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Examines the representation of Algerian and French authors in an anthology used as a textbook in the third year of the secondary cycle in Algeria's educational system. (AM)

Reviews events of 1978 in Francophone African journalism, literature, and film. (AM)

This article analyzes how contemporary queer African writing participates in decoloniality by queering (hetero)normative knowledge systems for social and epistemic transformation. In my reading of Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), I argue that Trans/Queer African literature participates in a very important epistemic project of counterfactualism by offering alternatives to perceived and systemically imposed African gender and sexual realities. The novel achieves this by deconstructing the hetero-naturalization of temporality to locate queer time and queer space within indigenous African modes of worldmaking. In their rendition of the Igbo myth of the Ogbanje spirit children in narrating the transgender life of their protagonist, Emezi not only ascertains the indigeneity of queerness to Africa, but goes further to demonstrate how some tropical epistemologies are already queer in their non-binary imagination of life and death, human and spirit, gender and sexuality. By representing otherworldliness and possibilities of being ‘out of order’—beyond the heteronormative framing of identity, space, and time—the novel debunks the pervasive notion of African queerness as recolonization and ascertains the flexibility of tropical knowledges against perceptions of their rigidity.

Copyright of Alternative Francophone is the property of Alternative Francophone and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Alternative Francophone is the property of Alternative Francophone and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Thélème is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The choice of language for literary creation is not a simple one, especially for African writers. Having grown up in a naturally multilingual environment and exposed to European languages, they often express themselves in the language of former colonizers. However, this is neither obvious nor should it remain a definitive choice for authors from various African countries. We will present different motivations, attitudes, and decisions of several writers; from the most radical, rejecting the European language, to others who hold onto it – either exclusively or accompanied by African languages.

Copyright of Literature / Literatura is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Alsun Beni-suef International Journal of Linguistics, Translation & Literature / Mağallaẗ Kulliyyaẗ Alsun Banī Swaīf Al-Dawliyyaẗ Li Luġawīyāt wa Al-Tarğamaẗ wa Al-Adab is the property of Beni Suef University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Estudios Románicos is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Anales de Filología Francesa is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Alternative Francophone is the property of Alternative Francophone and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Alternative Francophone is the property of Alternative Francophone and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Alternative Francophone is the property of Alternative Francophone and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Francosphères is the property of Liverpool University Press / Journals and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Contemporary works of African literature often engage in the depiction of a geographical and cultural dislocation inscribed in today’s pattern of global migration. NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) fits within this framework as a female coming-of-age novel that follows the story of Darling, from the character’s childhood in post-2000 Zimbabwe to the alienating experience of life as a migrant in the United States of America. The peculiarity of the novel lays in Bulawayo’s linguistic choices, in particular the use of irony and the practice of (re)naming, which come to represent the feelings of un-belonging and political disillusionment that define the characters’ geo-cultural displacement. Using the normative theory of literature (Cheah 2016) as a theoretical framework, this paper further analyses the use of such literary devices as tools through which the narrative opens up to alternative worlds of representation. In this sense, this paper argues that Bulawayo’s We Need New Names can be considered as a world-making narrative of cultural and linguistic resistance against the disruption of Zimbabwe’s socio-political situation.

Copyright of Thélème is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Présence Francophone is the property of College of Holy Cross, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The African literature of Portuguese language corresponds to a relatively recent production, if we take into account the post-independence history of these countries. However, they consist of a vast and rich production from the cultural, identity, aesthetic point of view and the way in which orality is imbricated in the writing. It is in this context that the work of the Angolan Ondjaki is situated, which explores, among so many themes and perspectives, the issue of childhood, the starting point of one of his best-known works, Os da Minha Rua (2007), composed of twenty-two narratives. Among them is the text “No galinheiro, no devagar do tempo”, object of study of this article, which aims to analyze how childhood is presented in this story. For this, we developed a bibliographical research, based, in particular, on the ideas of Bakhtin (2002), Jacoby (2010), Chombart de Lauwe (1991), Lajolo (1997), among others Keywords: Ondjaki; African Literature; Childhood.

Copyright of Alternative Francophone is the property of Alternative Francophone and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on violating the taboos of sex and religion, Faḍīla al-Fārūq's cause is the status and identity of women imprisoned in the domestic realm. Topics include how woman becomes a terrain with different discourses on social practices, beliefs, and religious discourses merge; and how women loses self-ownership and identity, before becoming a site of affirmation, self-emancipation and social norm in Maghrebi literature.

