Polo B Moji | University of Cape Town (original) (raw)

Books by Polo B Moji

This book approaches the study of AfroEurope through narrative forms produced in contemporary Fra... more This book approaches the study of AfroEurope through narrative forms produced in contemporary France, a location which richly illustrates race in European spaces.

The book adopts a transdiciplinary lens that combines critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis to explore the spatial negotiations of black women in France. It assesses literature, film, and music as narrative forms and engages with the sociocultural and political contexts from which they emerge. Through the figure of the black flâneuse and the analytical framework of "walking as method", the book goes beneath spectacular representations of ghettoised banlieues, televised protests, and shipwrecked migrants to analyse the spatiality of blackness in the everyday. It argues that the material-discursive framing of black flânerie, as both relational and embodied movements, renders visible a politics of place embedded in everyday mico-struggles of raced-sexed subjects.

Foregrounding expressive modes and forms that have traditionally received little critical attention outside of the French and francophone world, this book will be relevant to academics, researchers, writers, students, activists, and readers with interests in Literary and Cultural Studies, African and Afrodiasporic Studies, Black Feminisms, Migration Studies, Critical Black Geographies, Francophone Studies, and the comparative framework of Afroeuropean Studies.

Book Chapters by Polo B Moji

Spaces of Longing and Belonging: Spatiality, Culture and Identity in Literature and Film, 2019

This chapter explores diasporic space through the dual conception of filiation as both home and h... more This chapter explores diasporic space through the dual conception of filiation as both home and homeland (home/land) in Nimrod Bena Djangrang’s autobiographical L’Or des rivières (Chad, 2010). Using the Glissantian notion of errantry as a movement of relationality, the paper frames Nimrod as an “errant” son – a diasporic subject who mediates between his lived experience of home (Chad) and host lands. It firstly examines the topos of return to the mother/land using the intimate chronology of Nimrod’s personal life (his mother) and the historical chronology of Chadian politics. The notion of “collision” between home and host lands is further explored through leitmotif of spatial and temporal disorientation. Lastly, the intersubjective narration Nimrod’s father’s death and the temporal shifts of memory are used to analyse the re-membered father/land or topographies of relation. The chapter illustrates that by subverting a unitary conception of the home/land as space of origin and presenting a cycle of departure and return, L’Or des rivières frames diasporic subjectivity as relational and mobile – a dynamic temporal and spatial remapping of filiation.

Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation and Culture, 2017

Leonora Miano, a Cameroonian author residing in Paris, evokes the metaphor of living on the borde... more Leonora Miano, a Cameroonian author residing in Paris, evokes the metaphor of living on the border (Habiter la frontière, 2012) to describe a diasporic Francophone identity. While the notion of border is key to postcolonial theories of intersectionality (Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture, 2004), Miano defines this space specifically through the national and transnational cross-pollination of languages. In this way, her work lends itself to analysis through Edouard Glissant’s Poétique de la relation (1990) [Poetics of Relation], which conceives of multilingualism as a natural mutual impregnation of languages rather than the ability to speak multiple tongues. Miano is perhaps best known for coining the term “Afropean” through the short story collection entitled Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles (2008) and the novel Blues pour Elise (2010) – subtitled Figures afropéenes saison 1. Subjectification that is both European and black speaks to Paul Gilroy’s assertion that simultaneously occupying these two spaces challenges the ideological construction of their mutual exclusivity.
This essay argues that the subversive intent of Miano’s Afropean literary works can be read through Glissant’s poetics of multilingualism, while at the same time opening this up to the inclusion of music as a language of transnational black subjectivity. In particular, Miano employs the aesthetics of jazz and Afro-American musical references in Blues pour Elise to challenge readings such as Jacques Chevrier’s that interpret Francophone diasporic writing through the centrality of France for its former colonial subjects (migritude). French is thus rendered radically “open” to blackness through complex routes in Miano’s work that connect both to other languages, and to other cultural forms: to the ideology of the American Black Arts Movement, literary works like Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), and musical movements of the African Diaspora. Through this radical writing, the notion of multilingualism is expanded to include music as a language of transnational black subjectivity, which impregnates European languages to create the literary code of Afropean double consciousness.

