Phyllis Taoua | University of Arizona (original) (raw)
Papers by Phyllis Taoua
Journal of the African Literature Association
This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that wa... more This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that was both formally innovative and conceptually challenging. As a point of departure, I consider Tansi’s state-ments about his vocation as a writer and the interpretive questions they raise. One such question is why the novel’s critical reception has tended to focus on its representation of dictatorship, while not engag-ing as productively with its existential dimensions. To get at these issues, this essay explores the integral relationship between writing and freedom. I structure the argument around an interpretation of three aliases for the writer, Martial, Chaïdana, and Layisho, who are fictional projections of the author in the novel. My critical approach to the text is informed by the published archive of Tansi’s extra-literary writing, my own fieldwork in Congo-Brazzaville, and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Kongo peo-ple and their culture from art history to political anthropology. My re-reading of this classic novel ar-gues that the archive and Kongo culture are valuable resources for understanding the writer’s creative repertoire, which allows us to expand our interpretive framework for explicating aesthetic choices and their meanings in the text. Freedom as a concept broadens our critical parameters and brings a range of interrelated experiences into focus in the same interpretive frame, helping us to elucidate distinc-tions between them. By showing how Sony Labou Tansi elevates writing as a weapon of resistance with a spiritual dimension drawing on Kongo ritual and culture, we are better able to appreciate the extent of his capacious longing for freedom at home.
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2023
This introduction to a special issue on freedom presents a set of original essays that reflect cr... more This introduction to a special issue on freedom presents a set of original essays that reflect critically on the idea of freedom in relation to specific literary texts from Africa and the African diaspora. Read together, the essays presented in this introduction make up a rich tapestry, offering a set of reflections that map out the complex geo-histories of freedoms in Africa and an array of creative representations of this generative idea across the continent and in the diaspora. This diversity of texts and contexts allows for a wide-ranging critical exploration of a variety of genres, languages, cultures and historical periods. Areas of common ground across the ten essays include literature as a form of protest, creative ways of resisting repression, sidestepping to get around constraints, efforts to build networks of solidarity within and across communities and exploring what it means to be human within these reclaimed spaces.
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2023
This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that wa... more This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that was both formally innovative and conceptually challenging. As a point of departure, I consider Tansi’s state-ments about his vocation as a writer and the interpretive questions they raise. One such question is why the novel’s critical reception has tended to focus on its representation of dictatorship, while not engag-ing as productively with its existential dimensions. To get at these issues, this essay explores the integral relationship between writing and freedom. I structure the argument around an interpretation of three aliases for the writer, Martial, Chaïdana, and Layisho, who are fictional projections of the author in the novel. My critical approach to the text is informed by the published archive of Tansi’s extra-literary writing, my own fieldwork in Congo-Brazzaville, and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Kongo peo-ple and their culture from art history to political anthropology. My re-reading of this classic novel ar-gues that the archive and Kongo culture are valuable resources for understanding the writer’s creative repertoire, which allows us to expand our interpretive framework for explicating aesthetic choices and their meanings in the text. Freedom as a concept broadens our critical parameters and brings a range of interrelated experiences into focus in the same interpretive frame, helping us to elucidate distinc-tions between them. By showing how Sony Labou Tansi elevates writing as a weapon of resistance with a spiritual dimension drawing on Kongo ritual and culture, we are better able to appreciate the extent of his capacious longing for freedom at home.
Études littéraires africaines, 2010
L’idée de ce dossier consacré à Ousmane Sembène a vu le jour au cours de conversations durant les... more L’idée de ce dossier consacré à Ousmane Sembène a vu le jour au cours de conversations durant les journées d’études organisées par l’APELA à Paris en septembre 2007. Sembène venait de mourir, le 9 juin : soudain nous réalisions que l’oeuvre était à présent définitivement achevée, et nous pensions à ce qu’il avait laissé comme héritage. Depuis lors, quelques volumes ont été publiés, notamment le numéro 71 de la revue Présence francophone en 2008, et un numéro spécial d’Africultures (n°76) en 2009. Samba Gadjigo, l’une des chevilles ouvrières du numéro de Présence francophone, avait publié quelques mois auparavant le premier volume d’une biographie de Sembène : Ousmane Sembène : une conscience africaine 1, dont une traduction en anglais vient de sortir de presse sous le titre Ousmane Sembène : The Making of a Militant Artist 2. Gadjigo est par ailleurs occupé à achever un documentaire consacré à Sembène.
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2019
This essay examines Abiola Irele's career as a multilingual cosmopolitan intellectual. This emine... more This essay examines Abiola Irele's career as a multilingual cosmopolitan intellectual. This eminent Nigerian literary critic is shown to have bridged some cultural gaps between francophone and anglophone language spheres. The span of his work as a critic is considered from his early work written in West Africa to his later essays written in the United States.