Building on recent research around digital cultural production in Africa (Ligaga, Adenekan, Nyabola), my paper seeks to engage with digital media and online spaces — blogs, social media — in relation to contemporary literary practices in Africa. Its aim is to examine issues surrounding the production and circulation of contemporary “digital-native” texts, as well as the networks, both virtual and material, that underlie them. It draws on a range of examples from contemporary anglophone Africa, from online magazines (Bakwa, Saraba, Jalada, Hekaya) and Facebook fiction to self-published popular novels by writers who use social networks and blogs to produce, advertise and circulate their work (like Nigerian writer Myne Whitman and South African novelist Dudu Busani-Dube).First, the paper examines the complex relationship contemporary digital productions bear to the materiality and literary value usually associated with print. It then seeks to question the widespread notion that digital spaces are unmoored to geography and unbound by the power structures of the print publishing sector. Lastly, by analyzing two recent initiatives from Kenya (Jalada and Hekaya), it focuses on the various scopes and geographies of these virtual literary networks and the ways in which they intersect with material and social networks, through events like festivals or writers’ workshops.

African literature has been very polemically, but usefully engaged, by feminists and other concerned gender stakeholders in the past three decades on the note that its foundational discursive platform of representation is patriarchal, largely representing the female body as ‘absent’ and ‘other’ in the imaginative landscape of canonical African(ist) expression. While these critical efforts have significantly succeeded in interrogating phallocentrism in African male writing, they have, however, failed to recognize several masculinist indicators in the latter that have purposively undermined the hegemonic/patriarchal frame of maleness. In this article I argue, through a reading of Isidore Okpewho’s first three novels, that certain representations of African male writing preceding those of the contemporary turn portray revisionist attitudes to patriarchy, or any form of hegemonic masculinity. In these, the African woman is made to gain visibility and she becomes active on her own social terms. I thus debunk popular feminist-oriented claims that the canonical African literary male tradition necessarily inscribes the African woman in the stereotypical narrative of being a ‘mother-nation/mother-Africa image’, ‘prostitute’, ‘witch’, or socio-cultural other. I suggest a more careful, distilled, and responsible approach toward the politics of agency and power involving gender and identity (re)formation in the African world, culture, and literature.

The article investigates the use of popular culture as a literary device in three post-apartheid South African novels: Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (2007), Niq Mhlongo’s After Tears (2007), and Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 (2006). It argues that, in these novels, we can see the emergence of what can be called kwaito aesthetics, a particular aesthetic trend and a set of tropes rooted in early post-1994 youth culture and formed in defiance of post-apartheid spatial politics. The authors are found to use Kasi-taal (also known as township slang) and kwaito music in their texts as a means of insisting upon spaces of liberation for multiple subjectivities for young black South African citizens at the level of race, gender, and culture. Drawing on Glissant’s theory of opacity, these spaces are then situated within a broader, profoundly ontological aesthetic framework, identifying them as part of a significant shift in early post-apartheid South African literature.

In this paper I use the concept of teacherliness to explore the connections between literature and education in Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place and his opinion pieces on education. I read Wainaina’s texts against the way the literature/literacy duality has been envisioned in historical discourses, arguing that deeper pedagogical questions were largely overlooked in the intersections between the two theoretical fields. To address this lacuna, I use Paulo Freire’s theory of Critical Pedagogy to analyze historical debates of curriculum and canonization, as well as Wainaina’s more recent engagement with the Kenyan educational system, in which questions on how to write are intertwined with thoughts on how to teach. After detailing this history of literature and literacy in East Africa, I explore the themes and aesthetic devices that Wainaina develops in One Day to reflect on his own role as an educator in the context of his troubled relationship with his own schooling. By focusing on the theme of failure and Wainaina’s embedding of oral structures into his text, I suggest Wainaina’s work offers insights and concrete narrative patterns that might become fruitful tools through which educational theory and literary analysis might illuminate each other’s blind spots, specifically in regard to oral skills in education.

In the Sub-Saharan francophone literature, promotion of the African traditional cultures is followed by its tragical disappearance which represents the main dynamic of the narrative. This fact is stressed by total absence of happiness of the main character who is always African. The main character during the plotline feels the paroxysm of positive emotions, caused usually by his future voyage to France, which is almost immediately substituted by the downfall into negativism. He accepted this sudden reversal with the external calm but in his interior he started to understand that this change affects his identity. At the end of the story, the main character pronounces an accusatory discourse against Europe. In this work we will study collective emotions in African milieu and the way the voyage to Europe influences the attitude of the main character to these shared feelings.

We aim to identify the thematic elements that shape the imagination of identity confusion. Indeed, besides inventing a new rhetoric to express the identity crisis, Taos Amrouche has discussed the same major themes of migrant literature, giving them a self-related dimension. We will investigate how the geographical exile of the Iakouren is coupled with the identity exile in which they are locked up due to the confrontation with various groups which instill in them the feeling of irreducible difference. This difference is particularly obvious in the mind of the narrator Marie-Corail, who, under the influence of two opposing cultures - the tribal Arab culture that strongly bonds with the ancestors, on the one hand, and the Western culture, on the other - will find herself at an impasse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diversité et Identité Culturelle en Europe (DICE) is the property of National Museum of Romanian Literature, Editura Muzeul National al Literaturii Romane and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Synergies Afrique des Grands Lacs is the property of GERFLINT (Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches pour le Francais Langue Internationale) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Présence Francophone is the property of College of Holy Cross, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Présence Francophone is the property of College of Holy Cross, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)