Browsing by Subject "Postcolonial"
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Item Baroque and post/colonial Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa: The aesthetic embodiment of unreason.(2010-07) Joslin, Isaac V.My dissertation approaches postcolonial African literature and political culture through the lens of a baroque aesthetic of spectacle and subversion. The basic premise is that the baroque, identified by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les Choses (1966) as that pivotal transition between the Renaissance and classical episteme, is characterized by representational and rhetorical strategies that draw on the morbid-erotic and corporeal imagination to represent "reality" as an irrational, chaotic encounter of conflictive forces. From the notion of a "modern baroque" proposed by Christine Buci-Glucksmann in La Raison Baroque (1984), I develop a broad theory of the baroque that encompasses both art and critical theory, as well as material socio-economic realities of late or high modernity. Then, drawing from Édouard Glissant's discussion of a contemporary global baroque phenomenon in his work Poétique de la Relation (1990), my dissertation looks specifically at the baroque in postcolonial Africa, as a literary aesthetic, and as a political style of power and related subversive practices identified by Achille Mbembe in his work De la Postcolonie (2000). Through concerted analyses of select African novels by Yambo Ouologuem, Henri Lopes, Sony Labou Tansi, Calixthe Beyala, Ken Bugul, and others, I explicate the different characteristics of a baroque aesthetic practice in postcolonial francophone African literature.Item Into the Abject: Fracture Zones in Francophone African Literature(2018-09) Jones-Boardman, SarahIn my dissertation I examine what I call “fracture zones” between France and Africa through literary analysis of novels by authors from across francophone Africa: Abdourahman Waberi, Aminata Sow Fall, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ken Bugul, Léonora Miano and Nina Bouraoui. Fracture zones are interstitial spaces where two elements come into violent contact but in which one element, the author and gatekeeper of this violent space, has all the power. One manifestation of a fracture zone is the Mediterranean Sea which, at Europe’s behest, has become a space that is fluid and passible only to one side. To the other side, it has become a deadly space that swallows up African lives. A fracture zone serves as a sort of protective belt around the global Northern Subject. It is a Butlerian constitutive border, an abject and unlivable space that guarantees the Subject’s privileged identity. This dissertation descends into the abject to explore fracture zones and the process of “abjectification” that Francophone Africans are made to undergo to protect and justify French subjectivity. Chapter one, Zones of (Im)mobility and Fracture in Abdourahman Waberi’s Transit and Aminata Sow Fall’s Douceurs du bercail, paints a dynamic picture of fracture zones as physical spaces of contact that sharply divide a powerful France from relatively powerless African countries. I demonstrate that power-infused binary oppositions do not dissolve in an interstitial space of fluid exchange and negotiation; instead they are reinforced as the global North reifies its borders, making them increasingly impenetrable to those hailing from the global South. Chapter two, Fractured Inner Worlds: Neocolonial and Gendered Alienation in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Aventure ambigüe (1961) and Ken Bugul’s Le Baobab fou (1983), explores France’s historical fracturing of African subjectivity that began with its progressive invasion of the continent. I reveal that fracture zones are not confined to the physical world but produce distorting effects that infect and deform the psyches of the colonized, causing internal fissuring and even internalized abjectification. Chapter three, Infection, Gendered Fracture and Afropessimism in Léonora Miano’s L’Interieur de la nuit, analyzes a fictional central African country in the grips of civil war, exposing how existential destabilization and erasure manifest on a societal level and considering the lasting transgenerational trauma of France’s invasion and colonization of African nations. My concluding chapter, Devoured by Fracture: Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon Manqué, returns to look at the effects of fracturing on both sides of the Mediterranean. I demonstrate that fractures are deforming and even altogether destroying the future not only of the (formerly) colonized, but that of Subject/author-of-fracture as well.Item Non-Aligned Features: The Coincidence of Modernity and the Screen in Indonesia(2016-12) Yngvesson, DagIn Non-Aligned Features: The Coincidence of Modernity and the Screen in Indonesia, I deploy extensive archival, ethnographic, and participatory research on Indonesian mass media as a critical intervention in the study of cinema. Examining Indonesian cinema from independence in 1949 until the present, I focus in particular on complicating understandings of how Western technologies, techniques and ideas have functioned as catalysts or determinants for the development of both nationalism and national cinemas worldwide. I examine local cinematic canons that bear the imprint of centuries of engagement with various transnational networks and forces. In the view that emerges, the pervasive politics of left-right alignment specific to the Cold War appear radically shifted – not simply, however, to a place “between” the binary poles of the United States and the Soviet Union, or within the triad of classical, oppositional, and Third cinemas that articulate their struggle as an epic of superpowers. Instead, following many of the Indonesian cineastes and critics I study, I endeavor to open the reading, viewing, present to an older domain of aesthetics and commodity exchange in which the linear arrangement of events leading to and from the rise of capitalism in Europe is made to coincide with other probable causes of the modern. In this regard, I engage in particular with the discourses and modes of address of Javanese wayang – the conceptual-textual center of shadow play and a critical platform for Indonesian art, politics and historiography, whose narratives and screens are always positioned to “coincide” with the present state of affairs. Far from buried or brushed aside in contemporary geopolitics, I argue that the methods and perspectives underpinning media like wayang continue to act as filters that critically influence the circulation and absorption of aesthetic and political ideas. The lineage of cinema’s development in Indonesia thus defined a form and sphere of influence neither here nor there, then nor now in the broadest terms of film theory and practice.Item Untranslating the Maghreb: reckoning with Gender in literature and film from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia(2014-04) Bliss, Greta KatherineOrientalist cultural translation remains immanent to the creation and reception of Maghrebi women's fiction. However, recent literary and cinematic texts from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia problematize and critique this dynamic. Reappropriating both the process of translation and the highly charged figure of the Maghrebi heroine, Maghrebi women's cultural production performs a literary, cinematic, and critical intervention that I call "untranslation." Untranslation thwarts Orientalist translation through a variety of mechanisms including narrative deferral, the use of alternative linguistic and religious idioms, the reappropriation of technology and modernity, and the deployment of self-ethnography. Resisting the notion that "postcolonial" or "World" literature and film readily translates a known Other, untranslation calls for a new understanding of Maghrebi women's fiction as participating in its own scholarly and pedagogical productions of meaning.