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In her focus on irony and meaning in postcolonial African fiction, Gloria Nne Onyeoziri refers to an internal subversion of the discourse of the wise and the powerful, a practice that has played multiple roles in the circulation of knowledge, authority, and opinion within African communities; in the interpretation of colonial and postcolonial experience; and in the ongoing resistance to tyrannies in African societies. But irony is always reversible and may be used to question the oppressed as well as the oppressor, shaking all presumptions of wisdom. Although the author cites numerous African writers, she selects six works by Chinua Achebe, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Calixthe Beyala for her primary analysis. Modern Language Initiative

This book is a seminal study that significantly expands the interdisciplinary discourse on African literature and cinema by exploring Africa's under-visited carnivalesque poetics of laughter. Focusing on modern African literature as well as contemporary African cinema, particularly the direct-to-video Nigerian film industry known as Nollywood, the book examines the often-neglected aesthetics of the African comic imagination. In modern African literature, which sometimes creatively traces a path back to African folklore, and in Nollywood - with its aesthetic relationship to Onitsha Market Literature - the pertinent styles range from comic simplicitas to comic magnitude with the facilitation of language, characterization, and plot by a poetics of laughter or lightness as an important aspect of style. The poetics at work is substantially carnivalesque, a comic preference or tendency that is attributable, in different contexts, to a purposeful comic sensibility or an unstructured but ingrained or virtual comic mode. In the best instances of this comic vision, the characteristic laughter or lightness can facilitate a revaluation or reappreciation of the world, either because of the aesthetic structure of signification or the consequent chain of signification. This referentiality or progressive signification is an important aspect of the poetics of laughter as the African comic imagination variously reflects, across genres, both the festival character of comedy and its pedagogical value. This book marks an important contribution to African literature, postcolonial literature, world literature, comic imagination, poetics, critical theory, and African cinema.

The Star, the Cross, and the Crescent analyzes fiction, films, comics, autobiographical narratives, and essays by Francophone Arab writers whose Christian (Accad, Antaki, Chédid, Maalouf), Jewish (Albou, Cixous, El Maleh, Memmi), Muslim (Bachi, Benaïssa, Benguigui, Ben Jelloun, Boudjedra, Boudjellal, Meddeb, Mimouni), and secular (Sebbar) backgrounds are emblematic of the diversity of the Francophone Arab world. It examines how these writers represent the intertwining of religion and politics against the backdrop of the current international political context and the resurgence of religion. Focusing on a series of disputes commonly framed in religious terms (with Islam as the common denominator for all: the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Lebanese and the Algerian civil wars, the affair of the Muslim headscarf in France, and 9/11), this book questions the effectiveness of the Francophone studies model in providing insights into the complexity of the Islamic Revival. The study concludes by unpacking the influence of politics on the translation of these works in the U.S. It brings heightened awareness to the modalities according to which a creative work can serve as a cultural mediator.

Considers the changing role of literary translation in Egypt from the 1910s to the 1940sIn this novel and pioneering study Maya I. Kesrouany explores the move from Qur'anic to secular approaches to literature in early 20th-century Egyptian literary translations, asking what we can learn from that period and the promise that translation held for the Egyptian writers of fiction at that time. Through their early adaptations, these writers crafted a prophetic, secular vocation for the narrator that gave access to a world of linguistic creation and interpretation unavailable to the common reader or the religious cleric. This book looks at the writers' claim to secular prophecy as it manifests itself in the adapted narrative voice of their translations to suggest an original sense of literary resistance to colonial oppression and occupation in the early Arabic novel.

By looking at engagée literature from the recent past, when the francophone African writer was implicitly seen as imparted with a mission, to the present, when such authors usually aspire to be acknowledged primarily for their work as writers,Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitmentaddresses the currrent processes of canonization in contemporary francophone African literature. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier argue that aesthetic as well as political issues are now at the forefront of debates about the African literary canon, as writers and critics increasingly acknowledge the ideology of form. Working across genres but focusing on the novel, the authors take up the question of renewed forms of commitment in this literature. Their selected writers range from Mongo Beti, Ousmane Sembène, and Aminata Sow Fall to Boubacar Boris Diop, Véronique Tadjo, Alain Mabanckou, and Léonora Miano, among others.

