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Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of autobiography, Edgard Sankara considers a cross-section of postcolonial francophone writing from Africa and the Caribbean in order to examine and compare for the first time their transnational reception. Sankara not only compares the ways in which a wide selection of autobiographies were received locally (as well as in France) but also juxtaposes reception by the colonized and the colonizer to show how different meanings were assigned to the works after publication. Sankara's geographical and cultural coverage of Africa and its diaspora is rich, with separate chapters devoted to the autobiographies of Hampâté Bâ, Valentin Mudimbé, Kesso Barry, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Maryse Condé. The author combines close reading, reception study, and postcolonial theory to present an insightful survey of the literary connections among these autobiographers as well as a useful point of departure for further exploration of the genre itself, of the role of reception studies in postcolonial criticism, and of the stance that postcolonial francophone writers choose to take regarding their communities of origin. Modern Language Initiative

An innovative look at the dynamic role of sound in the culture of the African Diaspora as found in poetry, film, travel narratives, and popular music. Black Soundscapes White Stages explores the role of sound in understanding the African Diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, from the City of Light to the islands of the French Antilles. From the writings of European travelers in the seventeenth century to short-wave radio transmissions in the early twentieth century, Edwin C. Hill Jr. uses music, folk song, film, and poetry to listen for the tragic cri nègre. Building a conceptualization of black Atlantic sound inspired by Frantz Fanon's pioneering work on colonial speech and desire, Hill contends that sound constitutes a terrain of contestation, both violent and pleasurable, where colonial and anti-colonial ideas about race and gender are critically imagined, inscribed, explored, and resisted. In the process, this book explores the dreams and realizations of black diasporic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, and it poses questions about their legacies for us today. In the process, thee dreams and realities of Black Atlantic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, such as the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas—a founder of the Négritude movement—and Josephine Baker's performance in the 1935 film Princesse Tam Tam. As the first in Johns Hopkins's new series on the African Diaspora, this book offers new insight into the legacies of these exceptional artists and their global influence.

This collection of essays explores concepts present in literatures in French that, since the 2007 manifesto, more and more critics, suspicious of the term Francophonie, now prefer to designate as littérature-monde (world literature). The book shows how the three movements of antillanité, créolité and littérature-monde each in their own way break with the past and distance themselves from the hexagonal centre. The critics in this collection show how writers seek to represent an authentic view.

This book analyses the theme of community in seven French Caribbean novels in relation to the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. The islands’ complex history means that community is a central and problematic issue in their literature, and underlies a range of other questions such as political agency, individual and collective subjectivity, attitudes towards the past and the future, and even literary form itself. Britton examines Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, Edouard Glissant’s Le Quatrième Siècle, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Vincent Placoly’s L’eau-de-mort guildive, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit and Maryse Condé’s Desirada.

This book centers on visual and literary productions of Francophone Caribbean women. It investigates their aesthetics of violence, pain, the abhorrent, and the \"uglification\" of the feminine to unravel what makes them transgressive and uncommodifiable. It probes the ways in which these works destroy the regimentation of the \"ideal\" body.

If the imaginary Indian, from the moment of the nations founding, served as a flexible figure through which to work out questions of \"American\" identity, Indianness came to serve in the early twentieth century as a category through which Americans could also define what it meant to be modern. American modernism had nativist and nationalist inflections; American moderns demonstrated their commitment to a national artistic culture through their \"Indianness,\" which was cast as fundamentally opposed to Jewishness. This discussion seeks to address Jewish American literary response to this nativist modernism through a discussion of Nathanael West, whose ambivalent relationship with both Jewishness and aesthetic modernism continues to preoccupy and vex his critics. This essay reads West's preoccupations with Indians, Jews, and the marketplace through the unfixable Jewishness dramatized in his 1934 novel A Cool Million, whose modernist parody of racial and ethnic typologies succeeds in thoroughly undermining them.

Little could be further from the rage of an angry French philosophe or the moral gravitas of a British parliamentarian with a view to the judgment of history than the comic narcissism of Shakespeare’s Falstaff. In his efforts to woo two mistresses at once—a cheater to them both—he loses both. And yet, unlike Falstaff, many European countries did indeed trade at once, and very effectively, with two Indies, east and west. The early modern imagination of these regions would develop in color and specificity a great deal before the figures discussed in this book wrote their treatises regarding

Jim actually began doing research forThe Heartsong of Charging Elkin the fall of 1972, though he didn’t know it then. As he first set foot on French soil, he got his first taste of culture shock, European style. He didn’t know the language, couldn’t read the menus, the signs. Couldn’t talk, couldn’t understand what people said to him. He didn’t know the customs, the gestures even. We drove south through Italy, then into Greece, where we were going to spend the winter; the alphabet turned unrecognizable; even gestures changed meaning. Turns out Jim was practicing for Charging Elk