Shaming Colonial Africa

An examination of the ways in which shame was used during the colonial period both to encourage submission to the colonial project and to resist that oppression. The primary texts to consider are Le vieux nègre et la médaille by Ferdinand Oyono for its depiction of shame’s utility in maintaining social hierarchies and how, ironically, a shameful narrative can contest that power, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu by Ousmane Sembène, for its more strident shaming and addition of economic and legal aspects of shame, and Le pauvre Christ de Bomba by Mongo Beti and L’Aventure ambiguë by Cheikh Hamidou Kane for their inclusion of the role religious shame plays in colonial oppression.

Philosophical Quest and Growing up Motif in Ambiguous Adventure by Chiekh Hamidou Kane and Dead Men’s Path by Chinua Achebe

In literary tradition, some of the innovative and formative trends that characterise production and consumption of mimetic art in most third World countries of Africa focuses extensively on formation of the personal agents- specifically, the protagonist.This phenomenon has characterised most of the 21st Century texts and classed them under the literary sub-genre known as Bildungsroman. Bildungsroman is viewed primarily as a nineteenth-century literary phenomenon and the term is used so loosely and broadly that any novel – and even an epic poem like Iliad and Odyssey by Homer – that include elements of coming-of-age narrative might be labelled as a “Bildungsroman”.It is true that the type of novel commonly referred to as the “Bildungsroman” flourished in British literature in Victorian age, and was extremely popular among the realist writers. This accounts for early British publication of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and others who employed the pattern, for their novels of character formation into the fictional model of the Bildungsroman literature; a genre that consists of the literary treatment of the process of development and formation of a character in relation to society. As it were, the variety of Philosophical Bildungsroman is an advance variant of Bildung that offers the necessary extension and complexity to the phenomenological literary concern of Martin Heidegger, who posits the philosophical experience of the individual as the “Dasine”. Dasien is Heidegger’s philosophical concept which means “being there”. As a concept in existential philosophy, Heidegger employs it to explain the very concept of personhood. The philosophical quest in this case is attained through the process of “unconcealment” meaning “the disclosure of truth”. Meanwhile, in rethinking Ambiguous Adventure and Dead Men’s Path as typical Bildung texts, the real unconcealment will be extricated from the “thingly character or the constitutive elements” (Poetry Language Thought, 54)of the protagonists, so as to determine, and have a clear vision and beauty of a (realist) representation of these agent (s) maturing in relation to the modern demands of society woven in universalistic model of growth and development via social background. Thus, ‘‘beauty becomes one way in which truth occurs as unconcealdness’’ (The Origin of the Work of Art, 55). This is because in philosophical Bildung, the attainment of successful maturation remains the object of our inquiry and concern, and this is framed within a large-scale diachronic model of human existence; who engages in the act of “thinking a thought, this kind of thinking concerns the relation of being to man” (Letter to Humanism, 1) and remains the prototype of a true Bildung character and texts understudy, namely: Ambiguous Adventure and The Dead Men’s Path. Therefore, this paper opens up a new pattern of thought by investigating philosophical quest and growing up motif in this two novels using Heidegger’s notion of dasien and unconcealment.

« Voir le monde pour dire l’exception ». Identifications culturelles et littératures de la postcolonie

Alors que l’historiographie s’accorde à considérer que, dans leur ensemble, les littératures africaines du XXe siècle se complaisent dans une défense exclusive des traditions locales, cet article propose une analyse de L’Aventure ambiguë de Cheikh Hamidou Kane comme un commerce du regard. Il démontre comment ce roman de Kane (re)pose la question de l’altérité dans une démarche similaire et peut-être plus complexe que celles des générations du XXIe siècle, dites de la « postcolonialité » et de la « littérature-monde ». Contrairement aux idées reçues, les écrivains de la génération de Cheikh Hamidou Kane montrent une conscience du monde et une capacité de s’engager dans des combinaisons culturelles qui transcendent la race ou les origines géographiques. Comme toutes les générations d’écrivains, leurs choix révèlent des manières de se voir dans le monde selon des taxinomies qui, en elles-mêmes, expriment la pluralité des orientations que rend possible l’histoire de l’Afrique.

Trauma as Double Wound in Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns

The colonial experience in Africa left deep corporeal and psychic scars. The anti-colonial struggle involved bloody armed conflicts which left many dead and many more physically and psychologically maimed. Writers as diverse as Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ousmane Sembène, and Shimmer Chinodya have variously addressed the cultural, material, racial, class, psychological, and ideological aspects of this unprecedented history. And literary critics have equally responded by examining African literary texts from cultural, Marxist, colonial, and post-colonial angles. However, given the traumatic experience of the struggle for independence, not much has been done by way of applying trauma theory to the study of African literary texts to illuminate Africa’s violent encounter with the racist imperialism of Europe. Employing the insights of Cathy Caruth, the essay analyses trauma’s characteristic double infliction of a wound on the individual in Chinodya’s anti-colonial novel Harvest of Thorns. The traumatic memories of the liberation war testify to the physical and psychic wounds inflicted on the individual and the community.