African Studies Commons^™

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.

Meka Ou Le Lent Retour À Soi, Alexandre Lizotte

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Inspired by Ferdinand Oyono’s novel Le vieux nègre et la médaille and relying on the works of Albert Memmi and a number of critics of the negro-african novel, what we are proposing here is a reflection on the relation between the colonizer and the colonized. At the very core of our analysis is the character of Meka, Oyono’s main character, who symbolizes the people’s strive for freedom and self-rediscovery and reconquest. Step by step, we follow him through his long and difficult “walk” or journey towards himself, towards his own truth. In our understanding of that whole liberation process, we …

Representation In Kenya, Its Diaspora, And Academia: Colonial Legacies In Constructions Of Knowledge About Kenya's Coast, Jesse Benjamin

Faculty Articles

This paper explores the construction of knowledge in Kenya in the context and aftermath of colonialism and underdevelopment. Those communities that were politically and economically marginalized in Coast Province over the past century were also displaced in terms of academic opportunities, resulting in fewer social science scholars from Mijikenda and other non-Swahili communities in both Kenyan and diaspora universities. Underdevelopment studies in Africa and Kenya are briefly reviewed, and the colonial history of asymmetric social relations at coastal Kenya is traced. Finally, key debates over identity and history are examined within this context and shown to be exacerbated by diasporic …

To Cite Or Not To Cite? Confronting The Legacy Of (European) Writing On African Music, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

English Abstract:

The current citational practice in Western scholarship is ideologically loaded, being far more suited to a written economy than a primarily oral culture in which knowledge is preserved in memory and disseminated through repeated performance. The impact of orality on musical scholarship should be more closely investigated; African scholars have all too often become informants rather than theorists of their own traditions. It is therefore proposed that the routine citation of a body of scholarship developed without Africa's historically-specific intellectual needs and ambitions in mind should in fact be discouraged.

German Abstract:

Die heutige Zitierpraxis der westlichen Wissenschaft …

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.

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).

L’Inscription Du Corps Dans Quatre Romans Postcoloniaux D’Afrique, Augustine H. Asaah

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

More and more, contemporary African literature dwells on the body —as the subject and object of desire, as a refuge and as a commodified and objectified victim. Using as reference points four novels —Calixthe Beyala’s C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée and Femme nue, femme noire, Williams Sassine’s Mémoire d’une peau and Nimrod’s Les jambes d’Alice— all of which inscribe the body onto and into the text, this article seeks to analyse diverse manifestations of the textualized body. Works of alienation and dispossession, these four texts also focus on corporeal quests for equilibrium. The presence of the body in the …

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.

Faire Taire Les Silences Du Corps Noir, Cilas Kemedjio

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

From the middle passage to modern day red light districts, from human zoos to the “compassionate” forum of the TV screen, the display of the black body has long formed the narrative thread of a monologue uttered by a West pleased with the sound of its own voice. The staging of the black body can be said to have rendered black voices silent, and this study sets out to break this silence.

L’Imagination Du Corps Greffé : Filtres Bilingues, Mireille Rosello

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Contemporary narratives featuring organ transplants speak of a painful but also life-saving contact when the “donor” body is African and the receiving body is European. At this point the surgical operation and that of the imagination assume a whole other dimension, as the inequality and interdependence of these two bodies invite the reader to re-imagine the links between the concept of the “body,” on the one hand, and culture and language, on the other. This article looks at the transplanted body as an imagining machine capable of articulating a vision of itself different from the one that words impose upon …

De L’Écriture Romanesque Comme Traversée Et La Maghrébinité, Kasereka Kavwahirehi

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This essay explores how some “Maghrebian” novelists represent and problematize their relation to “Maghrebness” or “maghrebinité”. Using postcolonial theory and Réda Bensmaia's Alger ou La maladie de la mémoire, the author shows how problematic the concept of “Maghrebian literature” can be when one considers its transnational and transcultural poetics and its de-territorialization.

L’Intertextualité Géopolitique Dans Le Petit Chat Est Mort De Fejria Deliba, Sarah B. Buchanan

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In this article, Buchanan examines how Fejria Deliba’s short film, Le petit chat est mort, questions the ideas that conservative members of North African and French communities mobilize to separate themselves from each other. Using theories of intertextuality and geopolitical conscience, Buchanan illustrates how “imagined communities” are always influenced by other national narrations, and how “home” is never isolated, pure or preserved. On the contrary, Buchanan highlights how Deliba presents the French and North African cultures as spaces of intersection and interface, that is, of intertext.

Désir Et Impuissance Dans Halfaouine Et Bye-Bye, Scott Homler

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The experience of adolescence and the trials of Arab and Beur masculinity are explored in the films of Férid Boughédir and Karim Dridi in order to reveal the psychology and the politics of masculinity in evolution. Studying two films, Halfaouine and Bye-Bye, as well as the autobiography of Abdelkébir Khatibi entitled La mémoire tatouée, we see that they reflect a number of discursive stages of an emergent identity of protest that is based on flight and self-destruction.

Ahmadou Kourouma Et La Genèse Tragique L’Événement Postcolonial Dans En Attendant Le Vote Des Bêtes Sauvages Et Allah N’Est Pas Obligé, Étienne-Marie Lassi

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article studies the birth and manifestations of the tragic in Ahmadou Kourouma’s fiction. It demonstrates how the tragic in Kourouma’s novels, far from being a metaphysical feeling, stems from social realities and is closely related to the postcolonial system. In these novels, tragedy goes beyond the realistic depiction of catastrophic events and is further articulated in the characters’ political attitudes, their social life and cultural behaviour.

