I am an assistant professor of French at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. I have published articles on African literature and cinema in several journals and blogs, and have a book project in progress. Research sites: Senegal/West Africa, DR Congo.
Can we read novels as language memoirs of particular characters? Beyond the issue of writing styl... more Can we read novels as language memoirs of particular characters? Beyond the issue of writing style or literary creativity, postcolonial literary texts can help us theorize different kinds of speaker-legitimacies, as they depict native or colonized subjects who use language to negotiate their own positions in relation to violently normative colonial bureaucracies—whether on the margins of these, in opposition to them, or by infiltrating them. This article compares the speaker-legitimacies entailed through practices of storytelling in Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnifique (Martinique, 1988) and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s semi-fictional narrative L’Etrange destin de Wangrin (Mali, 1973). The multilingual strategies and tactics of these texts’ characters exert symbolic power in order to displace or subvert colonial power relations. After examining speaker-positions within each text, the study turns to the speaker-positions entailed by the texts as whole utterances. Both entertain a complex relationship with the discipline of ethnography, in relation to whose authority their hybrid uses of storytelling, voice, and register constitute another form of alternative legitimacy. By juxtaposing two heroic but very different literary storytellers from francophone writing, we can compare how different speaker-legitimacies are forged and performed as norms, and as alternatives to these norms, within colonial contexts.
Boubacar Boris Diop's novel Doomi Golo (2003)/Les Petits de la guenon (2009) elaborates a specifi... more Boubacar Boris Diop's novel Doomi Golo (2003)/Les Petits de la guenon (2009) elaborates a specifically futurist aesthetic of traditionality. Drawing on the shift in anthropology towards understanding traditionality as a construct rather than an intrinsic trait, I show how this novel strongly thematizes the inventedness of Senegalese oral traditions and calls for their reinvention in order to help imagine a more democratic society in the future. Oral traditions serve here to critique forms of domination based on gender and age, which have been identified by some scholars as 'traditional' power structures. Diop's novel, which I read both in its Wolof original and in the French adaptation made by the author, thus imagines a liberation from tradition-as-power through tradition-as-genre: because the category of tradition always depends to a certain extent on an act of invention, it can be reinvented to justify liberation rather than patriarchal domination, thereby serving the needs of the future rather than the past. This futurist vision parallels the novel's status as a call to constitute a future Wolof-language readership which remains, for now, limited.
The work of Senegalese film-maker Ousmane Sembène is often analysed in terms of its highly ideolo... more The work of Senegalese film-maker Ousmane Sembène is often analysed in terms of its highly ideological and social realist mode. This paper questions the relevance of a one-way 'film as message' model by demonstrating how Sembène's films thematize the limits of meaning. His work systematically emphasizes the dialogical construction of meaning, whether of important symbols like the mask in La Noire de …/ Black Girl, or of the films themselves as objects circulating in society. Self-reflexive strategies like posters and cameos by Sembène call the viewer's attention to the constructedness of the ideological message and the arbitrariness of the film as sign. Sembène's films are still a call to action, but they are also a call to thought about the factitiousness of narrative, and to dialogue about the work of interpretation.
Can we read novels as language memoirs of particular characters? Beyond the issue of writing styl... more Can we read novels as language memoirs of particular characters? Beyond the issue of writing style or literary creativity, postcolonial literary texts can help us theorize different kinds of speaker-legitimacies, as they depict native or colonized subjects who use language to negotiate their own positions in relation to violently normative colonial bureaucracies—whether on the margins of these, in opposition to them, or by infiltrating them. This article compares the speaker-legitimacies entailed through practices of storytelling in Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnifique (Martinique, 1988) and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s semi-fictional narrative L’Etrange destin de Wangrin (Mali, 1973). The multilingual strategies and tactics of these texts’ characters exert symbolic power in order to displace or subvert colonial power relations. After examining speaker-positions within each text, the study turns to the speaker-positions entailed by the texts as whole utterances. Both entertain a complex relationship with the discipline of ethnography, in relation to whose authority their hybrid uses of storytelling, voice, and register constitute another form of alternative legitimacy. By juxtaposing two heroic but very different literary storytellers from francophone writing, we can compare how different speaker-legitimacies are forged and performed as norms, and as alternatives to these norms, within colonial contexts.
Boubacar Boris Diop's novel Doomi Golo (2003)/Les Petits de la guenon (2009) elaborates a specifi... more Boubacar Boris Diop's novel Doomi Golo (2003)/Les Petits de la guenon (2009) elaborates a specifically futurist aesthetic of traditionality. Drawing on the shift in anthropology towards understanding traditionality as a construct rather than an intrinsic trait, I show how this novel strongly thematizes the inventedness of Senegalese oral traditions and calls for their reinvention in order to help imagine a more democratic society in the future. Oral traditions serve here to critique forms of domination based on gender and age, which have been identified by some scholars as 'traditional' power structures. Diop's novel, which I read both in its Wolof original and in the French adaptation made by the author, thus imagines a liberation from tradition-as-power through tradition-as-genre: because the category of tradition always depends to a certain extent on an act of invention, it can be reinvented to justify liberation rather than patriarchal domination, thereby serving the needs of the future rather than the past. This futurist vision parallels the novel's status as a call to constitute a future Wolof-language readership which remains, for now, limited.
The work of Senegalese film-maker Ousmane Sembène is often analysed in terms of its highly ideolo... more The work of Senegalese film-maker Ousmane Sembène is often analysed in terms of its highly ideological and social realist mode. This paper questions the relevance of a one-way 'film as message' model by demonstrating how Sembène's films thematize the limits of meaning. His work systematically emphasizes the dialogical construction of meaning, whether of important symbols like the mask in La Noire de …/ Black Girl, or of the films themselves as objects circulating in society. Self-reflexive strategies like posters and cameos by Sembène call the viewer's attention to the constructedness of the ideological message and the arbitrariness of the film as sign. Sembène's films are still a call to action, but they are also a call to thought about the factitiousness of narrative, and to dialogue about the work of interpretation.
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