Doyle D Calhoun - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Books by Doyle D Calhoun
Watermarked TOC, Preface and Introduction.
Journal articles by Doyle D Calhoun
African Studies Review, 2025
Slavery persisted in Morocco well into the twentieth century and throughout the French Protectora... more Slavery persisted in Morocco well into the twentieth century and throughout the French Protectorate (1912-56), long after it was abolished in other French-occupied territories (1848). While work by historians has illuminated a previously shadowy history of race and slavery in Morocco, less attention has been paid to the growing corpus of literary texts representing enslaved subjectivities under the Protectorate. Through their literary excavations of the slave past, such works retell the history of Moroccan slavery from the perspective of those most affected. This essay takes translator Nouzha Fassi Fihri's Dada l'Yakout (2010) as a case in point. Although marketed as a novel, the text is also a dense oral history that channels the voice of an enslaved woman who really existed: Jmia, who was abducted as a child at the beginning of the twentieth century and died in 1975. Considered as "Moroccan other-archive" (El Guabli 2023) and imaginative archeology, literary works chart a way forward for reckoning with the enduring legacies of slavery and the slave trade in Morocco.
Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures, 2025
Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures, 2025
Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 2023
Throughout the nineteenth century, Senegal was the site of some of the most extensive French expe... more Throughout the nineteenth century, Senegal was the site of some of the most extensive French experiments with alphabetic print literacy in African languages, especially Wolof. Before the advent of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), authors such as Jean Dard, Jacques-François Roger, Aloïs Kobès, David Boilat, Louis Faidherbe, and Louis Descemet experimented with Latin-scripted orthographies for representing the sounds of Wolof. This article focuses on the contributions of Boilat and Descemet, both members of prominent multilingual métis families in Saint-Louis and native speakers of Wolof. Even as they expressed deference to their predecessors, Boilat and Decemet asserted their intuitions as native speakers, challenging dominant colonial "scripts" by authoring their own texts and proposing their own orthographies. I read their nineteenth-century analyses of Wolof as important, if understudied, contributions to the history of phonetics by situating their works within the politics of colonial alphabet schemes.
PMLA, 2023
Besides the neologism négritude, the term verrition, a hapax legomenon and the final word of Aimé... more Besides the neologism négritude, the term verrition, a hapax legomenon and the final word of Aimé Césaire's celebrated long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939–56), is perhaps the most contested and ambiguous signifier in the poet's corpus. This essay reconsiders the much-debated question of verrition and its poiesis. Contra a long-standing tenet of Césaire criticism—that verrition was a pure neologism—and further to René Hénane (Glossaire des termes rares [2004]) and Carrie Noland (Voices of Negritude [2015]), I identify several textual antecedents to and possible sources of this supposed neologism that have implications for how we read the final stanza of the Cahier. Critical focus on Césairean neology has had a somewhat obfuscatory effect on thinking through subtler dimensions of Césaire's decolonial poetics, especially how the poet frequently reinvests and rearticulates existing terms in French, redirecting them toward antiracist and anticolonial ends.
New Literary History, 2022
Research in African Literatures, 2021
Nearly all analyses of Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de… (Voltaïque, 1962) and its eponymous... more Nearly all analyses of Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de… (Voltaïque, 1962) and its eponymous film adaptation (1966) mention the fact that Sembène found inspiration for his text and film in a French newspaper report of a real suicide. However, scholars have not tracked down a copy of the original report or excavated the history of Diouana Gomis, the real woman whose suicide in 1958—on the heels of the 1958 Referendum and on the eve of Senegalese independence (1960)—served as the inspiration for one of the most iconic of African films. Indeed, the figure of Diouana has become synonymous with Sembène’s literary and cinematic character, in particular her “screen memory” as Senegalese actress’s Mbissine Thérèse Diop’s powerful performance in the film. Until now, traces of the “real” Diouana have remained buried in French police archives, her story receding from view. My essay makes a signifi-cant contribution to the study of Sembène’s art and to the memory of Diouana Gomis by reconstructing the backstory of her suicide through unstudied archival documents. Diouana Gomis (1927–58), a thirty-one-year-old, unmarried woman from Boutoupa in the Ziguinchor region of Senegal arrived in Antibes during the second week of April in 1958 and died by suicide less than three months later. The faint archival traces sewn in the wake of her suicide make it possible, and necessary, to reconstruct some of the details of her life and death so that the ghostly signature of this real woman might shadow the “Diouana” whom we see and hear on screen.
