Translating African thought and literature : postcolonial glottopolitics

The articles of this special issue on “Translating African Thought and Literature” are exploring the long-term linguistic consequences of colonialism and appraising the sometime violent legacies thereof

Georges Balandier’s Africa : postcolonial translations and ambiguous reprises

This article focuses on Georges Balandier’s autobiographical essay Afrique ambiguë (1957). Its translation into English, Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision (1966), provides the basis for an examination of the concept of translation in its linguistic but also, and above all, transcultural dimensions. As a text, Ambiguous Africa does not quite render the subtlety of the French original but beyond its translational shortcomings, Balandier’s book is also shown to conduct an in-depth analysis of late colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. This era is characterized by a high degree of cultural anxiety on part of the colonizers and the colonized. Echoing other anti-colonial thinkers of the period – Balandier was a regular contributor to Présence Africaine – he records the environmental, artistic, psychological, and linguistic devastation generated by the colonial process in this part of the world. Balandier’s assessment is pessimistic but he identifies, however, the ability of some unassimilated African intellectuals and members of messianic movements such as Matswanism and Kimbanguism to challenge the hegemonic status of the colonial Ur-Text. This emancipative move relies on vernacular intellectual and cultural resources and is driven by an attempt to re-write and translate biblical stories anew. It is argued here that this process of indigenous re-appropriation, however ambiguous it might have been assessed by Balandier, is postcolonial for it bears witness to a partial de-canonization of the colonial source text

Statues Also Die

“African thinking,” “African thought,” and “African philosophy.” These phrases are often used indiscriminately to refer to intellectual activities in and/or about Africa. This large field, which sits at the crossroads between analytic philosophy, continental thought, political philosophy and even linguistics is apparently limitless in its ability to submit the object “Africa” to a multiplicity of disciplinary approaches. This absence of limits has far-reaching historical origins. Indeed it needs to be understood as a legacy of the period leading to African independence and to the context in which African philosophy emerged not so much as a discipline as a point of departure to think colonial strictures and the constraints of colonial modes of thinking. That the first (self-appointed) exponents of African philosophy were Westerners speaks volumes. Placide Tempels but also some of his predecessors such as Paul Radin (Primitive Man as Philosopher, 1927) and Vernon Brelsford (Primitive Philosophy, 1935) were the first scholars to envisage this extension of philosophy into the realm of the African “primitive.” The material explored in this article – Statues Also Die (Marker, Resnais, and Cloquet), Bantu Philosophy (Tempels), The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa (Cheikh Anta Diop), and It For Others (Duncan Campbell) - resonates with this initial gesture but also with the ambition on part of African philosophers such as VY Mudimbe to challenge the limits of a discipline shaped by late colonialism and then subsequently recaptured by ethnophilosophers. Statues Also Die is thus used here as a text to appraise the limitations of African philosophy at an early stage.  The term “stage,” however, is purely arbitrary and the work of African philosophers has since the 1950s often been absorbed by an effort to retrieve African philosophizing practices before, or away from, the colonial matrix. This activity has gained momentum and has been characterized by an ambition to excavate and identify figures and traditions that had hitherto remained unacknowledged: from Ptah-hotep in ancient Egypt (Obenga 1973, 1990) and North-African Church fathers such as Saint Augustine, Tertullian and Arnobius of Sicca (Mudimbe and Nkashama 1977), to “falsafa”-practising Islamic thinkers (Diagne 2008; Jeppie and Diagne 2008), from the Ethiopian tradition of Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat (Sumner 1976), to Anton-Wilhelm Arno, the Germany-trained but Ghana-born Enlightenment philosopher (Hountondji [1983] 1996).

Seeing, hearing, breathing, and witnessing from the Africana Center at Cornell : an afterword

Anniversaries are useful for they help us return to a specific moment, such as the creation of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University in 1969. The temporal framing offered by anniversaries is often a pretext to take stock of a particular sequence of events; anniversaries are subterfuges to remember, commemorate, and pay tribute but also disinter cumbersome corpses. Anniversaries test our vigilance and ability to submit these corpses to renewed autopsies. The term “Africana” reflects the worlding of Africa and the re- and translocation of its objects, subjects, and discourses within a diasporic network of relations (Hallen 2009, 8n2). From African to Africana studies, one can therefore identify a definitional and heuristic shift: like their postcolonial and decolonial counterparts, Africana scholars are engaged in the dismantling of (neo)colonial cartographies and in the creation of what Pheng Cheah calls “a world”— that is, a creative and discursive entity and realm of possibilities that are not reducible to the “epistemic violence” of “canonical literature” and the other “processes” shaping “how colonized subjects see themselves” and continue to see themselves “after decolonization” (2016, 19). Africana studies are concerned with Africa but also with the many cultural entanglements generated by African displacements and reterritorializations before and, above all, after the middle passage. Africana studies, then, provide the basis for analyzing African pasts and presents in Africa and beyond and anticipating future possibilities

