Carte D'identité. Remediatisierungen des ethnisierten Personalausweises in der neueren frankophonen Literatur über den Genozid an den rwandischen Tutsi

A l'aide de l'explication par Kwame Anthony Appiah de la politique ethnique à partir de trois concepts (labels, normes, traitement), cette contribution souhaite proposer une lecture de quelques remédiatisations (Bolter et Grusin) dans la littérature contemporaine de la mention ethnique sur les cartes d'identité nationales qui, pendant le génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda, indiquaient l'identité de leur porteur Au lieu de construire une causalité entre l'identité ethnique et le génocide de 1994, ces remédiatisations mettent plutôt en question l'utilisation peu critique de l'antagonisme Hutu et Tutsi dans les espaces politiques, commémoratifs, artistiques et littéraires Comme on le verra, c'est par exemple le cas dans le long-métrage Sometimes in April (2005) de Raoul Peck et /ou dans le roman Murambi, le livre des ossements (2000) de Boubacar Boris Diop Gaël Faye projette le narrateur de son roman Petit Pays (2016) dans une autre variation du motif et du narratif de l'identité ethnique Il montre à la fois l'efficacité meurtrière du dispositif de la carte d'identité tout comme sa longévité qui va bien au-delà du génocide de 1994 Mais surtout, il soustrait l'attribution des victimes et des coupables de la violence à la simple logique ethnique

The Tongue-Tied Imagination

Should a writer work in former colonial language, or in a vernacular? The language question was once one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation for being a dead end of narrow nationalism. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter. Focusing on the case of Senegal, this book studies the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, the chapters follow the emergence of a politics of language from colonization into the early independence decades and through to the era of neoliberal development. Chapters explore the works of well-known francophone authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked vernacular artists with whom they are in dialogue. Pushing back against a prevailing view of postcolonial language debates as a terrain of nativism, this book argues for the language question as a struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they produce literary commensurability by suturing vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, this book models both a new understanding of translation and a different approach to literary comparison.

Aesthetics After Austerity: Boubacar Boris Diop and the Work of Literature in Neoliberal Senegal

Beginning in the 1980s, Senegal became one of the first countries to accept structural adjustment loans from the IMF, resulting in a period of intense deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state. The effects of structural adjustment were felt across the cultural field. As the state ceased trying to dictate the terms of culture, the horizon of political action for Wolof language literature and literacy activism shifted as well. This chapter examines how the oppositional stance of vernacular language advocates has been remade since the heyday of state-centered cultural policy. Since 1980 it has become difficult to sustain the nation-language-people unity that has often served as a regulative ideal for vernacularizations since Herder. Focusing on the work of the novelist Boubacar Boris Diop, this chapter analyzes how vernacular writers take stock of their age of austerity by developing strategies that satirize, query, and critique the uncertainties of literary address.