Discours De La Sexualité Et Postmodernisme Littéraire Africain, Adama Coulibaly

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Representations of sex in the black Africa postcolonial novel often strike us because of their centrality and coarseness. Using examples from three texts (Cannibale; L'État honteux; Les naufragés de l'intelligence), this article examines the manifestation and mainly the motivation of what seems like inappropriate outbursts. In this transcultural approach (beyond the intertextual), the aggressiveness of the sexuality discourse allows the novel to be linked to the large movement of postmodernism. This strategy of “textual extravagance” represents a society that “lacks substance”, a society of pretence, in the � � Baudrillardian�

Haïti Et Sa Diaspora Ou Le Pays En Dehors, Marie-Hélène Koffi-Tessio

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The article looks at the causes of large migratory movements in Haiti. Anthropologist Gérard Barthélemy suggests that emigration from the countryside stems from aspects of rural society, namely the need to accumulate wealth to start one’s own production unit and the need to chase out those who will not stick to and perpetuate the rules of the community. However, according to Jean Métellus and Jean-Claude Icart, migration movements are tightly linked to political and historical upheavals, which force people out of the country in search of safety and survival. For many migrants, the consequence is a feeling of loss and …

Haïti Et L’Afrique Noire : De La Primauté À La Marginalité, Du Modèle Au Contre-Modèle, André Ntonfo

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

As we know, Haiti, the first Black republic in the world, commemorated the bicentennial of its independence in 2004. This paper examines how that unique experience has been received by the Black world in general and by independent African states in particular, as well look at the place that Haiti occupies in their imagination. This paper will examine Haiti’s role as an ideological place of structuring and as a real space for experimentation with post-colonial strategies applied to independent Black nations, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. The author will demonstrate how Haiti, from its position as a pioneer for these nations, …

Le Fou, Le Rebelle, L’Enfant Et La Révolution Haïtienne, Gilbert Doho

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The proliferation of fools in independent African nations’ capitals and major cities should have entailed profound analyses. The period after 1804 in Haiti and after 1960 for Africa is marked by irrationality. From this point of view, Aimé Césaire, doom prophet, uses the Haitian past to warn newly independent African nations. The attempt to understand the phenomena has so far been based on psychoanalysis and other euro-centric methods. In this paper, we will attempt to centre our approach on the gaze and thought of the lunatics themselves in order to understand the madness that has taken hold of post-colonial periods. …

Du Bateau Négrier À L’Avion Négrier : Haïti, Les Puissances Esclavagistes Et Le Monde Noir, Cilas Kemedjio

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The main argument of this study may be outlined as follows: colonized communities in the world economy being integrated by means of “historical fatality” from slavery to colonialism and neo-colonialism. The counter-movement of decolonization, as exemplified in the Haitian revolution, was meant to propose a more humane outbreak of enslaved peoples on the world scene. The account of globalization reveals that Haiti was forced into the world economy through the modality of extortion, which denied the most vulnerable members of Haitian society their basic humanity. The failure of the Haitian revolution to reverse the course of historical fatality opened the …

Satire, Désordre, Folie Et Régénérescence : Lecture De Quelques Romans Africains, Augustin H. Asaah

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Satire has the goal of reforming society and humans through the exposure and denunciation of evils. Using four novels, Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga, Touré’s Destins parallèles, Ken Bugul’s La folie et la mort and Nganang’s Tempsde chien as reference points, this article attempts to demonstrate how postcolonial Francophone African satire meets the criteria of the sub-genre. The four works deploy weapons of satire such as irony, contrast, verbal violence and exaggeration to lay bare the stench, madness and degeneration associated with neo-colonial order. As in all satirical works, the tableau of collective misery here encompasses a challenge to readers to …

Werewere Liking Et La Poétique Du Jeu Pour Libérer L'Imaginaire Postcolonial Africain, Kasereka Kavwahirehi

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This essay addresses the issue of poetics and political stakes in Werewere Liking's novel, Elle sera de jaspe et de corail. While this novel has been presented as illustrative of the Negro-African aesthetics rooted in orality, the present article argues that Liking's poetics of hybridity is a postcolonial strategy whose aim is the liberation of African imagination and creativity. The essay ends by suggesting some similarities between Liking's project and that of the Congolese philosopher, especially in his philosophical essay, L'Afrique va-t-elle mourir? Bouscu/er l'imaginaire africain. Through their works, Ka Mana and Werewere Liking are examining the conditions for a …

The Political Personality Of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, Aubrey Immelman, Adam Beatty

Psychology Faculty Publications

This paper presents the results of an indirect assessment of the personality of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, from the conceptual perspective of Theodore Millon.

Psychodiagnostically relevant information regarding President Mugabe was extracted from biographical sources and media reports and synthesized into a personality profile using the second edition of the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC), which yields 34 normal and maladaptive personality classifications congruent with Axis II of DSM–IV.

The personality profile yielded by the MIDC was analyzed on the basis of interpretive guidelines provided in the MIDC and Millon Index of Personality Styles manuals.

Mugabe’s primary personality …