Gender-based violence in Monique Ilboudo's fiction

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Calixthe Beyala: black face(s) on French TV

As president and spokeswoman of the French black rights movement, Collectif Egalité, Cameroonian-born novelist Calixthe Beyala is committed to pushing for an improvement in the representation of black people on television in France. This article discusses the ways in which the Collectif has attempted to draw the French public's attention to the lack of 'visible minorities' on French TV. It takes as a test case the controversial figure of Beyala herself who has become something of a minor TV celebrity in her own right. What emerges as an apparent contradiction between Beyala's own media representation and the Collectif's campaign will serve to illustrate the ambivalent positioning of black citizens in contemporary France

Visions of civil war and genocide in fiction from Rwanda

On October 1, 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Army invaded Rwanda from Uganda, thereby launching a civil war that was to last until the end of the 1994 genocide. While a number of fictional responses to the one-hundred-day genocide have appeared since 1994, very little fiction has been written in response to the civil war itself. This article discusses two little known novels written by Rwandan authors who engage specifically with the civil war: Aimable Twagilimana's 1996 novel, Manifold Annihilation, and Anicet Karege's Sous le déluge rwandais, published in 2005. While both authors have very different relationships with the events of 1994, they paint a similar picture of Rwanda in the early 1990s, which they both experienced firsthand. Through their fictional representations of Rwanda on the eve of genocide, they challenge the ill-informed, mythologized versions of the history of Rwanda that were so widespread in 1994 and continue to this day.PostprintPeer reviewe

Seeing the Genocide against the Tutsi through someone else's eyes : prosthetic memory and Hotel Rwanda

Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’ suggests that memories are not ‘owned’, that is they do not depend on lived experience, but rather they can occur as a result of an individual’s engagement with a mediated representation (e.g. a film, a museum, a TV series, a novel). One of the best-known mass cultural responses to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda is Terry George’s 2004 feature film, Hotel Rwanda. While the film was a huge commercial success, Rwandan survivor testimonies paint a very different picture of what happened in the real ‘Hotel Rwanda’ (the Hôtel des Mille Collines in the Rwandan capital of Kigali). This article discusses the different versions of the ‘Hotel Rwanda’ story through the lens of prosthetic memory and considers the usefulness of Landsberg’s theory for analysing memory narratives from or about Rwanda. While Landsberg promotes prosthetic memories as ‘in the best cases’ capable of generating empathy and political alliances, I show that, when mass-mediated representations create revisionist false ‘memories’, this can have harmful consequences for survivors of trauma. After focusing on the ethical implications of what Landsberg describes as ‘seeing through someone else’s eyes’, I conclude that prosthetic memory is a concept that should be treated with caution.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The unspoken self: Feminism and cultural identity in African women's writing in French

This thesis presents an analysis of a range of texts by black women from francophone Africa. Proceeding from a structuralist base, it examines the way in which the cultural identity of the African woman is located in these texts, and seeks to identify the specific nature of her cultural experience. Since feminism is recognised as the strongest theoretical expression of the specificity of gender-based oppression in the West, the thesis discusses the representation of feminism in African women's discourse, both spoken (the interviews) and written (the novels themselves). What eventually emerges is a complex relationship between the African woman and feminism which, as the thesis demonstrates, is symptomatic of the structural duality of African femininity. The body of the thesis considers the way in which the African woman's identity is expressed at different levels in the novels. Duality emerges in a lexical analysis, as well as at the fictional levels of imagery and character presentation, and ultimately at the level of the discourse itself in the shape of a central axis of modernism/tradition which it attempts to reconcile. Interviews with African women offer another view of the fictional 'mise-en-scene' of this unvoiced identity, and provide both context and commentary for the novels themselves. A bibliography of African women's writing in French also forms part of the corpus in that it demonstrates a multiplicity of voices which are rarely, if ever heard. The conclusion suggests that, although unspoken and unheard, the voice of the African woman's cultural identity is implicitly expressed through content and through form, and that the repression of the self in discourse is symptomatic of the control of feminine identity by contemporary black African society. The identity which does emerge is characterised by its diversity, thereby resisting the reduction of femininity to a single patriarchal construct. Moreover, the emphasis on plurality makes a positive link with the diversity of voices in Western feminism, and suggests an optimistic and theoretically useful model for women writers, not just in Africa but throughout the world