Études littéraires africaines, 2008
South Central Review, 2015
Research in African Literatures, 2000
Sony makes this magnificent confession of uncertainty about his last novel while in the process o... more Sony makes this magnificent confession of uncertainty about his last novel while in the process of its elaboration, Le commencement des douleurs ( 1 9 9 5 ) , a text we know he reworked through many versions (see Blachère; Devésa). He admits his doubts, his hesitations, his writerly agony, not when faced with the white page nor an entry into writing (“Le premier pas” is the title of his first novel), but rather with the difficulty of completing, of coming to the end of a text. And it so happens that unbeknownst to him (but what do we know? how do we know?), the metaphor of the labyrinth finds its verity once the work is completed, since it is not only the novel in gestation to which he must give birth with such pain but indeed the entire edifice, which receives its last stone, its definitive configuration, with this posthumous novel. Keeping to the novelistic side of things, which after all forms a fairly considerable corpus since it “gicle vers le ciel” ‘spurts towards the sky’ at the
Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2001
General trends in post-colonial African literature and criticism are explored with a particular f... more General trends in post-colonial African literature and criticism are explored with a particular focus on the Congolese writer and activist, Sony Labou Tansi. The compromizes entailed in his publication of novels in Paris are discussed in terms of institutional constraints and the surreptitious nature of multi-layered texts, both symptoms and acts of resistance, which are produced in response. The aesthetic innovation of Sony's experimental novels marked by his 'tropicalities' is contextualized with reference to contemporary African philosophy and literary criticism. Reconsidering the continued effects of cultural antagonism, the article contests notions of authenticity on which the oldfashioned discourse of cultural nationalism rests.. Pour la première fois il poussa son grand rire de père, se tint les côtes et qu'est-ce que vous êtes bêtes: vous avez laissé les choses de la patrie dans l'état honteux où les 'Flamants' les ont laissées, vous avez laissé les choses de la nation comme si le pouvoir pâle était encore là, quelle honte maman et qu'est-ce que vous êtes tous cons! … Il s'arrêtait pour manger et boire comme mange et boit mon peuple, il dansa les vraies danses de mon peuple, pas comme vos conards qui faisaient tout venir du pays de mon collègue, moi je suis d'ici et je resterai d'ici, je mangerai ce qu'on mange ici, je boirai ce qu'on boit ici. (For the rst time he laughed his huge fatherly laugh, held his sides and [said] aren't you all dumb: you left the country's things in the shameful state in which the "Flemish" left them, you left the nation's things as if the pale power were still here, mommy what a shame and aren't you all fools! … He stopped to eat and drink as my people eat and drink, he danced the true dances of my people, not like your assholes who had everything imported from my colleague's country, me I am from here and I will remain so, I will eat what one eats here, I will drink what one drinks here.) Sony Labou Tansi, L'Etat honteux … we are wedged uncomfortably between the values of our traditional culture and those of the West. The process of change we are going through has created a dualism of life which we experience at the moment less as a mode of challenging complexity than as one of confused disparateness. The ideas of cultural nationalism cannot help us out of this agonizing situation, cannot help us to resolve the problems posed by our alienation. Abiola Irele, In Praise of Alienation
Black Camera: An International Film Journal, 2022
Critical discussion of Abderrahmane Sissako’s major films, Life on Earth (1998), Waiting for Happ... more Critical discussion of Abderrahmane Sissako’s major films, Life on Earth (1998), Waiting for Happiness (2002), Bamako (2006), and Timbuktu (2014), explores issues related to spectatorship, live performance, and intertextuality. In particular, this essay looks at how this filmmaker frames spectatorship within his film narratives to bring the process of image-making up for reconsideration. These self-reflexive moments are examined in relation to film as an art form, issues of genre, and the history of cinema. The essay also looks at how live performances are embedded alongside scenarios of audiovisual spectatorship to draw our attention to the formation of audiences in different African settings, and to suggest an analogy between live and recorded performances. Some attention is also given to intertextuality and how Sissako references classic films by Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambety to cultivate an awareness of film history in his viewers. By drawing on and developing insights from contributions by Karin Barber, Tsitsi Jaji, and Akin Adesokan the essay seeks to define the importance of these meta-cinematic elements in the film narratives of one of the most impactful filmmakers of his generation.
Études littéraires africaines
Dans cet essai, je considère le retour de Mongo Beti au Cameroun après son exil en France comme u... more Dans cet essai, je considère le retour de Mongo Beti au Cameroun après son exil en France comme une expérience d’aliénation que l’auteur cherche à surmonter en raison de son besoin d’appartenance à sa communauté d’origine. Si les conséquences de son éloignement et la souffrance de se sentir marginalisé dans une société soumise à la dictature sont bien compréhensibles, il faut cependant reconnaître que l’aliénation est aussi une source de motivation, un dilemme à dépasser et une interpellation à laquelle répondre. La volonté de dépassement de Mongo Beti est justement liée à sa croyance d’appartenir à un projet plus vaste que sa personne : celui d’une véritable libération nationale, d’une lutte pour la démocratie et l’avènement de la justice sociale.
African Studies Review
Her research interests focus on the impact of age, gender, and location on the writing and recept... more Her research interests focus on the impact of age, gender, and location on the writing and reception of postcolonial literary and filmic narratives in French. Her most recent publications include Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment (University of Virginia Press, 2011, with Patricia Célérier), a co-edited special issue for Présence Francophone ("Vingt ans après le génocide des Tutsi du Rwanda: regards sur la production artistique" [December 2015]), and articles on film, Indian Ocean literature, and globalization.
Transition an International Review, 2010
Bilingual version of poem by Sony Labou Tansi.
Phyllis Clark Taoua and Taylor Kathryn Miller present a lively discussion of Gaba’s work as a med... more Phyllis Clark Taoua and Taylor Kathryn Miller present a lively discussion of Gaba’s work as a meditation on the location, form, and function of museum spaces, the kinds of objects that reside there, and the many ways in which those objects reflect the experiences of African people.
