Babacar Dieng - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Babacar Dieng
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - SHS, Sep 1, 2013
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - ParisTech, Dec 1, 2010
Journal of Pan African Studies, Jun 1, 2008
Margaret Walker's Jubilee is an important marker in the effective development of African-Amer... more Margaret Walker's Jubilee is an important marker in the effective development of African-American historical counter-narratives. Walker indeed appropriates feature traditions in the narratives of the enslaved, which she reshapes to create a new mode of representation that will only come to predominate in the sixties. Walker's text anticipates most of the practices embedded in the new body of African-American historical studies and novels on enslavement published after the sixties, which like her work pays attention to the agency and self-representations of the enslaved; privileges description of their community-and culture-building energies; exhibits forms of resistance; and interrogates the myths and stereotypes disseminated in Anglo-American representations. Walker's approach to history has inspired filial African-American contemporary writers. Indeed, as Pettis conjectures, "historical fiction structured in the same manner as Jubilee is also a vital precursor to complex ... approaches to Afro-American history such as David Bradley's The Chanesysville Incident, John A. Williams' Captain Blackman, and Ishmael Reed's parody of the genre, Flight to Canada" (12). Margaret Walker's text, as several critics have pointed out, may well have been the impetus for revisions of the history of chattel enslavement from the Black woman's perspective such as Ernest G. Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose (1986), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). (i) The author's confirmation that enslavement did not destroy the spirit of her heroine is her legacy to female protagonists of historical fiction that follows such as Miss James Pittman, Dessa Rose, and Sethe. Most scholarship on Jubilee traces back the text's inception to the sixties. Indeed, critics such as Ashraf H. A Rushdy, in "The Neo-Slave Narrative;" Joyce Pettis in "Margaret Walker: Black Women Writer of the South;" and Angelyn Mitchell in her introduction to The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fictions--suggest that the novel's development parallels the sixties. This article argues that in accounting for the revisionist undertaking which Jubilee represents, however, one should not only take into account the significant ideological base of the sixties, because Margaret Walker's text is a product of an earlier period during which the African-American movement of historical reclamation reached its peak: the thirties. Indeed, Walker started writing Jubilee in the fall of 1934, when she was in her senior year at Northeastern University in Illinois (Walker, How I Wrote 12), and she completed and published it thirty years later. Therefore, even though examination of the context of Jubilee's publication--the context of the Civil Rights and the erupting Black Power movements that gave impetus to a wave of neo-narratives of the enslaved--might help to understand the practices embedded in the text, it is necessary to examine the context of its beginnings as well. This is especially necessary since the author herself makes it clear, in an interview with Kay Bonnetti, that notwithstanding the fact that her historical novel was published in 1966, it bears influences of the thinking she acquired in the thirties (128). The context in which Walker began writing Jubilee coincides with the Harlem Renaissance's late stage. This movement of cultural self-assertion saw its fullest development in the 1920s. However, it was still a powerful ideological construct in the 1930s. The development of the Harlem Renaissance had taken place in a climate of protest against the African-Americans' economic and social conditions, of unprecedented development of race consciousness, and of pride in Negro cultural heritage--all ingredients necessary to the eventual birth of nationalism of the 1960s. Writers and theorists of this movement in particular affirmed pride in their Negro identity and celebrated their racial heritage in their works. …
This article scrutinizes the narrating instance and discourses in J California Cooper's Some ... more This article scrutinizes the narrating instance and discourses in J California Cooper's Some People, Some Other Place (2004). It argues that Cooper writes within a purely African-American literary tradition that exploits the power of orality embedded in the black sermon to bring order in the lives of the audience, more particularly women of different races and walks of life engaged in a quest for selfhood and wholeness. To show that the narrative voice replicates features of the Black sermonic tradition, its orality is first examined and it is argued that the narrator's language, particularly, in her opening address, resembles a sermon. How character's speech replicates the function of the Black Sermon in the African-American community has also been illustrated. The paper also explores how the character of Eula Too is emblematic of the truths disseminated in the network of sermons that populate the narrative.
the writer's project presented in the epigraph that opens the narrative, narrative voice, and... more the writer's project presented in the epigraph that opens the narrative, narrative voice, and the events focalized in the story, the author argues that Child's re-visitation of the early history of the puritans constitutes a lieu de memoire which corrects stereotypical images traditionally attached to them and celebrates their contribution to the construction of the American nation. To demonstrate this, a definition of the concept of lieu de memoire is first provided; then, illustrations of how Lydia Maria Child shapes her narrative in such a way as to turn it into a site of revision and tribute. Résumé: L'auteur de cet article se penche sur la représentation de l'histoire des puritains du dix-septième siècle dans le roman historique de Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times (1824).Se basant sur le personnage que Child construit, la voix et le discours narratifs, le projet de la romancière décliné dans l'épigraphe qui ouvre le roman, ainsi que les évèn...
