Literary warscapes in contemporary sub -Saharan francophone Africa

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Literary warscapes in contemporary sub -Saharan francophone Africa "
Christina Anne Lux K. McPherson

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	52504
Doc. No	:	TL22458
Call number	:	‭3276070‬
Main Entry	:	Christina Anne Lux
Title & Author	:	Literary warscapes in contemporary sub -Saharan francophone Africa\ Christina Anne Lux
College	:	University of Oregon
Date	:	2007
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	2007
Page No	:	181
Abstract	:	This dissertation explores embodiment in space through the narration of war, focusing on war novels written in French by authors from sub-Saharan Africa during the period from 1974 to 2001. This spatial approach comes from my finding that the majority of the texts focused on sites of trauma and an attachment to physical environment in the writing of war, as opposed to a more classical focus on telling war scenes, the narration of battles, or the narration of soldiers' first-hand experiences on the ground. The novels included in my corpus are: Williams Sassine's Wirriyamu; the writings of Sony Labou Tansi; V.Y. Mudimbe's Shaba Deux; Abdourahman Waberi's Balbala; Kossi Efoui's La Polka; Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah n'est pas obligé ; Véronique Tadjo's L'Ombre d'Imana; and Boubacar Boris Diop's Murambi. The first chapter of my dissertation provides an overview of this corpus of war texts, offers a literary history of their production, and analyzes theories concerning place, testimony, and trauma. In the second chapter, I examine how the individual protagonists of these novels negotiate their identity by telling the war narrative through sites of war trauma and through reflections on attachment to the physical environment. In the third chapter, I examine how the focus on embodiment in war writing pushes these texts into a critical re-evaluation of a gendered structural system that is predicated on the spatial containment of bodies. The conclusion offers reflection on the concepts of embodiment, containment, attachment, and possession and draws an ethics of fluid attachment from this ensemble of novels. The conclusion finally puts this ethics of fluid attachment into dialogue with Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation and with recent approaches to conflict transformation.
Subject	:	Social sciences; Language, literature and linguistics; Conflict; Francophone; Literary; Space; Sub-Saharan Africa; War; Comparative literature; African literature; Womens studies; 0453:Womens studies; 0295:Comparative literature; 0316:African literature
Added Entry	:	K. McPherson
Added Entry	:	University of Oregon