Review Essay: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu and its Controversial Reception Sissako, Abderrahm... more Review Essay: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu and its Controversial Reception
Sissako, Abderrahmane, dir. Timbuktu. Original title, “Timbuktu, le chagrin des oiseaux.” 2014. 97 minutes. In French, Tamashek, Bambara, Songhay, Arabic (with subtitles in English and French). France/Mauritania. Worso Films.
Abderrahmane Sissako made history with his most recent film Timbuktu that portrays the occupation of northern Mali by a radical Islamist group. Timbuktu became the most widely viewed African film in the history of cinema, with more than 1 million viewers in France, netting 10 million dollars at the box office. At the same time, the film has been the subject of critical controversy over the filmmaker’s association with the current President of Mauritania and was almost not shown at FESPACO due to security concerns. The film’s reviews, reception and nominations for awards over the course of the last year have been marked by glorious praise and polemical attacks, which reveal significant cultural and political tensions about the depiction of Islam, freedom of expression and the radicalization of Muslims in France, Africa and beyond.
During the summer of 1994, I went to Paris to do research on colonial censorship and surveillanc... more During the summer of 1994, I went to Paris to do research on colonial censorship and surveillance at the Archives Nationales at 60, rue des Francs Bourgeois in the 3rd arrondissement. I brought with me the customary letter from my dissertation director in French on university letterhead outlining the nature of my project on political engagement in literature from France, Africa and the Caribbean. Still, many of the files I asked to see were not available for consultation as the attendants at the window let me know each time repeating the same pat, bureaucratic formula. One day I got lucky and was handed a blue box that was covered in dust and had been tied shut with a cotton ribbon of the same color. I sat the heavy box down at my workstation and soon discovered that it had evidently never been opened as I worked to untie the ribbon and open the box. Inside, I found correspondence between three Ministries (Interior, War, Colonies) about how and why they followed and censored anti-colonial activists in France and the colonies during the interwar period. It was a treasure trove that helped me begin to answer my question about why the mildly subversive pamphlet Légitime Défense published by West Indian students in 1932 had been subjected to such swift censorship. While I came to enjoy the needle-in-a-haystack aspect of my research as I tried to lay my hands on relevant materials in the Archives Nationales and the Archives d’Outremer, the topic of policing anti-colonial activism was a sobering topic and not always easy. One Frenchman, also doing research at the Archives Nationales, wryly asked me, when he discovered my topic, whether Americans did not have their own historical record to examine at home.
So, it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I first became interested in the effects of censorship on the emergence of anti-colonial protest in France during the interwar period. Some twenty years ago, literary historians and critics were still fleshing out the causes and modalities of repression that black writers faced when they dared to challenge French colonial rule. In Forms of Protest, I argued that censorship and a repressive atmosphere in Paris hindered the emergence of anti-colonial protest during the 1920s and shaped the beginning of the Negritude movement during the 1930s. I propose to reconsider how this literary history revealed the contradictions and ambiguities in France’s imperial project by focusing on two examples of French colonial censorship: the events surrounding René Maran’s publication of Batouala (1921) and the fate of the surrealist inspired journal-manifesto Légitime défense (1932) eleven years later. These publications were seen as significant literary historical events in their own time and have been widely discussed in the years since. Colonial authorities that worried about maintaining control over France’s territories censored both publications in underhanded ways and subjected the authors to punitive measures. Read together, the similar stories surrounding these two publications show significant sites of colonial anxiety during the interwar era: (1) the image of blacks in France and (2) the crisis of colonial profitability during an economic downturn in Europe. Considering the rationale for and practice of censorship makes clear that the two issues of image and profit were more interconnected than one might think.
A few years ago, Ania Loomba explored a number of critical approaches to the vigorously debated ... more A few years ago, Ania Loomba explored a number of critical approaches to the vigorously debated relationship between the local and the global in her book Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998). Since then, her work on the interface between colonial and postcolonial discourses has become a new reference point in what remains an ongoing exchange on this local/global question in postcolonial theory.1 Loomba, in her conclusion to the chapter “Challenging Colonialism,” points to what she considers a sensible suggestion by Peter Hulme to move away from grand narratives “not on epistemological grounds, but rather [because] the grand narrative of decolonisation has, for the moment, been adequately told and widely accepted. Smaller narratives are now needed, with attention paid to local topography, so that maps can become fuller” (252). Loomba affirms Hulme’s call for renewed focus on smaller narratives and local topographies, but leaves open questions about what postcolonialism’s grand narrative may exclude.
I would like to bring some pressure to bear on Hulme’s position and its underlying assumptions, not because I favor grand narratives over local topographies, but because the nature of the relationship between the local and the global strikes me as more dynamic than his statement admits. I propose that if critics broaden the scope of their analysis to include smaller, local narratives, postcolonial theory’s grand narrative—insofar as one does indeed exist—will be significantly altered, if not radically challenged. Rather than new knowledge of local contexts serving to flesh out a widely accepted narrative of decolonization, I argue that thick descriptions of the former African French colonies—of the kind a specialized area studies approach affords—actually upset and contest the grand narrative of decolonization as currently told by postcolonial theorists.