This article scrutinizes the representation of the lives of the 17th century puritans in Lydia Ma... more This article scrutinizes the representation of the lives of the 17th century puritans in Lydia Maria Child's historical novel Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times (1824). Based on the persona adopted by the author, the writer's project presented in the epigraph that opens the narrative, narrative voice, and the events focalized in the story, the author argues that Child's re-visitation of the early history of the puritans constitutes a lieu de memoire which corrects stereotypical images traditionally attached to them and celebrates their contribution to the construction of the American nation. To demonstrate this, a definition of the concept of lieu de memoire is first provided; then, illustrations of how Lydia Maria Child shapes her narrative in such a way as to turn it into a site of revision and tribute. Résumé: L'auteur de cet article se penche sur la représentation de l'histoire des puritains du dix-septième siècle dans le roman historique de Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times (1824).Se basant sur le personnage que Child construit, la voix et le discours narratifs, le projet de la romancière décliné dans l'épigraphe qui ouvre le roman, ainsi que les évènements décrits, l'auteur s'efforce principalement de démontrer que le roman constitue un lieu de mémoire qui corrige l'image réductrice et stéréo typique des puritains et célèbre leur importante contribution à l'édification de la nation américaine. Pour se faire, il fournit d'abord la définition d'un lieu de mémoire avant de démontrer comment Lydia Maria Child construit le roman historique pour réviser l'image des puritains et leur rendre hommage.
Shifting the focus from black women to black men novelists, this work inspired by Barbara Christi... more Shifting the focus from black women to black men novelists, this work inspired by Barbara Christian’s seminal work, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (1980), studies the characterization of Aunt Hager in Not Without Laughter, Hughes’ Harlem Renaissance novel, against the backdrop of the struggle over the image of the black woman in literary representations. It compares and contrasts Hughes’ character with the stereotypical depictions of the mammy in Antebellum and southern representations and the emancipatory portraits of the black woman in counter-narratives from the abolitionist to the New Renaissance periods. It argues that Hughes constructs a complex character combining features of the mammy but sufficiently revising it to give birth to a new archetype that anticipates the emergence of the Morrisionian “ancestor.”
The oral tradition forms part of the aesthetic pillars of African-American literature and the stu... more The oral tradition forms part of the aesthetic pillars of African-American literature and the study of its presence in African-American literary works deserves more attention. This article shows how African-American creative artists have used their oral tradition, more specifically music, as an index to construct narrative contents, structure and decorate them, thus conferring them beauty, originality and complexity. It focuses on the deployment of the Jazz, the Blues and the slave secular and civil war songs in texts by Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker and Toni Morrison.
This paper discusses the concepts of Myth and Nation in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel Queen ... more This paper discusses the concepts of Myth and Nation in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel Queen of Dreams. Against a narrative backdrop of immigrant community life in America (Indian family moving to the West and settling there) this paper analyses the roles these concepts play in the life of the immigrants. It also focuses on the relation between these two ideas. We shall see how the perception of second or third generation immigrants in America (or any other Western country) regarding their nation (their native land) is based on formulation of myths. The paradigmatic concerns they face and manipulate while trying to understand their nation are also analysed. The paper also portrays the articulation of an existential flux which such individuals or communities feel from a ceaseless struggle between Western value-systems and their traditional Eastern ethics. We shall see how in trying to understand the nation the immigrant community eventually resorts to an Orientalist discursive pr...
This article is a study of the characteristic traits of what we term the mid-century diasporic Af... more This article is a study of the characteristic traits of what we term the mid-century diasporic AfroEntwicklungsroman, a new version of bildungsroman developed in the African Diaspora in the midtwentieth century. It results from the realization of the differences in terms of form between the traditional European Bildungsroman‘s model and the version popularized by writers of the African diaspora from the middle to the end of the twentieth century. It mainly argues that these differences stem from the context and the function of the discourses disseminated in them. It demonstrates that although both the European and diasporic versions are pedagogical in impulse, they bear different forms because the Afro-Entwicklunsgromane, unlike the European bildungsroman which depicts more stages and celebrates the protagonist‘s entrance into the world as a mature being, focuses exclusively on the challenges faced during the protagonist‘s stage of growth as a means of awakening, sensitizing, and ed...