The French Review, 2021
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey ... more Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History.-Derek Walcott, "The Sea is History" (1979) Supposez, si vous le pouvez, l'ivresse rouge des montées sur le pont, la rampe à gravir, le soleil noir sur l'horizon, le vertige, cet éblouissement du ciel plaqué sur les vagues.
French Studies, 2021
On the surface, Zola’s Germinal (1885) has little to say about France’s non-European ‘others’, de... more On the surface, Zola’s Germinal (1885) has little to say about France’s non-European ‘others’, despite the facts that the coal industry and late-nineteenth-century imperial expansion were linked and the rise of the beet-sugar industry in Europe led to the eventual call for labourers of colour in France. Nonetheless, the subtexts of colonialism and slavery surface in the text via the tropes of colonial metaphor and metonymy. When Zola suggests the material oppression of his miners is ‘like’ the suffering of enslaved and colonized peoples, he is participating in a nineteenth-century rhetorical tradition shared by both the realist novel and French socialist discourse: one that frequently analogized the subjugation of France’s wage laborers to the abject suffering of its colonial subjects. The presence in the novel of colonial products and exotic goods points synecdochically to France’s colonies and their systems of exploitative labour even as those objects circulate within metropolitan milieus. This essay excavates the colonial referents of Germinal, examining how the novel represents domestic and colonial servitude within a single novelistic ‘economy’.
Research in African Literatures, 2020
This essay examines the tensions between inscription and voice, silence and servitude, that are s... more This essay examines the tensions between inscription and voice, silence and servitude, that are staged in Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de… (1962) and its eponymous film adaptation (1966). In contrast to existing scholarship on La Noire de…, I center my reading on the space of suicide itself—the bathtub and the interior space of the bathroom—which I show to be a highly symbolic site, charged with meanings. Taking up Gayatri Spivak’s characterization of suicidal resistance as an impossible message inscribed on the body, I show that Sembène figures Diouana’s suicide in the bath not only as a watery death, but also as a writerly one. I argue, moreover, that the bath manages to distill a racialized discourse on hygiene while presenting Diouana’s death as occurring at the intersection of two models of neoslavery.
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2020
Since Walter Benjamin’s characterization of fl ânerie as a kind of botanizing on the asphalt in “... more Since Walter Benjamin’s characterization of fl ânerie as a kind of botanizing on the asphalt in “Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire,” critics oft en have sought to compare Charles Baudelaire to the figure of the botanist, mobilizing the naturalist as a surrogate for the poet- in- the- city. In this essay, I re-cite Benjamin’s initial recourse to the botanist in order to reread it. If Benjamin invites us to consider the activity of the flâneur in terms of (urban) botany, it is perhaps an opportunity to pursue the ways in which botanical praxis and the emergence of a properly modern mode of allegorical writing in Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire provide each other with representations of the operations that each manages to accomplish. Far from being an inconsequential metaphor, Benjamin’s botanist figure can be seen to harbor a disruptive force that has more to do with an “extractive” and initially violent act of inscription than with any facile correspondence between “nature” and “poetry.”
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 2018
Missionaries collected and, in many cases, were instructed to collect not only linguistic data bu... more Missionaries collected and, in many cases, were instructed to collect not only linguistic data but also cultural artifacts and natural scientific specimens of various kinds. In doing so, they became motors of European “arm-chair” science and museum culture, supplying European universities and scientific institutions with curiosities and rarities from the colonies. What is the relationship between colonial collection practices and doing linguistic work? Does a better under- standing of how missionaries approached the collection of linguistic data, on the one hand, and non-linguistic specimens, on the other hand, provide insight into how they viewed, handled, or “descrip- tively appropriated” indigenous languages? In this paper, I examine a particular moment in the history of linguistics where the collection of natural scientific, especially botanical, specimens and linguistic enquiry intersected in a powerful way in the extra-linguistic collect- ing activities of French missionaries in colonial Africa.
Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 2017
Given the pervasive and ongoing shift from analog to digital media, the mediation of linguistic a... more Given the pervasive and ongoing shift from analog to digital media, the mediation of linguistic and historical data by digital technologies should be of growing interest to historians of linguistics. If our interaction with primary sources in the history of linguistics increasingly occurs digitally, and if representations of data always encode a particular point of view, how can we go about decoupling our analysis of such sources from the digital resources that mediate it? What recuperative processes might allow the researcher to reintegrate, or recapture, what gets lost in a digital format? In this paper I suggest that the digital frameworks we use to represent primary sources in the history of linguistics benefit from being submitted to a critical reading as much as the sources themselves. As a case study, I present ongoing work on a student-led project that digitizes late 19th to early 20th century analyses of languages from continental Africa and Madagascar, compiled by French Catholic missionaries.
Language & History , 2017
In this paper, I apply Gérard Genette’s (1987) concept of paratexts to an analysis of prefaces fr... more In this paper, I apply Gérard Genette’s (1987) concept of paratexts to
an analysis of prefaces from different dictionary-grammars of Niger-
Congo languages, written by French Catholic missionaries between
the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My analysis focuses
on the preface to the Dictionnaire français-wolof et wolof-français
(Dakar: 1855), compiled by missionaries from the Congrégation du
St.-Ésprit et du St.-Coeur de Marie, variously known in English as
the Holy Ghost Fathers or Spiritans. I also provide diverse examples
from contemporary and near-contemporary dictionary-grammars of
other Niger-Congo languages, also compiled by French Spiritans. I
investigate the extent to which these prefaces rely on or inflect the
conventions, devices and rhetorical strategies of the original authorial
preface, as identified by Genette.
Essays by Doyle D Calhoun
Salon, 2024
Subscribe Help keep Salon independent Fire extinguishers are seen at the scene as officials inspe... more Subscribe Help keep Salon independent Fire extinguishers are seen at the scene as officials inspect the scene at the park across from Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City, after a man reportedly set himself on fire during the trial of US President Donald Trump, in New York,United States on April 19, 2024. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images) An "extreme act of protest": The long history of selfimmolation as political statement A scholar examines recent public self-burnings in the U.S. and the response By DOYLE CALHOUN
Sydney Review of Books, 2022
In the history of Black authors writing in French – and in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s new novel, winn... more In the history of Black authors writing in French – and in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s new novel, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt – it turns out that authorship matters very much.
Public Books, 2021
A Review of David Diop's Booker Prize-winning novel, Frère d'âme (At Night All Blood Is Black) fo... more A Review of David Diop's Booker Prize-winning novel, Frère d'âme (At Night All Blood Is Black) for the literary magazine Public Books.
Watermarked TOC, Preface and Introduction.
African Studies Review, 2025
Slavery persisted in Morocco well into the twentieth century and throughout the French Protectora... more Slavery persisted in Morocco well into the twentieth century and throughout the French Protectorate (1912-56), long after it was abolished in other French-occupied territories (1848). While work by historians has illuminated a previously shadowy history of race and slavery in Morocco, less attention has been paid to the growing corpus of literary texts representing enslaved subjectivities under the Protectorate. Through their literary excavations of the slave past, such works retell the history of Moroccan slavery from the perspective of those most affected. This essay takes translator Nouzha Fassi Fihri's Dada l'Yakout (2010) as a case in point. Although marketed as a novel, the text is also a dense oral history that channels the voice of an enslaved woman who really existed: Jmia, who was abducted as a child at the beginning of the twentieth century and died in 1975. Considered as "Moroccan other-archive" (El Guabli 2023) and imaginative archeology, literary works chart a way forward for reckoning with the enduring legacies of slavery and the slave trade in Morocco.
Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures, 2025
Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures, 2025
Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 2023
Throughout the nineteenth century, Senegal was the site of some of the most extensive French expe... more Throughout the nineteenth century, Senegal was the site of some of the most extensive French experiments with alphabetic print literacy in African languages, especially Wolof. Before the advent of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), authors such as Jean Dard, Jacques-François Roger, Aloïs Kobès, David Boilat, Louis Faidherbe, and Louis Descemet experimented with Latin-scripted orthographies for representing the sounds of Wolof. This article focuses on the contributions of Boilat and Descemet, both members of prominent multilingual métis families in Saint-Louis and native speakers of Wolof. Even as they expressed deference to their predecessors, Boilat and Decemet asserted their intuitions as native speakers, challenging dominant colonial "scripts" by authoring their own texts and proposing their own orthographies. I read their nineteenth-century analyses of Wolof as important, if understudied, contributions to the history of phonetics by situating their works within the politics of colonial alphabet schemes.
