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Francophone and Post-Migratory Afropeans within and beyond France Today
- from I - Generations and Designations
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- By Christopher Hogarth, University of South Australia
- Edited by Kathryn A. Kleppinger, Laura Reeck
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- Book:
- Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 19 December 2019
- Print publication:
- 08 August 2018, pp 60-76
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Summary
The term ‘Afropean’ could be considered yet another neologism in a world where multiple belonging has become a fashion. Coined by the well-travelled American musician David Byrne (Thomas and Hitchcott, 2014: 3), its leading voice is francophone Cameroonian novelist Léonora Miano. She wrote the short story ‘Afropean Soul’ and has since become a common reference for theorists seeking to understand the position of authors who inhabit the frontier or border. In the French context, the claims of Miano and others to belong to a variety of continents, not just countries, has a particular resonance. Claims to be ‘Afropean’ go one step further in bringing together Africa and Europe and taking the very idea of nationality out of the equation. Perhaps it is not surprising that Miano should take this step, given the artificial nature of European-created nation states in Africa and the history of interethnic rivalry there, as well as the evolving state of a Europe in which over half of the nation states are part of a sociopolitical union which allows free movement and employment opportunities.
Meanwhile, in France, the notion of multiple or hyphenated identities is rarely discussed; and the ‘postcolonial’ has only recently come to the fore after efforts by scholars such as Jean-Marc Moura. The divide between France and l’étranger has long been evident in French bookstores, where littérature française is shelved separately from littérature étrangère, though much of the latter was written in French by francophone African authors. Such a state of affairs riled enough writers to lead to the 2007 ‘Pour une littérature-monde’ manifesto, in which African authors long published in France, like Alain Mabanckou and Jean-Luc Raharimanana, called for the abolition of all border labels in the French literary market. Since then, prominent scholars of French and francophone literature, but also large, influential bookstores like Gibert Jeune have begun to take notice of such layering of authors’ identities.
Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas's Francophone Afropean Literatures (2014) contains not only critical articles discussing ‘Afropean’ literature by authors such as Fatou Diome, Miano, Mabanckou, Sami Tchak, Wilfried N'Sondé, Bessora, and J.R. E ssomba, but also a collection of texts written by five ‘Afropean’ authors. Of Diome, Miano, Abdourahman A. Waberi, Mabanckou, Tchak, and N'Sondé, it is noteworthy that only one, N'Sondé, was raised in France (although, perhaps tellingly, he now lives in Germany).
9 - The image of self-effacement: The revendication of the autonomous author in Marie NDiaye's Autoportrait en vert
- from Part 3 - Photographic framings
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- By Christopher Hogarth, University of South Australia
- Natalie Edwards, University of Adelaide, Ben McCann, University of Adelaide
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- Book:
- Framing French Culture
- Published by:
- The University of Adelaide Press
- Published online:
- 05 February 2016
- Print publication:
- 25 October 2015, pp 193-208
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Summary
Michel Beaujour states his dissatisfaction with the term ‘autoportrait’ to encapsulate adequately literary endeavours at self-representation. The connection between self-portraiture and painting is evident, and the slippage of the term across mediums leads, in Beaujour's opinion, to deny the specificity of literary works. Yet, referring to works such as Michel de Montaigne's Essais, Michel Leiris's L'âge d'homme and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Rêveries, Beaujour highlights its usefulness as a tool that distinguishes it from autobiographical texts for two fundamental reasons. First, self-portraiture insists upon an absence of continuity, thus defying any clearly arranged order of events that contribute to a personality created in narrative. Furthermore, the self-portraitist responds to time differently from the autobiographer, since s/he does not necessarily write a retrospective narrative; whereas the autobiographer is generally concerned with how s/he has become what s/he has — the scope of the self-portraitist is who s/he is now, in the present time of writing. Herein lies one of the main reasons for the derision of the self-portrait: it may be viewed as mere ‘scribbling’, an attempt to encapsulate the present self in words with no clear purpose or direction. As Beaujour resumes, the self-portrait ‘ne s'adresse à un éventuel lecteur qu'en tant que celui-ci est placé en position de tiers exclu. L'autoportrait s'adresse à lui-même’.
In contrast to autobiography, the self-portrait is relatively undertheorised, but Beaujour offers a partial definition, declining how the self-portrait
tente de constituer sa cohérence grâce à un système de rappels, de reprises, de superpositions ou de correspondances entre des éléments homologues et substituables, de telle sorte que sa principale apparence est celle du discontinu, de la juxtaposition anachronique, du montage, qui s'oppose à la syntagmatique d'une narration, fût-elle très brouillée, puisque le brouillage du récit invite toujours à en ‘construire’ la chronologie.
Moreover, the correlation between textual and visual elements — between a painter's self-portrait and a writer's — adds a further layer to a narrative self-portrait. Beaujour points to Leiris's and Montaigne's metaphors for painting in their work, showing their preoccupation with the visual genre and its impact upon their narrative. Yet, Beaujour argues, the writer's work departs from that of the painter since when s/he begins to write, s/he cannot render her/himself as though looking at a mirror, but is instead affected by the culture and the language in which s/he is immersed.
9 - Afro-Italian Literature: From Productive Collaborations to Individual Affirmations
- from II - Authenticity and Influence: Contexts for Black Cultural Production
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- By Christopher Hogarth, University of South Australia
- Edited by Eve Rosenhaft, University of Liverpool, Robbie Aitken, Sheffield Hallam University
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- Book:
- Africa in Europe
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 05 May 2013
- Print publication:
- 16 January 2013, pp 162-180
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Summary
This chapter considers literary production by Africans in Italy. While the work of contemporary francophone African writers in France has been dealt with in great detail by Odile Cazenave in her 2006 work Afrique sur Seine, the work of Africans in Italy has most often been placed in the same category as the general phenomenon of letteratura della migrazione. Here, I wish to follow the lead of Sabrina Brancato and focus specifically upon the work of writers from Africa in the Italian language. That said, Africa is no more united socially or linguistically than Europe, and, as I will show in this chapter, there are a variety of groups of ‘Africans’ operative in literature in the Italian language, and published in Italy today. This chapter represents an attempt to outline who these are and the challenges they have faced in publishing literary works over the last forty years, during which time they have been arriving in increasing numbers to Italy. While Italy's colonial past in East Africa has meant that some Afro-Italians have lived in Italy since the immediate posts-Second World War period, a wave of new migration into lo stivale (the boot, as this country is often nicknamed) followed crushing post-colonial poverty and often political persecution in North, West, East and Central Africa. Many of these migrants have had to learn Italian from scratch upon arrival, yet have received opportunities to publish works on their experiences as immigrants and, increasingly, more fictional works based on the literary styles and traditions of their ‘home’ countries.