The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, 2009
Journal of the African Literature Association
This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that wa... more This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that was both formally innovative and conceptually challenging. As a point of departure, I consider Tansi’s state-ments about his vocation as a writer and the interpretive questions they raise. One such question is why the novel’s critical reception has tended to focus on its representation of dictatorship, while not engag-ing as productively with its existential dimensions. To get at these issues, this essay explores the integral relationship between writing and freedom. I structure the argument around an interpretation of three aliases for the writer, Martial, Chaïdana, and Layisho, who are fictional projections of the author in the novel. My critical approach to the text is informed by the published archive of Tansi’s extra-literary writing, my own fieldwork in Congo-Brazzaville, and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Kongo peo-ple and their culture from art history to political anthropology. My re-reading of this classic novel ar-gues that the archive and Kongo culture are valuable resources for understanding the writer’s creative repertoire, which allows us to expand our interpretive framework for explicating aesthetic choices and their meanings in the text. Freedom as a concept broadens our critical parameters and brings a range of interrelated experiences into focus in the same interpretive frame, helping us to elucidate distinc-tions between them. By showing how Sony Labou Tansi elevates writing as a weapon of resistance with a spiritual dimension drawing on Kongo ritual and culture, we are better able to appreciate the extent of his capacious longing for freedom at home.
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2023
This introduction to a special issue on freedom presents a set of original essays that reflect cr... more This introduction to a special issue on freedom presents a set of original essays that reflect critically on the idea of freedom in relation to specific literary texts from Africa and the African diaspora. Read together, the essays presented in this introduction make up a rich tapestry, offering a set of reflections that map out the complex geo-histories of freedoms in Africa and an array of creative representations of this generative idea across the continent and in the diaspora. This diversity of texts and contexts allows for a wide-ranging critical exploration of a variety of genres, languages, cultures and historical periods. Areas of common ground across the ten essays include literature as a form of protest, creative ways of resisting repression, sidestepping to get around constraints, efforts to build networks of solidarity within and across communities and exploring what it means to be human within these reclaimed spaces.
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2023
This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that wa... more This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that was both formally innovative and conceptually challenging. As a point of departure, I consider Tansi’s state-ments about his vocation as a writer and the interpretive questions they raise. One such question is why the novel’s critical reception has tended to focus on its representation of dictatorship, while not engag-ing as productively with its existential dimensions. To get at these issues, this essay explores the integral relationship between writing and freedom. I structure the argument around an interpretation of three aliases for the writer, Martial, Chaïdana, and Layisho, who are fictional projections of the author in the novel. My critical approach to the text is informed by the published archive of Tansi’s extra-literary writing, my own fieldwork in Congo-Brazzaville, and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Kongo peo-ple and their culture from art history to political anthropology. My re-reading of this classic novel ar-gues that the archive and Kongo culture are valuable resources for understanding the writer’s creative repertoire, which allows us to expand our interpretive framework for explicating aesthetic choices and their meanings in the text. Freedom as a concept broadens our critical parameters and brings a range of interrelated experiences into focus in the same interpretive frame, helping us to elucidate distinc-tions between them. By showing how Sony Labou Tansi elevates writing as a weapon of resistance with a spiritual dimension drawing on Kongo ritual and culture, we are better able to appreciate the extent of his capacious longing for freedom at home.
Études littéraires africaines, 2010
L’idée de ce dossier consacré à Ousmane Sembène a vu le jour au cours de conversations durant les... more L’idée de ce dossier consacré à Ousmane Sembène a vu le jour au cours de conversations durant les journées d’études organisées par l’APELA à Paris en septembre 2007. Sembène venait de mourir, le 9 juin : soudain nous réalisions que l’oeuvre était à présent définitivement achevée, et nous pensions à ce qu’il avait laissé comme héritage. Depuis lors, quelques volumes ont été publiés, notamment le numéro 71 de la revue Présence francophone en 2008, et un numéro spécial d’Africultures (n°76) en 2009. Samba Gadjigo, l’une des chevilles ouvrières du numéro de Présence francophone, avait publié quelques mois auparavant le premier volume d’une biographie de Sembène : Ousmane Sembène : une conscience africaine 1, dont une traduction en anglais vient de sortir de presse sous le titre Ousmane Sembène : The Making of a Militant Artist 2. Gadjigo est par ailleurs occupé à achever un documentaire consacré à Sembène.
Journal of the African Literature Association, 2019
This essay examines Abiola Irele's career as a multilingual cosmopolitan intellectual. This emine... more This essay examines Abiola Irele's career as a multilingual cosmopolitan intellectual. This eminent Nigerian literary critic is shown to have bridged some cultural gaps between francophone and anglophone language spheres. The span of his work as a critic is considered from his early work written in West Africa to his later essays written in the United States.