Modernity and the Belgian Congo

This article will explore the intellectual context in which French-Belgian colonial writing developed from the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1930s. This period is marked by a gradual shift from evolutionism to cultural relativism. The analysis will first focus on the Tervuren colonial exhibition of 1897 and the progressive emergence of Belgian africanism in the early twentieth century. Secondly, it will account for the ways in which this overall context bore witness to new and somewhat less Eurocentric conditions of possibility. Subsequently, the article will attempt to draw parallels between these more inclusive and seemingly less orientalising anthropological paradigms and the advent, first in France and then in Belgium, of a rejuvenated brand of colonial literature (or indigenous realism) which, for all its openness and eagerness to embrace modernity, did not result in radical rejections of colonialism on the part of its promoters. Finally, two Belgian novels in French – M. L. Delhaise-Arnould’s Amedra (1926) and H. Drum’s Luéji (1932) – will be analysed to appraise whether or not their authors’ objective to reconstitute Congolese indigeneity is a strategy to oppose Belgian modernity against Congolese supposed pre-modernity

Digging holes, excavating the present, mining the future : extractivism, time, and memory in Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s and Sammy Baloji’s works

This article explores the links between creative imagination and extraction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This question has an undeniable memorial dimension, for extraction, as a crucial point of entry into Congolese historical consciousness, allows for a multi-perspectivist examination of the way in which the memory of the past has been archived, experienced, and (mis)interpreted. As a key term to understand Congo’s geopolitical position since colonial times, extraction offers a rich array of tropes and ideas to assess culture from the DRC and the Congolese diaspora. First, I reflect on the notions of extraction and extractivism; secondly, I analyse how they form the basis of Sammy Baloji's multi-media work in Mémoire (2006) and Mémoire/Kolwezi (2014); then, I turn to La Danse du vilain (2020) and Tram 83 (2014) by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, first to assess how extraction is employed in these novels, then to conduct a reflection on ‘necropolitics’, and reveal little-known aspects of diamond digging during the Mobutu era. I will also show that Baloji’s and Mujila’s creative trajectories have been enriched by dialogues with Filip De Boeck, the Belgian social anthropologist and specialist of the DRC

Sous l'empire du royaume: poét(h)ique de la fiction coloniale issue du Congo belge (1945-60)

This thesis intends to explore colonial fictions written in French and set in the former Belgian Congo between 1945 and 1960. The investigation will focus on George Duncan (1898-1967), Henri Cornélus (1913-1983), Marcel Tinel (1904-?) and Joseph Esser (1901-?). The thesis - throughout - will endeavour to focus on both ethics and poetics. In order to achieve this overarching (double) objective it will attempt to address the following questions: (1) how are colonised subjects and colonisers represented by this fictional material? (2) how do colonial novelists account for and/or sympathise with the emergence of a Congolese opposition after the Second World War? (3) what are the implicit and explicit strategies deployed by the corpus to support or question the discourse(s) on which Belgian colonialism was premised? (4) what is colonial imagination? Did it decolonise itself - and if so how? - with the demise of the Belgian empire in 1960? In its poet(h)ical investigation this thesis will rely (a) on a range of representatives of postcolonial thinking such as Sartre, Fanon, Mouralis, Glissant and Mudimbe, (b) as well as a number of literary critics whose work is of relevance for my study. Chapter I will contextualise the thesis from both a critical and an historical standpoint and fall into four distinct parts. Part i will provide a historical overview of the Congo under Belgian rule. Part ii will concentrate on Belgian colonial discourse with a particular emphasis on its main ideologue, Pierre Ryckmans (1891-1959). Part iii will deal with the two colonial art and literary critics Gaston-Denys Périer (1879-1963) and Joseph-Marie Jadot (1886-1967) and their attempt to (a) promote colonial writing and (b) create synergies between 'white' and 'black' literatures at a time (1945-60) which coincided with the emergence of the first Congolese writers in French under the auspices of the journal La Voix du Congolais. Part iv will focus on the reassessment of Belgian colonial literature by contemporary critics. Chapters II to V will be author-based. In each case a central text will be read with / against a number of other primary sources. Chapter II will deal with Duncan's five colonial novels and their recurring main protagonist with a particular emphasis on Blancs et Noirs (1949). Chapter III will read Cornélus' novel Kufa (1954) against his collection of short stories Bakonji. Les Chefs, (1955). Whereas Duncan's and Cornélus' fictions primarily concentrate on white male subjects for whom Central Africa is a mere theatrical backdrop meant to be metaphorically mirroring the decline of Western civilisation, Tinel and Esser give their preferences to Congolese protagonists and engage more deeply with local cultures. Chapter IV will attempt to interpret Tinel's novel Le Monde de Nzakomba (1959) in the light of (a) Tinet's journalistic pieces on the colonial situation and (b) with regard to 'négritude', one of the underlying themes of the novel. In Chapter V the reading will focus on Esser's novel Matuli, fille d'Afrique (1960). As for Tinel, the interpretation will also rely on Esser's non fictional writing, the bulk of which is dealing with bantou culture. The conclusion of the thesis will propose a paradigmatic categorisation of the Belgian colonial corpus during the given period