PMLA, 2023
Besides the neologism négritude, the term verrition, a hapax legomenon and the final word of Aimé... more Besides the neologism négritude, the term verrition, a hapax legomenon and the final word of Aimé Césaire's celebrated long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939–56), is perhaps the most contested and ambiguous signifier in the poet's corpus. This essay reconsiders the much-debated question of verrition and its poiesis. Contra a long-standing tenet of Césaire criticism—that verrition was a pure neologism—and further to René Hénane (Glossaire des termes rares [2004]) and Carrie Noland (Voices of Negritude [2015]), I identify several textual antecedents to and possible sources of this supposed neologism that have implications for how we read the final stanza of the Cahier. Critical focus on Césairean neology has had a somewhat obfuscatory effect on thinking through subtler dimensions of Césaire's decolonial poetics, especially how the poet frequently reinvests and rearticulates existing terms in French, redirecting them toward antiracist and anticolonial ends.
New Literary History, 2022
Research in African Literatures, 2021
Nearly all analyses of Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de… (Voltaïque, 1962) and its eponymous... more Nearly all analyses of Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de… (Voltaïque, 1962) and its eponymous film adaptation (1966) mention the fact that Sembène found inspiration for his text and film in a French newspaper report of a real suicide. However, scholars have not tracked down a copy of the original report or excavated the history of Diouana Gomis, the real woman whose suicide in 1958—on the heels of the 1958 Referendum and on the eve of Senegalese independence (1960)—served as the inspiration for one of the most iconic of African films. Indeed, the figure of Diouana has become synonymous with Sembène’s literary and cinematic character, in particular her “screen memory” as Senegalese actress’s Mbissine Thérèse Diop’s powerful performance in the film. Until now, traces of the “real” Diouana have remained buried in French police archives, her story receding from view. My essay makes a signifi-cant contribution to the study of Sembène’s art and to the memory of Diouana Gomis by reconstructing the backstory of her suicide through unstudied archival documents. Diouana Gomis (1927–58), a thirty-one-year-old, unmarried woman from Boutoupa in the Ziguinchor region of Senegal arrived in Antibes during the second week of April in 1958 and died by suicide less than three months later. The faint archival traces sewn in the wake of her suicide make it possible, and necessary, to reconstruct some of the details of her life and death so that the ghostly signature of this real woman might shadow the “Diouana” whom we see and hear on screen.
The French Review, 2021
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey ... more Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History.-Derek Walcott, "The Sea is History" (1979) Supposez, si vous le pouvez, l'ivresse rouge des montées sur le pont, la rampe à gravir, le soleil noir sur l'horizon, le vertige, cet éblouissement du ciel plaqué sur les vagues.
French Studies, 2021
On the surface, Zola’s Germinal (1885) has little to say about France’s non-European ‘others’, de... more On the surface, Zola’s Germinal (1885) has little to say about France’s non-European ‘others’, despite the facts that the coal industry and late-nineteenth-century imperial expansion were linked and the rise of the beet-sugar industry in Europe led to the eventual call for labourers of colour in France. Nonetheless, the subtexts of colonialism and slavery surface in the text via the tropes of colonial metaphor and metonymy. When Zola suggests the material oppression of his miners is ‘like’ the suffering of enslaved and colonized peoples, he is participating in a nineteenth-century rhetorical tradition shared by both the realist novel and French socialist discourse: one that frequently analogized the subjugation of France’s wage laborers to the abject suffering of its colonial subjects. The presence in the novel of colonial products and exotic goods points synecdochically to France’s colonies and their systems of exploitative labour even as those objects circulate within metropolitan milieus. This essay excavates the colonial referents of Germinal, examining how the novel represents domestic and colonial servitude within a single novelistic ‘economy’.
Research in African Literatures, 2020
This essay examines the tensions between inscription and voice, silence and servitude, that are s... more This essay examines the tensions between inscription and voice, silence and servitude, that are staged in Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de… (1962) and its eponymous film adaptation (1966). In contrast to existing scholarship on La Noire de…, I center my reading on the space of suicide itself—the bathtub and the interior space of the bathroom—which I show to be a highly symbolic site, charged with meanings. Taking up Gayatri Spivak’s characterization of suicidal resistance as an impossible message inscribed on the body, I show that Sembène figures Diouana’s suicide in the bath not only as a watery death, but also as a writerly one. I argue, moreover, that the bath manages to distill a racialized discourse on hygiene while presenting Diouana’s death as occurring at the intersection of two models of neoslavery.