Articles by Polo B Moji

Journal of the African Literature Association, 2023

This article examines elusive freedom and black (un)belonging in France through the work of Marie... more This article examines elusive freedom and black (un)belonging in France through the work of Marie NDiaye, a prize-winning playwright and author, whose controversial denunciation of the “monstrosity” of President Nicholas Sarkozy’s France in 2009 coincided with her being awarded France’s highest literary award. Reading the author’s fierce attachment to the conception of her blackness as French rather than francophone I analyze the interracial and intraracial dynamics of black French identities in NDiaye’s novel Ladivine (2013) alongside her critically acclaimed play Papa doit manger (2003) and short story “Les sœurs” (2008). The analysis frames (un)belonging as contingent belonging, using Tommie Shelby’s articulations of “thin” and “thick” conceptions of blackness to read NDiaye’s literary representations in conversation with Pap Ndiaye’s sociological study of blackness as a minoritization “condition” in France. I explore the representation of métissage (biracial/mixed-race) identities and the trope of passing (as white) in troubling dominant conceptions of “thin blackness” and being able to read race on the body in Ladivine and “Les sœurs.” This is followed by an examination of the representation of “monstrous” intimacies of kinship and ancestry as articulations of “thick blackness” by reading Ladivine in conversation with Papa doit manger. I propose that through the poetics of the “thins and thicks” of blackness NDiaye productively challenges the conflation of blackness with “other” origins.

Cultural Studies, 2022

Winner of the 2003 Prix des Hémisphères Chantal Lapicque, and translated into German, Italian, Po... more Winner of the 2003 Prix des Hémisphères Chantal Lapicque, and translated into German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English, Fatou Diome’s 2003 novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique [ The Belly of the Atlantic, 2006] plays on the image of the Atlantic as an oceanic belly. This article explores the usefulness of the black Atlantic epistemology (Glissant 1990, Gilroy 1993) as a site for imagining the production of diasporic space, alongside the critique that ‘by excluding Africa, Gilroy has in effect narrowed the Africanness or Africanity of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Masilela 1996, p. 88). Through Diome’s novel, I explore how this intersects with a feminist project of rendering visible the spatialization of difference, through an engagement with the geographies of domination. Borrowing from Zymunt Bauman’s (2006) notion of liquid modernity, I therefore propose ‘liquid feminism’ as a framework that relates the globalised oceanic mobilities of African migrants to the structures of patriarchal domination which render black women’s lives ‘ungeographic’ (McKittrick 2006).I start by exploring the geographic sensibility of Diome’s poetics, including her use of the language of geography and her personification of the Atlantic Ocean. I then analyse how her portrayal of a geulwaar matriclan subverts the notion of Western feminism as rescuing African women who are trapped by ‘tradition’. Finally, I explore Diome’s notion of ‘geographic suicide’ as associated with the reflexivity of African women as modern subjects a site for the ‘affective mapping’ (Flatley 2009) of diasporic identity. Ultimately, the article illustrates how Diome’s feminist re-imagining of the black Atlantic centres Africa and Africanness, combating the temporal dislocation that fixes the continent as a space that is lost in the originary moment of rupture of the Middle Passage.

Journal of African Cinemas, 2019

Using Amir Baraka’s conception of Afrosurrealism as a black aesthetic form that is imbricated wit... more Using Amir Baraka’s conception of Afrosurrealism as a black aesthetic form that is imbricated with ‘lived life’, this article proposes an Afrosur/realist reading of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (‘The hyena’s journey’) (1973). I explore the trajectory of the iconic lovers Anta and Mory and their recourse to petty criminality as a means of escaping to Paris. I first consider how petty criminality or ‘hustling’ can be read in relation to Abdoumaliq Simone’s notion of ‘people as infrastructure’ or a realistic reproduction of the African urban. I then turn my attention to Membéty’s surrealist portrayal of Anta and Mory as ‘hyenas’ – or the archetypal figure of the stranger who poses a threat to the city’s social order. Central to my analysis of the surreal as an expression of desire is the filmic reproduction of post-independence Dakar on-screen. I pay attention to place-identity, and the filmic depiction of nodes and modes of mobility as sites of potential disruption to the city as a form of social order. The article thus subverts and complicates the dichotomy between the real and the surreal as cinematic forms that reproduce the postcolonial African urban as both lived and imagined.

Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2018

Through a study of Soulfood Equatoriale (2009), a nostalgic collection of culinary short stories... more Through a study of Soulfood Equatoriale (2009), a nostalgic collection of culinary short stories by Paris-based Cameroonian writer Leonora Miano (1973–), and her essay “Afropea” (Miano, Ecrits pour la parole), this article relates culinary literary form to the AfroEuropean subjectivities. Located in the emergent field of foodways, the article examines the juxtaposition “Soulfood” as a signifier of histories of Afrodiasporic dispersal and African- American culinary tradition, with “Equatoriale” denoting the author’s personal trajectory from Cameroon to becoming a naturalized French citizen or AfroEuropean. Using the dual notions of taste and nostalgia to interrogate the affective multiple affiliation created by the translocation of soul food to the Francophone Afropean space, the article frames a nascent Afropean culinary culture as a site of subjectivation created by an entangled network of cultural roots and routes, which transcend cultural and linguistic borders.

Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, 2019

This article examines the novel, Soul Tourists (2005), by Bernadine Evaristo, a black British wri... more This article examines the novel, Soul Tourists (2005), by Bernadine Evaristo, a black British writer of Nigerian and English descent, through the notion of hauntology. Based on the author’s assertion that “her preoccupation is her DNA,” I explore the novel’s depiction of a black British couple—Stanley and Jessie—as they take a road trip across Europe, and the haunting of Stanley by the ghosts of black historical figures along the way. I draw on Avery Gordon’s framing of hauntology as both a racialized experience of invisible power structures of oppressions and a call to action. I firstly consider Stanley and Jessie’s personal histories as haunted sites of melancholia and repressed memories. I further link hauntology to the imbrication of spiritual and physical worlds through an analysis of the erased historical figures—ghosts—that speak to Stanley at various locations along their journey. Over and above the spatiotemporal (re)mapping of blackness in Europe and the challenge to the ontological definition of Europe as ‘being’ a space of whiteness, I relate the hauntological imaginary to a schema of black ancestry.

Agenda, Special Issue: Gender and the Popular imaginary, 2018

Through a study of Lauren Ekué’s Icône Urbaine (2006), touted as France’s first Hip-hop feminist ... more Through a study of Lauren Ekué’s Icône Urbaine (2006), touted as France’s first Hip-hop feminist novel, I argue that Hip-hop aesthetics can be used to find a language, re-negotiate the deviance and pathologies associated with black femininity as either diva-hood or deviance. Using the Hip-hop feminist theory and the critical cultural analysis of black visuality in Nicole Fleetwood’s On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public (2015), I frame Ekué’s portrayal of Flora D’Almeida, the novel’s heroine, as a negotiation of public images of black femininity in popular culture. I firstly read Flora’s pathological narcissism through Nicole Fleetwood’s association of racial iconicity – diva-hood – with hyperbolic consumption. I then use Hip-hop feminist theory to unpack the consumption practices of Hip-hop culture through the notion of “bling” and the “deviant” image of the video-girl. My final section then examines how denigration and veneration inform Flora’s negotiation of her sexual desire. Throughout the analysis I pay close attention to the novel’s hyperbolic narrative style, sampling of musical and literary references, as well as the re-mixing of linguistic codes to simultaneously represent the particularities of black France in relation to a globally mediated (African American influenced) public image of blackness

Journal of the African Literature Association, 2017

The dissection of Sarah Baartman's body is considered a colonial scientific practice that rendere... more The dissection of Sarah Baartman's body is considered a colonial scientific practice that rendered the Africans “less than human.” This paper is interested in how this project travels into Francophone literature through the autobiographical novel 53cm (1999) by Swiss–Gabonese author Sandrine Bessora van Nguema. Dedicated to Baartman, 53cm depicts Bessora's alter-ego, Zara, an illegal alien in Paris. Although skinny-bottomed Zara is the embodied opposite of Baartman's steatopygia, she too is considered “alien” by French society. I analyse Zara's lived experience as a “known” body who is subject to a dissecting gaze based in the anatomical “knowledge” of Sarah's enlarged buttocks. Conversely, I consider dissection as a subversive practice in Zara's satirical performance of being an ethnographer of French (the “knower”). I conclude that the Zara/Sarah representational model reframes dissection as a subversive performance born of the feeling of indignity created by persistent colonial ontological categories.