Études littéraires africaines, 2008
South Central Review, 2015
Research in African Literatures, 2000
Sony makes this magnificent confession of uncertainty about his last novel while in the process o... more Sony makes this magnificent confession of uncertainty about his last novel while in the process of its elaboration, Le commencement des douleurs ( 1 9 9 5 ) , a text we know he reworked through many versions (see Blachère; Devésa). He admits his doubts, his hesitations, his writerly agony, not when faced with the white page nor an entry into writing (“Le premier pas” is the title of his first novel), but rather with the difficulty of completing, of coming to the end of a text. And it so happens that unbeknownst to him (but what do we know? how do we know?), the metaphor of the labyrinth finds its verity once the work is completed, since it is not only the novel in gestation to which he must give birth with such pain but indeed the entire edifice, which receives its last stone, its definitive configuration, with this posthumous novel. Keeping to the novelistic side of things, which after all forms a fairly considerable corpus since it “gicle vers le ciel” ‘spurts towards the sky’ at the
Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2001
General trends in post-colonial African literature and criticism are explored with a particular f... more General trends in post-colonial African literature and criticism are explored with a particular focus on the Congolese writer and activist, Sony Labou Tansi. The compromizes entailed in his publication of novels in Paris are discussed in terms of institutional constraints and the surreptitious nature of multi-layered texts, both symptoms and acts of resistance, which are produced in response. The aesthetic innovation of Sony's experimental novels marked by his 'tropicalities' is contextualized with reference to contemporary African philosophy and literary criticism. Reconsidering the continued effects of cultural antagonism, the article contests notions of authenticity on which the oldfashioned discourse of cultural nationalism rests.. Pour la première fois il poussa son grand rire de père, se tint les côtes et qu'est-ce que vous êtes bêtes: vous avez laissé les choses de la patrie dans l'état honteux où les 'Flamants' les ont laissées, vous avez laissé les choses de la nation comme si le pouvoir pâle était encore là, quelle honte maman et qu'est-ce que vous êtes tous cons! … Il s'arrêtait pour manger et boire comme mange et boit mon peuple, il dansa les vraies danses de mon peuple, pas comme vos conards qui faisaient tout venir du pays de mon collègue, moi je suis d'ici et je resterai d'ici, je mangerai ce qu'on mange ici, je boirai ce qu'on boit ici. (For the rst time he laughed his huge fatherly laugh, held his sides and [said] aren't you all dumb: you left the country's things in the shameful state in which the "Flemish" left them, you left the nation's things as if the pale power were still here, mommy what a shame and aren't you all fools! … He stopped to eat and drink as my people eat and drink, he danced the true dances of my people, not like your assholes who had everything imported from my colleague's country, me I am from here and I will remain so, I will eat what one eats here, I will drink what one drinks here.) Sony Labou Tansi, L'Etat honteux … we are wedged uncomfortably between the values of our traditional culture and those of the West. The process of change we are going through has created a dualism of life which we experience at the moment less as a mode of challenging complexity than as one of confused disparateness. The ideas of cultural nationalism cannot help us out of this agonizing situation, cannot help us to resolve the problems posed by our alienation. Abiola Irele, In Praise of Alienation
Black Camera: An International Film Journal, 2022
Critical discussion of Abderrahmane Sissako’s major films, Life on Earth (1998), Waiting for Happ... more Critical discussion of Abderrahmane Sissako’s major films, Life on Earth (1998), Waiting for Happiness (2002), Bamako (2006), and Timbuktu (2014), explores issues related to spectatorship, live performance, and intertextuality. In particular, this essay looks at how this filmmaker frames spectatorship within his film narratives to bring the process of image-making up for reconsideration. These self-reflexive moments are examined in relation to film as an art form, issues of genre, and the history of cinema. The essay also looks at how live performances are embedded alongside scenarios of audiovisual spectatorship to draw our attention to the formation of audiences in different African settings, and to suggest an analogy between live and recorded performances. Some attention is also given to intertextuality and how Sissako references classic films by Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambety to cultivate an awareness of film history in his viewers. By drawing on and developing insights from contributions by Karin Barber, Tsitsi Jaji, and Akin Adesokan the essay seeks to define the importance of these meta-cinematic elements in the film narratives of one of the most impactful filmmakers of his generation.
Études littéraires africaines
Dans cet essai, je considère le retour de Mongo Beti au Cameroun après son exil en France comme u... more Dans cet essai, je considère le retour de Mongo Beti au Cameroun après son exil en France comme une expérience d’aliénation que l’auteur cherche à surmonter en raison de son besoin d’appartenance à sa communauté d’origine. Si les conséquences de son éloignement et la souffrance de se sentir marginalisé dans une société soumise à la dictature sont bien compréhensibles, il faut cependant reconnaître que l’aliénation est aussi une source de motivation, un dilemme à dépasser et une interpellation à laquelle répondre. La volonté de dépassement de Mongo Beti est justement liée à sa croyance d’appartenir à un projet plus vaste que sa personne : celui d’une véritable libération nationale, d’une lutte pour la démocratie et l’avènement de la justice sociale.
African Studies Review
Her research interests focus on the impact of age, gender, and location on the writing and recept... more Her research interests focus on the impact of age, gender, and location on the writing and reception of postcolonial literary and filmic narratives in French. Her most recent publications include Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment (University of Virginia Press, 2011, with Patricia Célérier), a co-edited special issue for Présence Francophone ("Vingt ans après le génocide des Tutsi du Rwanda: regards sur la production artistique" [December 2015]), and articles on film, Indian Ocean literature, and globalization.
Transition an International Review, 2010
Bilingual version of poem by Sony Labou Tansi.
Phyllis Clark Taoua and Taylor Kathryn Miller present a lively discussion of Gaba’s work as a med... more Phyllis Clark Taoua and Taylor Kathryn Miller present a lively discussion of Gaba’s work as a meditation on the location, form, and function of museum spaces, the kinds of objects that reside there, and the many ways in which those objects reflect the experiences of African people.
Review Essay: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu and its Controversial Reception Sissako, Abderrahm... more Review Essay: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu and its Controversial Reception
Sissako, Abderrahmane, dir. Timbuktu. Original title, “Timbuktu, le chagrin des oiseaux.” 2014. 97 minutes. In French, Tamashek, Bambara, Songhay, Arabic (with subtitles in English and French). France/Mauritania. Worso Films.