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2020
Since Walter Benjamin’s characterization of fl ânerie as a kind of botanizing on the asphalt in “... more Since Walter Benjamin’s characterization of fl ânerie as a kind of botanizing on the asphalt in “Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire,” critics oft en have sought to compare Charles Baudelaire to the figure of the botanist, mobilizing the naturalist as a surrogate for the poet- in- the- city. In this essay, I re-cite Benjamin’s initial recourse to the botanist in order to reread it. If Benjamin invites us to consider the activity of the flâneur in terms of (urban) botany, it is perhaps an opportunity to pursue the ways in which botanical praxis and the emergence of a properly modern mode of allegorical writing in Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire provide each other with representations of the operations that each manages to accomplish. Far from being an inconsequential metaphor, Benjamin’s botanist figure can be seen to harbor a disruptive force that has more to do with an “extractive” and initially violent act of inscription than with any facile correspondence between “nature” and “poetry.”
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 2018
Missionaries collected and, in many cases, were instructed to collect not only linguistic data bu... more Missionaries collected and, in many cases, were instructed to collect not only linguistic data but also cultural artifacts and natural scientific specimens of various kinds. In doing so, they became motors of European “arm-chair” science and museum culture, supplying European universities and scientific institutions with curiosities and rarities from the colonies. What is the relationship between colonial collection practices and doing linguistic work? Does a better under- standing of how missionaries approached the collection of linguistic data, on the one hand, and non-linguistic specimens, on the other hand, provide insight into how they viewed, handled, or “descrip- tively appropriated” indigenous languages? In this paper, I examine a particular moment in the history of linguistics where the collection of natural scientific, especially botanical, specimens and linguistic enquiry intersected in a powerful way in the extra-linguistic collect- ing activities of French missionaries in colonial Africa.
Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 2017
Given the pervasive and ongoing shift from analog to digital media, the mediation of linguistic a... more Given the pervasive and ongoing shift from analog to digital media, the mediation of linguistic and historical data by digital technologies should be of growing interest to historians of linguistics. If our interaction with primary sources in the history of linguistics increasingly occurs digitally, and if representations of data always encode a particular point of view, how can we go about decoupling our analysis of such sources from the digital resources that mediate it? What recuperative processes might allow the researcher to reintegrate, or recapture, what gets lost in a digital format? In this paper I suggest that the digital frameworks we use to represent primary sources in the history of linguistics benefit from being submitted to a critical reading as much as the sources themselves. As a case study, I present ongoing work on a student-led project that digitizes late 19th to early 20th century analyses of languages from continental Africa and Madagascar, compiled by French Catholic missionaries.
Language & History , 2017
In this paper, I apply Gérard Genette’s (1987) concept of paratexts to an analysis of prefaces fr... more In this paper, I apply Gérard Genette’s (1987) concept of paratexts to
an analysis of prefaces from different dictionary-grammars of Niger-
Congo languages, written by French Catholic missionaries between
the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My analysis focuses
on the preface to the Dictionnaire français-wolof et wolof-français
(Dakar: 1855), compiled by missionaries from the Congrégation du
St.-Ésprit et du St.-Coeur de Marie, variously known in English as
the Holy Ghost Fathers or Spiritans. I also provide diverse examples
from contemporary and near-contemporary dictionary-grammars of
other Niger-Congo languages, also compiled by French Spiritans. I
investigate the extent to which these prefaces rely on or inflect the
conventions, devices and rhetorical strategies of the original authorial
preface, as identified by Genette.
Salon, 2024
Subscribe Help keep Salon independent Fire extinguishers are seen at the scene as officials inspe... more Subscribe Help keep Salon independent Fire extinguishers are seen at the scene as officials inspect the scene at the park across from Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City, after a man reportedly set himself on fire during the trial of US President Donald Trump, in New York,United States on April 19, 2024. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images) An "extreme act of protest": The long history of selfimmolation as political statement A scholar examines recent public self-burnings in the U.S. and the response By DOYLE CALHOUN
Sydney Review of Books, 2022
In the history of Black authors writing in French – and in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s new novel, winn... more In the history of Black authors writing in French – and in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s new novel, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt – it turns out that authorship matters very much.
