Doyle D Calhoun | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)
Books by Doyle D Calhoun
Watermarked TOC, Preface and Introduction.
Journal articles by Doyle D Calhoun
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.
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
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.
Book reviews by Doyle D Calhoun
Watermarked TOC, Preface and Introduction.
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.
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.
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.
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