ones as observed in the socio-religious beliefs of the Fulani of Guinea.

Media, Civil Society And Political Culture In West Africa, Mohamed S. Camara

Security Studies & International Affairs - Daytona Beach

From the premise that a free and democratic society is impossible without free and responsible media and an active civil society and that freedom and democracy must evolve from within a particular society in order to mature into a way of life for the society and its media, the present study examines the symbiotic role of the media and civil society in West Africa’s struggle for democratic governance. It addresses the question of the independence and accountability of West Africa’s media vis-à-vis foreign donors, local business and political forces along with the effects on local audiences of giant Western/global media …

Media, Civil Society And Political Culture In West Africa, Mohamed Saliou Camara

Humanities & Communication - Daytona Beach

From the premise that a free and democratic society is impossible without free and responsible media and an active civil society and that freedom and democracy must evolve from within a particular society in order to mature into a way of life for the society and its media, the present study examines the symbiotic role of the media and civil society in West Africa’s struggle for democratic governance. It addresses the question of the independence and accountability of West Africa’s media vis-à-vis foreign donors, local business and political forces along with the effects on local audiences of giant Western/global media …

La Pensée Du Témoignage : De La Scène Du Génocide À La Scène Judiciaire, Sélom Gbanou

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This paper intends to study the stories of witnesses of the genocide of the Tutsi people in Rwanda from the angle of both History and Justice. It analyses how the actual event is brought back by the victims’s stories and shows the tormentors that the lives they have undone have been redone in defiance of the effort to wipe out all traces, the basic idea of genocide. Furthermore, the witnesses report seems to be a judiciary scene where, trying to understand what has happened, the victims put themselves in the witness box of their conscience in order to find their …

Le Témoignage Dans L’Oeuvre De Yolande Mukagasana, Théopiste Kabanda

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

this article analyzes the status of testimony in Mukagasana’s La mort ne veut pas de moi and N’aie pas peur de savoir, by bringing out the main narrative strategies allowing to get round the unspeakable. It demonstrates the connection of the testimony, the memory and the history of the genocide in Rwanda as event which marked the humanity in 20th century. This link is studied through the conditions and the postures of testimony, the textual marks of dentification of the addressees and the roles of the testimony.

Bent Familia De Nouri Bouzid : Enjeux De L’Amitié, De La Clairvoyance Féminine Et Du Questionnement, Hélène Tissières

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Bent Familia by the Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid breaks down silences by questioning norms and power structures, including patriarchal authority. Centered on an exceptional friendship between three women and examining their preoccupations as well as their needs, the film reveals the empowering forces of sharing, insightfulness and engagement. Through the character of Aïda and the intertwinement of arts – in particular music and painting – the film dismantles absolutes and illusions. It encourages deep questioning in order to trace new paths, valuing the clear-sighted contributions of women in a continuously changing society.

Témoigner : Les Voies De La Connaissance, Catalina Sagarra

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The author analyzes the narrations of Survivors of the genocide of the Tutsi, in 1994. A particular attention is paid to how the witnesses express two affects : guilt and responsibility. Their life stories explore these concepts which help them to carry out a search for Truth, which is deeply linked with the sufferings the horror of the past inflicted to them to the point of being haunted by the past. The Survivors ask themselves an array of questions, not always finding a satisfying answer which could bring them some peace. They address their questioning to different agents, telling them …

Maggy Corrêa : Passer Le Témoin, Avec Ou Sans Le Feu Sacré, Isabelle Favre

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In her book entitled Tutsie, etc., Rwandan Swiss author Maggy Corrêa recounts how in july 1994, she was able to rescue her mother from the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi. This essay begins by examining the status of the testimonial genre within the literary institution. Then, based on Maggy Corrêa’s text, the analysis will demonstrate how Derrida’s concept of sacramentum can be traced in Corrêa’s adventure, and how this same notion proved to be absent from the United Nations’s discourse taking place in Geneva at the same time.

La Poétique Du Fragment Dans Le Récit De Survivance Au Rwanda, Eugène Nshimiyimana

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The narrative about surviving is by definition an impossible narrative due to the enormity and absurdity of the tragedy. It is characterized by a fragmentary aspect which is a sign of its resistance to utterance. Based on Révérien Rurangwa’s Génocidé, the following reflection proposes to read the fragment as a manifestation of a traumatic memory that language fails to carry out due to the distortion of the signifying process in which the signified seems to take priority to the signifier. The fragment, thus, can be seen as an attempt to recuperate the symbolic, attempt that is always ''unsuitable'' due to …

Le Témoignage De L’Itsembabwoko Par La Fiction. L’Ombre D’Imana, Josias Semujanga

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Following the Tutsi genocide in 1994, many African writers went to Rwanda, in 1998, and then wrote some novels and other fictional texts about the horror they saw. This study shows how Véronique Tadjo’s L’ombre d’Imana adopts several mechanisms of Traveler’s Narratives, but poses also their limits in ethical thinking about genocide. Tadjo uses indeed the subversion of Traveler’s Narratives by adding other forms of genres like reportage and testimonies. She discusses about the limits of testimony narratives on a genocide.

« La Femme Qui Pleure » : La Nouvelle D’Assia Djebar Et Le Tableau De Picasso, Farah Aïcha Gharbi

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article is a study of the dialogue that is maintained between the novel « La femme qui pleure » by Assia Djebar and the Picasso painting that bears the same title. This article also aims to show author’s achievement of the liberation of the feminine subject through an aesthetic means, in other words, through an angle that allows for an encounter between that which has been written and the painting, which combined give the women the right to the word and the image portrayed. The form and the structure that are shared between the novel and the painting appear …

L’Écriture Tumulaire : Témoignage Sur La Mort, Pour La Vie, Philippe Basabosa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The article proves how the testimony narrative, in writing death and genocide-related atrocities, attempts to restore human dignity to the victims. The narrative space that becomes in that way a burial place and a funeral monument plays also the role of the ''redemption'' of history in order to secure the future. The narratives that the article analyzes constitute at the same time a hymn to life. By creating themselves other destinies, other reasons for life, the survivor and witness authors succeed in overcoming the world-weariness that threatens every survivor of the Itsembabwoko slaughter.

Songs From Imerina: A Creative Study Of The Evolving Craft Of Merina Hainteny In Madagascar, Elly Bookman

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

I don’t know much about hainteny. It’s an elusive form to me still, for by nature it’s only a foggy representation of a culture that I can never truly be a part of. And anyway, even many members of the Malagasy population are uncertain of the plethora of possible meanings behind this literature, as I was told on more than one occasion when I discussed my plans to study these mysterious verses.

Luckily, though, I do know poetry, and while hainteny may fall outside any Western parameters set up to define this medium, it nonetheless exists in the same way: …

Dust And Smoke: Desertification, Fire And Elephants In Togo, West Africa, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

Dust and smoke: from desert and fire. Everyone south of the Sahara in Africa, and not just those in the region where I lived, knows them intimately. From Abidjan to Mombassa, Africans understands what these twinned hazes mean to their lives, their futures. Dual signs of the destruction of the savanna—born of the over-use of farmland and of wood burned as fuel—they’ve become omens, precursors of the desert sands certain to follow. Signals, they are, that life in the villages will only get harder as time passes. This is a story of dust and smoke--and elephants--in one small area in …