Scrutiny 2: issues in English studies in Southern Africa, 2017

Political exile is an integral part of post 1994 liberation struggle narrative in South Africa. L... more Political exile is an integral part of post 1994 liberation struggle narrative in South Africa. Lauretta Ngcobo’s autobiographical short story, “The Prodigal Daughter”, is the title story of Prodigal Daughters (2012), an anthology of South African women’s stories of political exile during the anti-apartheid struggle. I enter the analysis through Ngcobo’s intertextual reference to the gendered figure of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11–32). The parable creates a clichéd schema of exile which lends itself to a feminist critique through the figure of the female “prodi-gal” (Carter 1985). Drawing on a black feminist conception of placelessness, I examine racial and gendered hierarchies of citizenship in relation to political exile and consider Ngcobo’s female “prodi-gal” as speaking back to the constructed radical subalternity of black South African women. Reading exile as a narrative form I argue that both the anthology and Ngcobo’s personal account are informed by a gendered insider/outsider perspective of the liberation movement: insider or “in place” as an activist but outsider “out of place” as a woman. I firstly analyse the notion of “statelessness” in relation to the racialised hierarchy of citizenship under apartheid as external exile. I then analyse “place-lessness” with reference to the marginalisation of women within patriarchal liberation movements while in political exile – this I read as internal exile. Over and above the historicising of women’s political exile, Ngcobo’s narrative recasts the exiled “women’s place” as a space of political agency through its erasure of the separation between the political and personal. By contrasting the gendered division of labour and resistance with the “domestication” of women’s activism in exile, Ngcobo challenges the perceived gender-neutrality of political exile. The male figure of the prodigal is thus re-cast as a female “prodi-gal”, creating a feminist schema for women’s political exile.

Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2015

NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names – shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Et... more NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names – shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Etisalat Prize for Literature in 2013 – is a novel in which the leitmotif of (re)naming associates the trope of migration to the (dis)location and translation of subjectivities. Based on the premise that the movement of subjects from one social context to another is analogous to the translation of text from one language to another, this paper proposes a transitional mode of subjectification. However, I argue against reading Darling’s journey from Zimbabwean shanty dweller to illegal immigrant in America as a linear progression from an original (located) to a translated (dislocated) subjectivity. I further argue that the novel goes beyond the idea of ‘transparent translation’- a visible layering of a translated subjectivity over a discrete original subjectivity – by privileging their inter-permeability. Semantic and cognitive dissonance are read as textual markers of the psychic (dis)location experienced by displaced subjects. This analysis of Darling’s childhood and adolescent subjectivities leads me to conclude that the novel’s leitmotif of (re)naming as a call for a new hermeneutic code through which translational subjectivities can be understood.

International Journal of African Renaissance Studies - Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity, 2013

Tanella Boni, an author engaged with African women’s emancipation, has written cautionary essays ... more Tanella Boni, an author engaged with African women’s emancipation, has written cautionary essays since the 1990s decrying the xenophobic nature of government-sanctioned ivoirité in the Ivory Coast. Forced into exile due to the subsequent strife (2000-2010) she wrote Matins de couvre-feu (2005), an allegorical novel in which the woman’s status as a second-class citizen is equated to that of a foreigner in a xenophobic state. This representation plays on the domestic / public space dichotomy, considered by feminist discourse to be a social barrier to women’s equal citizenship. Drawing on Boni’s own “feminist” monograph, Que vivent les femmes d’Afrique? (2008), this paper explores the internalisation of national politics (the public sphere) through the “domestication” of an anonymous female narrator who is placed under house arrest. Thereafter an analysis of Kanga Ba, a character who is a victim of xenophobic nationalism, will be used to substantiate the equation of the woman’s social and political marginalisation to that of the foreigner. This paper concludes that Boni’s representational framework ultimately subverts the very notion of a public / domestic dichotomy through narrative strategies that illustrate the porous nature of both spaces, thus eliding the separation between private and national experiences.