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - SHS, Sep 1, 2013
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - ParisTech, Dec 1, 2010
Journal of Pan African Studies, Jun 1, 2008
Margaret Walker's Jubilee is an important marker in the effective development of African-Amer... more Margaret Walker's Jubilee is an important marker in the effective development of African-American historical counter-narratives. Walker indeed appropriates feature traditions in the narratives of the enslaved, which she reshapes to create a new mode of representation that will only come to predominate in the sixties. Walker's text anticipates most of the practices embedded in the new body of African-American historical studies and novels on enslavement published after the sixties, which like her work pays attention to the agency and self-representations of the enslaved; privileges description of their community-and culture-building energies; exhibits forms of resistance; and interrogates the myths and stereotypes disseminated in Anglo-American representations. Walker's approach to history has inspired filial African-American contemporary writers. Indeed, as Pettis conjectures, "historical fiction structured in the same manner as Jubilee is also a vital precursor to complex ... approaches to Afro-American history such as David Bradley's The Chanesysville Incident, John A. Williams' Captain Blackman, and Ishmael Reed's parody of the genre, Flight to Canada" (12). Margaret Walker's text, as several critics have pointed out, may well have been the impetus for revisions of the history of chattel enslavement from the Black woman's perspective such as Ernest G. Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose (1986), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). (i) The author's confirmation that enslavement did not destroy the spirit of her heroine is her legacy to female protagonists of historical fiction that follows such as Miss James Pittman, Dessa Rose, and Sethe. Most scholarship on Jubilee traces back the text's inception to the sixties. Indeed, critics such as Ashraf H. A Rushdy, in "The Neo-Slave Narrative;" Joyce Pettis in "Margaret Walker: Black Women Writer of the South;" and Angelyn Mitchell in her introduction to The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fictions--suggest that the novel's development parallels the sixties. This article argues that in accounting for the revisionist undertaking which Jubilee represents, however, one should not only take into account the significant ideological base of the sixties, because Margaret Walker's text is a product of an earlier period during which the African-American movement of historical reclamation reached its peak: the thirties. Indeed, Walker started writing Jubilee in the fall of 1934, when she was in her senior year at Northeastern University in Illinois (Walker, How I Wrote 12), and she completed and published it thirty years later. Therefore, even though examination of the context of Jubilee's publication--the context of the Civil Rights and the erupting Black Power movements that gave impetus to a wave of neo-narratives of the enslaved--might help to understand the practices embedded in the text, it is necessary to examine the context of its beginnings as well. This is especially necessary since the author herself makes it clear, in an interview with Kay Bonnetti, that notwithstanding the fact that her historical novel was published in 1966, it bears influences of the thinking she acquired in the thirties (128). The context in which Walker began writing Jubilee coincides with the Harlem Renaissance's late stage. This movement of cultural self-assertion saw its fullest development in the 1920s. However, it was still a powerful ideological construct in the 1930s. The development of the Harlem Renaissance had taken place in a climate of protest against the African-Americans' economic and social conditions, of unprecedented development of race consciousness, and of pride in Negro cultural heritage--all ingredients necessary to the eventual birth of nationalism of the 1960s. Writers and theorists of this movement in particular affirmed pride in their Negro identity and celebrated their racial heritage in their works. …
This article scrutinizes the narrating instance and discourses in J California Cooper's Some ... more This article scrutinizes the narrating instance and discourses in J California Cooper's Some People, Some Other Place (2004). It argues that Cooper writes within a purely African-American literary tradition that exploits the power of orality embedded in the black sermon to bring order in the lives of the audience, more particularly women of different races and walks of life engaged in a quest for selfhood and wholeness. To show that the narrative voice replicates features of the Black sermonic tradition, its orality is first examined and it is argued that the narrator's language, particularly, in her opening address, resembles a sermon. How character's speech replicates the function of the Black Sermon in the African-American community has also been illustrated. The paper also explores how the character of Eula Too is emblematic of the truths disseminated in the network of sermons that populate the narrative.
the writer's project presented in the epigraph that opens the narrative, narrative voice, and... more the writer's project presented in the epigraph that opens the narrative, narrative voice, and the events focalized in the story, the author argues that Child's re-visitation of the early history of the puritans constitutes a lieu de memoire which corrects stereotypical images traditionally attached to them and celebrates their contribution to the construction of the American nation. To demonstrate this, a definition of the concept of lieu de memoire is first provided; then, illustrations of how Lydia Maria Child shapes her narrative in such a way as to turn it into a site of revision and tribute. Résumé: L'auteur de cet article se penche sur la représentation de l'histoire des puritains du dix-septième siècle dans le roman historique de Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times (1824).Se basant sur le personnage que Child construit, la voix et le discours narratifs, le projet de la romancière décliné dans l'épigraphe qui ouvre le roman, ainsi que les évèn...
