AFRC591 - WAR, FICTION AND THE POSTCOLONIAL

SPRING 2016: This seminar will introduce key authors and issues in Francophone studies through texts that specifically focus on various experiences of war in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Significantly, the first piece of fiction by an African author may well be Bakary Diallo's Force Bonte, (1926), the autobiographical story of a WWI Senegalese Tirailleur, physically deformed by his war experience and trying to through his writing. While Force Bont¿ is unique as an early piece, similar narratives have not ceased to proliferate in French and Francophone fiction. Indeed, writers from all over the former French Empire have repeatedly offered fictional accounts of colonial subjects' involvement in European wars, and especially WWII, with various degrees of ambivalence. As conflicts and genocides continue, the experience of war fukes a new wave of Francophone accounts at the turn of the twenty-first century. We will use an extensive diachronically and synchronically developed reading (and viewing ) list of texts and films from Senegal, Congo, Rwanda, Guinea, Algeria, Martinique, Mauritius, and (Metropolitan) France from the 1920s to 2014.


Using this material as the basis for our exploration we will address several questions: What are some of the important tropes deployed in these narratives and how do they relate to broader issues concerning colonial and postcolonial violence? How do the wars of others (e.g. WWI and WWII) complicate the experience of war and questions of engagement and solidarity? How do such experiences lay the groundwork for other wars, of liberation, for example? Finally how does war impact the articulation of memory, survival and writing in colonial contexts, in the postcolony, and in the European Metropole? Primary texts in French. Class discussion in French or English.