French Studies in Southern Africa, 2013

The political autobiographies of African “nation fathers” position them as heroic emblems of the ... more The political autobiographies of African “nation fathers” position them as heroic emblems of the birth of the African nation. Aminata Sow Fall’s L’Ex-père de la nation (1987) is an adaptation of this genre. This paper uses Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s definition of genre conventions in its analysis of modalities of transformation. The novel is a parody which adopts the setting and autobiographical style of the political autobiography in order to inverse schema of heroic triumph into that of tragic decline. Irony is seen as a formal indicator of this thematic modification based on a hypertextual relation to the autobiographical genre of origin. An analysis of rhetorical strategies which subvert this genre is based on the novel’s metatextual relation to the “nation father” mythology in African political discourse. Sow Fall’s satirical humour is a technique that indicates the novel’s critical stance through humour. By erasing the schema of separate political and domestic spheres she adopts a “feminine” approach in her adaptation, questioning the centrality of the male figure in the patriarchal conception of the African nation. L’Ex-père de la nation is therefore a subversive rewriting of a canonical genre.

Literator, 2014

A gendered conceptual schema of war– which creates a dichotomy between a masculine battlefront an... more A gendered conceptual schema of war– which creates a dichotomy between a masculine battlefront and a feminine home-front – undermines the credibility of women’s participation in battle, impacting on the legitimacy of the woman’s war novel. Through a study of Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982) this paper highlights the role of genre conventions in the production and reception of war novels written by African women. Emecheta’s makes daring choice to reconceptualise the home / battlefront dichotomy. By manipulating the representational genre convention of soldier-hero she subverts its archetypal masculinity. Debbie, the female soldier-hero, is the focal point of this analysis. Within the context of postcolonial African literature, women’s writing is portrayed as a process of ‘writing back’ to a canon that represents women as apolitical conduits of tradition. In Debbie, Emecheta foregoes canonical markers of African ‘authenticity’ to create a liminal figure that negotiates her identity between modernity and tradition; masculinity and femininity. The paper concludes that the principal reason for which the characterisation of Debbie is deemed dissatisfying is because it defies the facile categorisation offered by the adherence to the gendered representational conventions. Too often genre is considered a fixed category yet a meaningful analysis of Destination Biafra forces one to consider it as an open category whose conventions can be ‘bent’ to accommodate minority literatures spawning new sub-genres.

Editorials by Polo B Moji

Tydskrif vir Letterkunde , 2019

Editorial, Special Issue: "Ghostly border-crossings: Europe in African and Afrodiasporic narrativ... more Editorial, Special Issue: "Ghostly border-crossings: Europe in African and Afrodiasporic narratives".

Interviews by Polo B Moji

Agenda ,No 100/28.2 , 2014

Lauretta Ngcobo is a political figure whose engagement with the anti-apartheid struggle predates ... more Lauretta Ngcobo is a political figure whose engagement with the anti-apartheid struggle predates the birth of the Pan-African Congress, of which she is a founding member and her subsequent political exile in the early 1960s. Her literary works - Cross of Gold (1981), And They Didn’t Die (1990) – can be read as fictionalised histories of the anti-pass of the 1950s and 1960s and their aftermath. Ngcobo’s particular sensitivity to the socio-political and cultural forces shaping the life experiences of Black women and their writing in apartheid South Africa is illustrated by essays such as African Motherhood – Myth and Reality (1988) penned in exile. Her latest offering, Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile (2012), stems from a deep awareness of the silencing of women’s voices within the post-apartheid liberation narrative. My introduction to the short interview that I conducted with the author at the Miriam Tlali Book Club (Johannesburg, August 18 2010) shows that Ngcobo herself is not immune to the patriarchal representations that marginalise the voices of female anti-apartheid activists. I propose that studying the reception of her work requires an examination of domesticating labels such as ‘struggle wife’ alongside literary descriptors such ‘exile writer’, ‘struggle writer’ or ‘feminist writer’.

Book Reviews by Polo B Moji

Tydskrif vir Letterkunde , 2015

Book review