Sous l'empire du royaume: poét(h)ique de la fiction coloniale issue du Congo belge (1945-60)

This thesis intends to explore colonial fictions written in French and set in the former Belgian Congo between 1945 and 1960. The investigation will focus on George Duncan (1898-1967), Henri Cornélus (1913-1983), Marcel Tinel (1904-?) and Joseph Esser (1901-?). The thesis - throughout - will endeavour to focus on both ethics and poetics. In order to achieve this overarching (double) objective it will attempt to address the following questions: (1) how are colonised subjects and colonisers represented by this fictional material? (2) how do colonial novelists account for and/or sympathise with the emergence of a Congolese opposition after the Second World War? (3) what are the implicit and explicit strategies deployed by the corpus to support or question the discourse(s) on which Belgian colonialism was premised? (4) what is colonial imagination? Did it decolonise itself - and if so how? - with the demise of the Belgian empire in 1960? In its poet(h)ical investigation this thesis will rely (a) on a range of representatives of postcolonial thinking such as Sartre, Fanon, Mouralis, Glissant and Mudimbe, (b) as well as a number of literary critics whose work is of relevance for my study. Chapter I will contextualise the thesis from both a critical and an historical standpoint and fall into four distinct parts. Part i will provide a historical overview of the Congo under Belgian rule. Part ii will concentrate on Belgian colonial discourse with a particular emphasis on its main ideologue, Pierre Ryckmans (1891-1959). Part iii will deal with the two colonial art and literary critics Gaston-Denys Périer (1879-1963) and Joseph-Marie Jadot (1886-1967) and their attempt to (a) promote colonial writing and (b) create synergies between 'white' and 'black' literatures at a time (1945-60) which coincided with the emergence of the first Congolese writers in French under the auspices of the journal La Voix du Congolais. Part iv will focus on the reassessment of Belgian colonial literature by contemporary critics. Chapters II to V will be author-based. In each case a central text will be read with / against a number of other primary sources. Chapter II will deal with Duncan's five colonial novels and their recurring main protagonist with a particular emphasis on Blancs et Noirs (1949). Chapter III will read Cornélus' novel Kufa (1954) against his collection of short stories Bakonji. Les Chefs, (1955). Whereas Duncan's and Cornélus' fictions primarily concentrate on white male subjects for whom Central Africa is a mere theatrical backdrop meant to be metaphorically mirroring the decline of Western civilisation, Tinel and Esser give their preferences to Congolese protagonists and engage more deeply with local cultures. Chapter IV will attempt to interpret Tinel's novel Le Monde de Nzakomba (1959) in the light of (a) Tinet's journalistic pieces on the colonial situation and (b) with regard to 'négritude', one of the underlying themes of the novel. In Chapter V the reading will focus on Esser's novel Matuli, fille d'Afrique (1960). As for Tinel, the interpretation will also rely on Esser's non fictional writing, the bulk of which is dealing with bantou culture. The conclusion of the thesis will propose a paradigmatic categorisation of the Belgian colonial corpus during the given period

Contes de Nadal i malsons

Abstract not availabl