Abderrahmane Sissako made history with his most recent film Timbuktu that portrays the occupation of northern Mali by a radical Islamist group. Timbuktu became the most widely viewed African film in the history of cinema, with more than 1 million viewers in France, netting 10 million dollars at the box office. At the same time, the film has been the subject of critical controversy over the filmmaker’s association with the current President of Mauritania and was almost not shown at FESPACO due to security concerns. The film’s reviews, reception and nominations for awards over the course of the last year have been marked by glorious praise and polemical attacks, which reveal significant cultural and political tensions about the depiction of Islam, freedom of expression and the radicalization of Muslims in France, Africa and beyond.
During the summer of 1994, I went to Paris to do research on colonial censorship and surveillanc... more During the summer of 1994, I went to Paris to do research on colonial censorship and surveillance at the Archives Nationales at 60, rue des Francs Bourgeois in the 3rd arrondissement. I brought with me the customary letter from my dissertation director in French on university letterhead outlining the nature of my project on political engagement in literature from France, Africa and the Caribbean. Still, many of the files I asked to see were not available for consultation as the attendants at the window let me know each time repeating the same pat, bureaucratic formula. One day I got lucky and was handed a blue box that was covered in dust and had been tied shut with a cotton ribbon of the same color. I sat the heavy box down at my workstation and soon discovered that it had evidently never been opened as I worked to untie the ribbon and open the box. Inside, I found correspondence between three Ministries (Interior, War, Colonies) about how and why they followed and censored anti-colonial activists in France and the colonies during the interwar period. It was a treasure trove that helped me begin to answer my question about why the mildly subversive pamphlet Légitime Défense published by West Indian students in 1932 had been subjected to such swift censorship. While I came to enjoy the needle-in-a-haystack aspect of my research as I tried to lay my hands on relevant materials in the Archives Nationales and the Archives d’Outremer, the topic of policing anti-colonial activism was a sobering topic and not always easy. One Frenchman, also doing research at the Archives Nationales, wryly asked me, when he discovered my topic, whether Americans did not have their own historical record to examine at home.
So, it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I first became interested in the effects of censorship on the emergence of anti-colonial protest in France during the interwar period. Some twenty years ago, literary historians and critics were still fleshing out the causes and modalities of repression that black writers faced when they dared to challenge French colonial rule. In Forms of Protest, I argued that censorship and a repressive atmosphere in Paris hindered the emergence of anti-colonial protest during the 1920s and shaped the beginning of the Negritude movement during the 1930s. I propose to reconsider how this literary history revealed the contradictions and ambiguities in France’s imperial project by focusing on two examples of French colonial censorship: the events surrounding René Maran’s publication of Batouala (1921) and the fate of the surrealist inspired journal-manifesto Légitime défense (1932) eleven years later. These publications were seen as significant literary historical events in their own time and have been widely discussed in the years since. Colonial authorities that worried about maintaining control over France’s territories censored both publications in underhanded ways and subjected the authors to punitive measures. Read together, the similar stories surrounding these two publications show significant sites of colonial anxiety during the interwar era: (1) the image of blacks in France and (2) the crisis of colonial profitability during an economic downturn in Europe. Considering the rationale for and practice of censorship makes clear that the two issues of image and profit were more interconnected than one might think.
A few years ago, Ania Loomba explored a number of critical approaches to the vigorously debated ... more A few years ago, Ania Loomba explored a number of critical approaches to the vigorously debated relationship between the local and the global in her book Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998). Since then, her work on the interface between colonial and postcolonial discourses has become a new reference point in what remains an ongoing exchange on this local/global question in postcolonial theory.1 Loomba, in her conclusion to the chapter “Challenging Colonialism,” points to what she considers a sensible suggestion by Peter Hulme to move away from grand narratives “not on epistemological grounds, but rather [because] the grand narrative of decolonisation has, for the moment, been adequately told and widely accepted. Smaller narratives are now needed, with attention paid to local topography, so that maps can become fuller” (252). Loomba affirms Hulme’s call for renewed focus on smaller narratives and local topographies, but leaves open questions about what postcolonialism’s grand narrative may exclude.
I would like to bring some pressure to bear on Hulme’s position and its underlying assumptions, not because I favor grand narratives over local topographies, but because the nature of the relationship between the local and the global strikes me as more dynamic than his statement admits. I propose that if critics broaden the scope of their analysis to include smaller, local narratives, postcolonial theory’s grand narrative—insofar as one does indeed exist—will be significantly altered, if not radically challenged. Rather than new knowledge of local contexts serving to flesh out a widely accepted narrative of decolonization, I argue that thick descriptions of the former African French colonies—of the kind a specialized area studies approach affords—actually upset and contest the grand narrative of decolonization as currently told by postcolonial theorists.
