Browsing by Subject "Francophone literature"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Acquired Tastes: Food as Relation in Franco-African Cultures and Women’s Literature
    (2020-09) Lee-Ferrand, Deborah
    My dissertation investigates the parallels between food and literary productions that are particularly dominant in the role that France has played in the construction of both sub-Saharan and Caribbean culinary and literary art when it comes to recognition and prestige. It expands the study of francophone literature towards the material culture of food, as I posit that the birth of a literature concerned with gastronomical matters lessens the scarcity of African cookbooks, especially those destined for an African audience, and transforms literary writing into a pragmatic way of reclaiming oral cultures and experiences previously appropriated by France. Subsequently, it enables me to rethink and challenge the excluding dichotomy between high versus low cuisines and literary cultures as I document the current rise of sub-Saharan African cuisines from marginalization to an established cultural presence in the West outside of an all-encompassing ethnic niche. Finally, I demonstrate that the literary hybridity of gastro-literature echoes a culinary hybridization inherited from transnational and transdurational rhizomic connections inherited from global movements that redefine the notions of terroir and locavorism. Ultimately, I argue that gastro-literature participates in a greater movement of resistance and advocacy for social justice through the recognition and (re)definition of both culinary and literary sub-Saharan and Caribbean traditions free from the long-lasting influence of France.
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    Homo Mediaticus: Immigrants, Identity, and (Tele)Visual Media in Contemporary Francophone Literature
    (2016-09) Bates, Severine
    This dissertation examines the figure of the Immigrant in light of the practical and symbolic role played by the mass media, and especially television and its images, in the processes of identity construction and socialization, as problematized in several Francophone North African immigrant novels. It aims to shed light on the ways in which the figure of the Immigrant has been “mediated” in novels such as Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Les raisins de la galère, Youssouf Elalamy’s Les clandestins or Faiza Guène’s Kiffe kiffe demain. These novels fall mainly into three literary categories: Beur Literature, Banlieue literature and Illiterature (Hakim Abderrezak) which focuses on the phenomenon of clandestine migration (Hrig) in the Mediterranean basin. Products of what I call the “génération du visible,” these novels offer ground for reflection on the political, psychological, social, cultural and, ultimately, ontological effects of the media’s obsessive representations of this social category. Arguing for a new model of subjectivity for the Immigrant grounded on his relationship with the mass media, I posit that, in these novels and more generally in the collective imagination, the Immigrant—embodied by the Beur, Jeune de Banlieue or Harraga—emerges not only as a constructed figure of alterity and subalternity, but also as a Homo Mediaticus (Massimo Ragnedda) born from the interstices of images and discourses, and of the virtual and the real. I also contend that as a Homo Mediaticus, the Immigrant is both a product of media representation and a media user whose existence, subjectivity, and agency depend on his visibility (as object of the Gaze) and on the performative and meaningful act of “seeing” (as agent and user of technology). In novels like Faïza Guène’s Kiffe kiffe demain, the Immigrant's use of media technologies and of his imagination allows him to mediate his experiences in and with society, to control his “droit de regard,” and to create new identities that are more subversive and transcultural in nature than fixed or unique.
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    Les frontières de l'exil: figures et territoires de l'étranger
    (2019-08) Rauer, Selim
    My doctoral dissertation entitled The Borders of Exile: Figures and Territories of Foreignness, reinterprets the notion of the border as an expanding territory of estrangement and seclusion in the aftermath of colonialism and the Shoah, in an era characterized by global market economies. While allegedly situated beyond racial and sexual hegemonic claims, I show how this globalized economy in fact recreates or intensifies a concept of “zone(s)” --as defined by Frantz Fanon in Les damnés de la terre, 1961--that draws centers and margins, and establishes sites of domination structured by a historical and political unconscious. At the core of this unconscious lies the figure of the enemy or the adversary. The latter is an essential biopolitical and theological representation of otherness and foreignness through which a specific border definition can be established as limit rather than hyphen. Thus, in my project, I scrutinize a multidimensional literary corpus comprised of works by figures such as Jean Genet (1910-1986), Patrick Modiano (1945), Bernard-Marie Koltès (1948-1989), Koffi Kwahulé (1956), Marie NDiaye (1967), Wajdi Mouawad (1968), and Léonora Miano (1973), each of whose works investigate a certain definition and practice of power and sovereignty as part of an ethical and moral reflection on “evil,” or as Rüdiger Safranski defined it, as the moral and ethical burden that accompanies the practice of freedom (Evil, or the Drama of Freedom, 1997).