Bringing together in English translation eleven Francophone African plays dating from 1970 to 2021, this essential collection includes satirical portraits of colonizers and their collaborators (Bernard Dadié's Béatrice du Congo; Sony Labou Tansi's I, Undersigned, Cardiac Case; Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou's We're Just Playing) alongside contemporary works questioning diasporic identity and cultural connections (Koffi Kwahulé's SAMO: A Tribute to Basquiat and Penda Diouf's Tracks, Trails, and Traces…). The anthology memorializes the Rwandan genocide (Yolande Mukagasana's testimony from Rwanda 94), questions the status of women in entrenched patriarchy (Werewere Liking's Singuè Mura: Given That a Woman…), and follows the life of Elizabeth Nietzsche, who perverted her brother's thought to colonize Paraguay (José Pliya's The Sister of Zarathustra). Gustave Akakpo's The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood and Kossi Éfoui's The Conference of the Dogs offer parables about what makes life livable, while Kangni Alem's The Landing shows the dangers of believing in a better life, through migration, outside of Africa.

Suellen Diaconoff situates French-language texts from Moroccan women writers in a discourse of social justice and reform, arguing that they contribute to the emerging national debate on democracy and help to create new public spaces of discourse and participation.

In Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms, Anna-Leena Toivanen combines mobilities research, postcolonial literary studies, and theories of cosmopolitanism to explore the representations and often complex intertwinements of different mobility practices and cosmopolitanisms in contemporary Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts.

01 02 This illuminating study of European women's narratives in colonial Algeria and Kenya argues that nostalgia was not a post-colonial phenomenon but was embedded in the colonial period. Patricia M. E. Lorcin explores the distinction between imperial nostalgia, associated with the loss of power that results from the loss of empire, and colonial nostalgia, associated with loss of socio-cultural standing—in other words, loss of a certain way of life. This distinction helps to make women's discursive role an important factor in the creation of colonial nostalgia, due to their significant contribution to the establishment of a European colonial environment. 13 02 Patricia M. E. Lorcin is an associate professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (1995), editor of Algeria and France 1800-2000: Identity, Memory, and Nostalgia (2006), and co-editor of several collections of essays including France and its Spaces of War: Experience, Memory, Image (2009). 02 02 Comparative study of the writings and strategies of European women in two colonies, French Algeria and British Kenya, during the twentieth century. Its central theme is women's discursive contribution to the construction of colonial nostalgia. 04 02 PART I: 1900-1930. COLONIAL WOMEN AND THEIR IMAGINED SELVES  Women and their Colonial Worlds  Nostalgia Personified: Isabelle Eberhardt and Karen Blixen  PART II: 1920-1940. POLITICAL REALITIES AND FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS  Reality Expressed; Reality Imagined: Colonial Women in Twenties Algeria and Kenya  Writing and Living the Exotic [The Twenties]  Women's Fictions of Colonial Realism [The Thirties] PART III: IMPERIAL DECLINE AND THE REFORMULATION OF NOSTALGIA  Nationalist Anger; Colonial Illusions: Women's responses to Decolonization Happy Families, Red Strangers and 'A Vanishing Africa': Nostalgia Comes Full Circle 31 02 Comparative study of the writings and strategies of European women in two colonies, French Algeria and British Kenya, during the twentieth century 19 02 1) COMPARATIVE APPROACH: There are few comparative studies in the literature on this subject, while there is a plethora of work on women writers within a single colony. 2) ANALYTICALLY RICH: Lorcin avoids reductive explanations, examines the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, colonialism, and modernity. 3) NUANCED PORTRAIT: Lorcin provides a complex, not unsympathetic look at these writers, without ignoring the underlying racism or trauma of colonialism.

Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic is unique both in its focus on literary fiction as a formal and sociological category and in the range of examples it brings to bear on the question of Paris as an imaginary capital of diasporic consciousness.