This article scrutinizes the representation of the lives of the 17th century puritans in Lydia Ma... more This article scrutinizes the representation of the lives of the 17th century puritans in Lydia Maria Child's historical novel Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times (1824). Based on the persona adopted by the author, the writer's project presented in the epigraph that opens the narrative, narrative voice, and the events focalized in the story, the author argues that Child's re-visitation of the early history of the puritans constitutes a lieu de memoire which corrects stereotypical images traditionally attached to them and celebrates their contribution to the construction of the American nation. To demonstrate this, a definition of the concept of lieu de memoire is first provided; then, illustrations of how Lydia Maria Child shapes her narrative in such a way as to turn it into a site of revision and tribute. Résumé: L'auteur de cet article se penche sur la représentation de l'histoire des puritains du dix-septième siècle dans le roman historique de Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times (1824).Se basant sur le personnage que Child construit, la voix et le discours narratifs, le projet de la romancière décliné dans l'épigraphe qui ouvre le roman, ainsi que les évènements décrits, l'auteur s'efforce principalement de démontrer que le roman constitue un lieu de mémoire qui corrige l'image réductrice et stéréo typique des puritains et célèbre leur importante contribution à l'édification de la nation américaine. Pour se faire, il fournit d'abord la définition d'un lieu de mémoire avant de démontrer comment Lydia Maria Child construit le roman historique pour réviser l'image des puritains et leur rendre hommage.
Shifting the focus from black women to black men novelists, this work inspired by Barbara Christi... more Shifting the focus from black women to black men novelists, this work inspired by Barbara Christian’s seminal work, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (1980), studies the characterization of Aunt Hager in Not Without Laughter, Hughes’ Harlem Renaissance novel, against the backdrop of the struggle over the image of the black woman in literary representations. It compares and contrasts Hughes’ character with the stereotypical depictions of the mammy in Antebellum and southern representations and the emancipatory portraits of the black woman in counter-narratives from the abolitionist to the New Renaissance periods. It argues that Hughes constructs a complex character combining features of the mammy but sufficiently revising it to give birth to a new archetype that anticipates the emergence of the Morrisionian “ancestor.”
The oral tradition forms part of the aesthetic pillars of African-American literature and the stu... more The oral tradition forms part of the aesthetic pillars of African-American literature and the study of its presence in African-American literary works deserves more attention. This article shows how African-American creative artists have used their oral tradition, more specifically music, as an index to construct narrative contents, structure and decorate them, thus conferring them beauty, originality and complexity. It focuses on the deployment of the Jazz, the Blues and the slave secular and civil war songs in texts by Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker and Toni Morrison.
This paper discusses the concepts of Myth and Nation in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel Queen ... more This paper discusses the concepts of Myth and Nation in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel Queen of Dreams. Against a narrative backdrop of immigrant community life in America (Indian family moving to the West and settling there) this paper analyses the roles these concepts play in the life of the immigrants. It also focuses on the relation between these two ideas. We shall see how the perception of second or third generation immigrants in America (or any other Western country) regarding their nation (their native land) is based on formulation of myths. The paradigmatic concerns they face and manipulate while trying to understand their nation are also analysed. The paper also portrays the articulation of an existential flux which such individuals or communities feel from a ceaseless struggle between Western value-systems and their traditional Eastern ethics. We shall see how in trying to understand the nation the immigrant community eventually resorts to an Orientalist discursive pr...
This article is a study of the characteristic traits of what we term the mid-century diasporic Af... more This article is a study of the characteristic traits of what we term the mid-century diasporic AfroEntwicklungsroman, a new version of bildungsroman developed in the African Diaspora in the midtwentieth century. It results from the realization of the differences in terms of form between the traditional European Bildungsroman‘s model and the version popularized by writers of the African diaspora from the middle to the end of the twentieth century. It mainly argues that these differences stem from the context and the function of the discourses disseminated in them. It demonstrates that although both the European and diasporic versions are pedagogical in impulse, they bear different forms because the Afro-Entwicklunsgromane, unlike the European bildungsroman which depicts more stages and celebrates the protagonist‘s entrance into the world as a mature being, focuses exclusively on the challenges faced during the protagonist‘s stage of growth as a means of awakening, sensitizing, and ed...