The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, 2009
Études littéraires africaines, 2008
Tous droits réservés © Association pour l'Étude des Littératures africaines (APELA), 2008 Ce docu... more Tous droits réservés © Association pour l'Étude des Littératures africaines (APELA), 2008 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'
Études littéraires africaines, 2008
Tous droits réservés © Association pour l'Étude des Littératures africaines (APELA), 2008 Ce docu... more Tous droits réservés © Association pour l'Étude des Littératures africaines (APELA), 2008 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'
Research in African Literatures, 2003
Études littéraires africaines, 2016
Tous droits réservés © Association pour l'Étude des Littératures africaines (APELA), 2016 Ce docu... more Tous droits réservés © Association pour l'Étude des Littératures africaines (APELA), 2016 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'
![Research paper thumbnail of RICARD (Alain), « Wole Soyinka », in : Oxford Bibliographies in African Studies. Ed. by Thomas Spear. New York : Oxford University Press, 2016, 23 p. [accès réservé : ]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/76038402/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Études littéraires africaines
Tous droits réservés © Association pour l'Étude des Littératures africaines (APELA), 2016 Ce docu... more Tous droits réservés © Association pour l'Étude des Littératures africaines (APELA), 2016 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'
African Studies Review
Reel Resistance: The Cinema of Jean-Marie Teno is a collaboration between the Cameroonian filmmak... more Reel Resistance: The Cinema of Jean-Marie Teno is a collaboration between the Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno and Melissa Thackway, a film scholar and teacher. In the preface, Teno explains the impetus for working with Thackway on this project. In the introduction, Thackway recounts how her passion for Teno's work was born and evolved from her scholarship on African cinema in Africa Shoots Back (James Currey, 2003). The nature of their various collaborations and close friendship is thus articulated from the outset. This volume provides a hands-on discussion of Teno's life story, his major films, and his approach to documentary filmmaking as it evolved over time. Part One opens with "Documentary Filmmaking in Africa: An Introduction," in which Thackway covers a lot of ground for readers who may be unfamiliar with the subject. She discusses definitions of the documentary as a genre and reviews the history of documentary filmmaking in Africa. This background on early African cinema and the documentary as a genre provides context for understanding the emergence of Teno's filmmaking in the 1980s. The second chapter, "Critical Insights: Reading the Films of Jean-Marie Teno," offers a sustained discussion of Teno's work. Thackway considers important characteristics of his style and the evolution of his vision. Of course, there is attention to his commitment to observing the world around him and aspects of his political engagement. Thackway also examines the filmmaker's subjectivity and the ways in which he is present in his films, including his use of voiceover narration that features his own voice. She continues by developing the importance of history and memory in Teno's films and what she characterizes as "(Hi)stories, Memory: Decolonial Readings of the Past." Her critical approach is clearly informed by the "decolonial" turn found in work by Walter Mignolo and others. There is some discussion of how Teno engages with the archive of colonial history, and issues of imperialism and European hegemony are presented for reconsideration. Finally, there is attention to Teno's transnational and exilic life in between France, where he lives in Mèze, and Cameroon, where he was born and where the vast majority of his films are set.
African Studies Review, 2003
... Nation-building, propaganda, and literature in Francophone Africa / Dominic Thomas. ... en pr... more ... Nation-building, propaganda, and literature in Francophone Africa / Dominic Thomas. ... en procès (Editions Nouvelles du Sud, 2000); uvres & Critiques (Spring 2001); Rethinking Creative Pro-cesses (Lang, 2001); Nottingham French Studies (Spring 2001); and La Rue Meurt. ...
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 2001
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 2002
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Research in African Literatures, 2003
Research in African Literatures, 2004
Research in African Literatures, 2003
The central argument in Alain Ricard’s Le Sable de Babel. Traduction et apartheid explores the co... more The central argument in Alain Ricard’s Le Sable de Babel. Traduction et apartheid explores the complex relationship between translation as a practice that builds bridges and makes connections and apartheid as a set of concepts, laws and institutions that sought to implement racial separateness. Ricard emphasizes the ethics at work in dialogic translation; a practice that involves the creation of meaning and intercultural dialogue. Following the myth of Babel in the Bible according to which people were dispersed into different language groups, Ricard takes up Paul Ricoeur’s invitation to embrace translation as a means of overcoming these linguistic divisions with an ethics of hospitality across languages (Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, 2004). Of course, any openness to transcend the boundaries of language and ethnicity through translation was banished under apartheid with the adoption of racist laws, the segregation of space and the virtual exclusion of translation from Bantu education programs. Through the separation of people by race came connections between territory (inhabited by whites, blacks, coloreds, Indians), language (Afrikans, Xhosa, Zulu, etc.) and political rights in South Africa. Whereas many may have seen the form of despotism that was set up in South Africa under apartheid as somehow unique to that regime (1948-1994), Mahmood Mamdani has argued that the “decentralized despotism” under apartheid can and should be seen as exemplary of colonial relations of domination everywhere on the continent (Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, 1997). Ricard builds on Mamdani’s observations and argues that African literature as a basic expression of freedom came up against a concept of human relations defined by the domination of one group by another across the continent.
African Studies Review, 2016
Jean-Pierre Bekolo, dir. Mudimbe’s Things and Words. Original title: Les Choses et les Mots de ... more Jean-Pierre Bekolo, dir. Mudimbe’s Things and Words. Original title: Les Choses et les Mots de Mudimbe. 2013. In French (with English subtitles). USA/France/Cameroon.
The Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo, known for his inventive award-winning films Quartier Mozart (1993) and Les Saignantes (2005), has made an intriguing documentary about the Congolese philosopher and writer, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe. The film explores Mudimbe’s ideas and life experiences through an extensive interview and the scholar’s presentation of his impressive collection of objects and books. Born in 1941 in the Belgian Congo, V. Y. Mudimbe lived through the tumultuous 1950s in the region of Katanga and in Rwanda, where he studied at a Benedictine seminary. Bekolo’s conversation with one of the most important African intellectuals of the twentieth century captures a sense of the man, his way of life as well as his engagement with many pressing issues of our day from the lessons we can learn from Frantz Fanon’s misunderstanding of violence and Patrice Lumumba’s tragic example to the creation of racial identities in the Great Lakes region.