Public Books, 2021
A Review of David Diop's Booker Prize-winning novel, Frère d'âme (At Night All Blood Is Black) fo... more A Review of David Diop's Booker Prize-winning novel, Frère d'âme (At Night All Blood Is Black) for the literary magazine Public Books.
French Studies, 2024
in lieu of a traditional bibliography. Like these authors, Kanor revisits the slaving past with a... more in lieu of a traditional bibliography. Like these authors, Kanor revisits the slaving past with an eye to how its traces and absences continue to signifyvisibly and invisibly-in today's Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. She does so by drawing on a richly varied range of materials (archival documents, photographs, novels, films, contemporary art, music, museums, monuments, memoir, interviews, oral history, artefacts) and by flexibly deploying multiple critical frames across a series of incisive readings, intimate personal anecdotes, and moving reflections. Two central features of the book distinguish it from other hybrid and formally experimental engagements with writing the colonial past as a history of the present. First, its haunting poetic style. Kanor demonstrates a distinctive ability to find a textual form for absence: 'Je ne chasserai pas le Spectre et les disparus de la cale. Je les laisserai entrer comme je l'ai toujours fait' (p. 15). Second, Kanor's singular and sustained attention to a specific space-or rather, a non-space (non-lieu)-of the French slave trade: the ship's cale or 'hold'. Kanor tracks iterations of and 'variations' on the cale, showing how this 'espace disparu' (p. 145) persists in historical memory and contemporary cultural production as a site of representational failure, traumatic memory, and creative possibility. Showing the cale to be simultaneously omnipresent and unthought in literary and extra-literary discourses concerning the slave trade, Kanor theorizes the hold as the origin point of an inaugural, incurable wound or affliction that members of the diaspora and descendants of the enslaved continue to revisit-not merely as a kind of ahistorical mal but also as a mode of spiritual potential and being-with the ancestors: 'On a gardé la cale en nous', writes Kanor (p. 305). 'La Poétique de la cale' is the title of an earlier piece by Kanor, an essay from 2020. Here, Kanor gives more space to the questions that occupied her in this earlier essay as well as to many of the themes she takes up in her novel Humus (2006). This longer meditation is at the crossroads of literature, history, memoir, and psychoanalysis. Kanor organizes her meditations into four 'chemins' or 'chimen chyen', adopting the Creole word for an informal path that is at once a byway, shortcut, and detour. This gives a sense of the non-linear, though no less rigorous, itinerary Kanor pursues through the worlds of the slave trade: a form of intellectual vagabondage that remains
Safundi, 2023
At the precise midpoint of Cheikh Hamidou Kane's postcolonial bildungsroman L'Aventure ambigu€ e ... more At the precise midpoint of Cheikh Hamidou Kane's postcolonial bildungsroman L'Aventure ambigu€ e ("The Ambiguous adventure," 1961), the ill-fated protagonist Samba Diallo, born in Senegal, steps into the Parisian salon of a French family of intellectuals-that of his love interest, Lucienne Martial, a white French woman whose name fittingly combines the supposedly "illuminating" and definitively militaristic aspects of France's mission civilisatrice. Samba Diallo is a serious and studious " evolu e," a product of France's colonial assimilationist policy by which young Africans were sent to the metropole to pursue their studies, largely in the hopes they would return to their home countries and support French imperial interests abroad. Affectionately dubbed the "apprentice philosopher" by his father, Samba Diallo idolizes the likes of Descartes and Pascal and is at work on a study of Plato's Phaedo. 1 As Samba Diallo steps into the salon-the symbolic site of intellectual, cultural, artistic, and philosophical exchange in the French bourgeoise home-Lucienne rises to greet him. "Has Socrates finally drunk the hemlock?" she inquires smilingly. "No," Samba Diallo replies, "the sacred vessel has not yet returned from Delos." 2 Later in the evening, Lucienne's father presses Samba Diallo to explain what drew him to philosophy in the first place. "I don't know," Samba Diallo replies, "When I reflect on it now, I can't help but think that there was also a bit of morbid attraction to danger. I chose the path on which I was most likely to lose myself." 3 Morbid attraction and loss indeed, for Samba Diallo's pursuit of philosophical truths in France ultimately spell (self-willed) death. The novel ends with a fatal confrontation between the protagonist and the figure of the village dof ("madman" in Wolof) back in Senegal. Kane's Samba Diallo finds fellow travelers in Jeanne-Marie Jackson's The African Novel of Ideas, especially in her fourth and final chapter, "Bodies Impolitic: African Deaths of Philosophical Suicide," where Jackson focuses on works that feature "alienated, contemplative characters whose intellectual dispositions lead them, in some way, to court death." 4 Excavating a literary genealogy of "philosophical suicide"