Jean-Marie Teno, dir. Leaf in the wind. Original title: Une feuille dans le vent. 2013. 55 minu... more Jean-Marie Teno, dir. Leaf in the wind. Original title: Une feuille dans le vent. 2013. 55 minutes. In English and French (with subtitles in French, English, Spanish and German). Cameroon/France. Raphia Films. http://raphia.fr
Jean-Marie Teno’s short documentary Leaf in the Wind offers a surprisingly powerful portrait of Ernestine Ouandié, the daughter of a famous independence leader in Cameroon by the name of Ernest Ouandié. Her father was a leading figure of the decolonization effort and president of the Union des Populations du Cameroun after the assassination of Félix Moumié in 1960. Teno explores the legacy of his nation’s troubled transition to independent rule with an intimate look at the toll political violence took on the Ouandié family and his daughter, Ernestine, in particular. For viewers familiar with Cameroon’s most important documentary filmmaker, Leaf in the Wind will seem like an updated fragment of Teno’s famous film Africa, I Will Fleece You (1992; original title: Afrique, je te plumerai). The short documentary offers an eye-opening exploration of the consequences of Ernest Ouandié’s personal sacrifice for his people’s freedom and eventual execution in 1971, which helps to flesh out the imperial archive and reveal the ongoing legacy in Africa today. Teno makes another significant contribution with this film by denying dictators the impunity they crave. Both for its humanity and political relevance, Leaf in the Wind is a worthwhile story that deserves to be seen by a wide audience.
Evidence shows extremist groups are more successful at recruiting new members among disaffected y... more Evidence shows extremist groups are more successful at recruiting new members among disaffected youth, the poor and unemployed
Op-Ed at WorldPost, a Partnership with the HuffingtonPost and the Berggruen Institute On Februa... more Op-Ed at WorldPost, a Partnership with the HuffingtonPost and the Berggruen Institute
On February 21, Niger will vote in the first round of a presidential election. This hasn't been reported on in the American media— the The New York Times published its last article on Niger in August 2015 and The Washington Post has run two Op-Eds in an online blog but journalists have not reported on the stakes in the upcoming election. Yet, whether the election is fair or not matters to Nigeriens and it should matter to the rest of the world, because if democracy fails in Niger, the country could become the next breeding ground for radical Islamic terrorism.
African Freedom, 2018
The push for independence in African nations was ultimately an incomplete process, with the peopl... more The push for independence in African nations was ultimately an incomplete process, with the people often left to wrestle with a partial, imperfect legacy. Rather than settle for liberation in name alone, the people engaged in an ongoing struggle for meaningful freedom. Phyllis Taoua shows how the idea of freedom in Africa today evolved from this complex history. With a pan-African, interdisciplinary approach, she synthesizes the most significant issues into a clear, compelling narrative. Tracing the evolution of a conversation about freedom since the 1960s, she defines three types and shows how they are interdependent. Taoua investigates their importance in key areas of narrative interest: the intimate self, gender identity, the nation, global capital, and the spiritual realm. Allowing us to hear the voices of African artists and activists, this compelling study makes sense of their struggle and the broad importance of the idea of freedom in contemporary African culture.
NB: Introduction (online as PDF)
African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence, 2018
The push for independence in African nations was ultimately an incomplete process, with the peopl... more The push for independence in African nations was ultimately an incomplete process, with the people often left to wrestle with a partial, imperfect legacy. Rather than settle for liberation in name alone, the people engaged in an ongoing struggle for meaningful freedom. Phyllis Taoua shows how the idea of freedom in Africa today evolved from this complex history. With a pan-African, interdisciplinary approach, she synthesizes the most significant issues into a clear, compelling narrative. Tracing the evolution of a conversation about freedom since the 1960s, she defines three types and shows how they are interdependent. Taoua investigates their importance in key areas of narrative interest: the intimate self, gender identity, the nation, global capital, and the spiritual realm. Allowing us to hear the voices of African artists and activists, this compelling study makes sense of their struggle and the broad importance of the idea of freedom in contemporary African culture.
NB: Introduction (online as PDF)
European domination and transformation of colonized societies in Africa and the Caribbean has ins... more European domination and transformation of colonized societies in Africa and the Caribbean has inspired a great deal of writing. Phyllis Taoua propounds a revisionist synthesis of the French colonial project, illustrating how writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and France developed avant-garde programs in dialog with one another. This provocative reassessment of canonical works by Aime Cesaire, Mongo Beti, Sony Labou, and others, deliberately challenges models of cultural freedom predicated on outmoded notions of cultural purity. A focus on avant-gardes and anti-colonialism highlights the antagonism inherent in colonial society, illustrating modes of cross-cultural innovation developed as forms of protest. What emerges is an interpretive model of dynamic interaction in which actors on both sides of the colonial divide participated and were transformed as a result.
Written in clear, jargon-free prose that both students and specialists will appreciate, this is the first book in the Studies in African Literature series to place African literature in firm dialog with France and the Caribbean, making it especially valuable to anyone interested in African, Caribbean, and other post-colonial literatures, as well as 20th-century French literature.