AU SEUIL DE LA GRAMMAIRE: L’APPAREIL PRÉFACIEL FRANÇAIS DANS LA GRAMMATICOGRAPHIE «MISSIONNAIRE» DE LANGUES AFRICAINES À L’ÉPOQUE COLONIALE, 1850-1930
THE ARCHITECTURE OF GRAMMAR: Studies in Linguistic Historiography in Honor of Pierre Swiggers, 2022
Although the prefatory apparatus may take a variety of forms and appear under diverse titles (pré... more Although the prefatory apparatus may take a variety of forms and appear under diverse titles (préface, introduction, avertissement, etc.), one generally observes a strong unity in its thematic content (Francoeur 2005). The present contribution broadly outlines the characteristics of prefatory discourses concerning African languages, by examining the prefaces to grammars produced by missionaries between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In doing so, this contribution aims to identify the major themes that come into play in texts preceding descriptions of African languages.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2018
Though it builds upon the author's earlier contributions to the history of lexicography (i.e. Con... more Though it builds upon the author's earlier contributions to the history of lexicography (i.e. Considine 2008, 2014), John Considine's volume Small Dictionaries and Curiosity departs from a highly original premise: the observation that, beginning around 1500 with the proliferation of wordlists documenting marginal or lesser known languages of Europe, Western lexicography enters a new phase characterised by a shared practice of curiosity and an imaginative sense of 'what a language variety is and why it matters' (p. 239). Thus, Considine proposes to investigate the notion (or rather, the experience) of curiosity as a transhistorical motor for the compilation of wordlists on the basis of fieldwork in early modern Europe. Considine begins his investigation with a description of lexicographic records of the language of vagabonds, and this is fitting since the author leads us on a sort of linguistic vagabondage of his own-introducing us, over the course of the volume, to wordlists big and small that document diverse language varieties from every corner of Europe: from cryptolects and regionalisms to weakly codified and even dying languages. Following a brief introduction, the text falls into 27 short chapters, organised into five parts. Chapters are grouped thematically, in the case of Part I, and chronologically, in the case of Parts II-V. Part I, 'Curiosity' , though the briefest of the five, is arguably the most crucial since it is here that Considine lays out the contrast which underpins the work as a whole: namely, the difference between the fundamentally utilitarian and largely unimaginative work of medieval lexicographers, and the curiosity-driven lexicography that the author will go on to trace from its beginnings in the sixteenth century to its various inflections in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Appropriately, Considine opens this first part with a text that appears to be situated at the threshold of the two competing worlds he describes: the Codex Cumanicus, a fourteenth-century manuscript containing short wordlists of Cuman and Persian, compiled by Genoese traders and German-speaking missionaries in the Mongol empire. The manuscript is emblematic of the gradual shift identified by Considine-i.e. from the lexically incurious compilation of wordlists to curiosity-driven lexicography-because it shows unusual glimmers of its compilers' imaginative linguistic curiosity, which shine out against the practically oriented lexicographic background of fourteenth-century Latin Christendom. For instance, the second part of the manuscript is particularly heterogeneous, interspersing shorter wordlists with other materials, such as prayers and hymns, fieldwork notes and the earliest extant Turkic riddles (Considine 2017: 13). In Chapter 4, 'The history of lexicography and the history of curiosity' , Considine introduces his working definition of curiosity, which serves as the major heuristic device throughout the volume. He borrows sociologist Justin Stagl's ahistorical sketch, which characterises curiosity as: (1) a directed activity involving locomotion and the senses; that (2) has something to do with new or unknown situations; (3) is 'superfluous' insofar as it has no immediate utilitarian goal; (4) is closely connected with play; and (5) can lead to indirect, long-range advantages in the form of learning (Considine 2017: 24; Stagl 1995: 2). In addition to the work of Stagl and a number of cultural historians-such as Pomian (1990), Marr (2006) and Kenny (2004, 2006)-another major intertext is Brian Ogilvie's The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (2006) which, like Considine's volume, posits a development in intellectual orientations at the end of the fifteenth century: a new attention to 'particulars' (p. 25), to the