Do self-referent metacognition and residential context predict depressive symptoms across late-life span? A developmental study in an Italian sample

There is controversial evidence concerning the variables favoring depression in community-dwelling elderly individuals. This study mainly investigates the impact of lifestyle, residential environment, cognitive efficiency and social desirability in predicting self-assessed depressive signs in late adult span

Role of the mesoamygdaloid dopamine projection in emotional learning

Amygdala dopamine is crucially involved in the acquisition of Pavlovian associations, as measured via conditioned approach to the location of the unconditioned stimulus (US). However, learning begins before skeletomotor output, so this study assessed whether amygdala dopamine is also involved in earlier 'emotional' learning. A variant of the conditioned reinforcement (CR) procedure was validated where training was restricted to curtail the development of selective conditioned approach to the US location, and effects of amygdala dopamine manipulations before training or later CR testing assessed. Experiment 1a presented a light paired (CS+ group) or unpaired (CS- group) with a US. There were 1, 2 or 10 sessions, 4 trials per session. Then, the US was removed, and two novel levers presented. One lever (CR+) presented the light, and lever pressing was recorded. Experiment 1b also included a tone stimulus. Experiment 2 applied intra-amygdala R(+) 7-OH-DPAT (10 nmol/1.0 A mu l/side) before two training sessions (Experiment 2a) or a CR session (Experiment 2b). For Experiments 1a and 1b, the CS+ group preferred the CR+ lever across all sessions. Conditioned alcove approach during 1 or 2 training sessions or associated CR tests was low and nonspecific. In Experiment 2a, R(+) 7-OH-DPAT before training greatly diminished lever pressing during a subsequent CR test, preferentially on the CR+ lever. For Experiment 2b, R(+) 7-OH-DPAT infusions before the CR test also reduced lever pressing. Manipulations of amygdala dopamine impact the earliest stage of learning in which emotional reactions may be most prevalent

‘More than just a genocide country’ : recuperating Rwanda in the writings of Scholastique Mukasonga

How can we write fiction about 21st-century Rwanda? This article analyses the writing trajectory of the most successful Rwandan writer, Scholastique Mukasonga. Through close analysis of her published works, it traces a literary passage from mourning to recuperation. It also examines the interaction between Mukasonga’s most recent fictional texts (a second novel and a second collection of short stories) and the series of digitized artefacts presented on her website. Combining a postcolonial framework with insights from clinical and political psychology, the article shows how Mukasonga’s most recent writing encourages us to think about Rwanda differently, and suggests a new way of reading literary responses to the 1994 genocide.PostprintPeer reviewe

Mental health in late adulthood: What can preserve it?

The current research investigates the part played by several socio-demographic factors, lifestyle and cognitive efficiency in predicting self-rated depressive signs in late adulthood. One hundred and ninety-one healthy adults were recruited in Northern Italy and Sardinia—an Italian island located in the Mediterranean sea known for the longevity of its elderly people—from urban and rural areas. Participants were assigned to old (60–74 years) and very old (75–99 years) groups, and were administered cognitive efficiency and self-referent depression measures. Gender and region of residence were the best predictors of self-rated depression scores. Furthermore, Sardinian participants, especially those from rural areas, showed better preserved mental health than respondents from Northern Italy. Positive aging is more evident in Sardinia, especially in rural areas, where the maintenance of an adequate social status and physical activity help guarantee a positive level of mental health in later life

The (un)believable truth about Rwanda

Since the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, a proliferation of fictional and non-fictional narratives has appeared, many of them claiming to represent the truth about what really happened in 1994. These include a small but significant number of Rwandan-authored novels which, this article suggests, invite the reader to accept what I call a “documentary pact”. While there is no single version of the truth about what happened in Rwanda, one of the common features of fictional responses to the genocide is an emphasis on truth claims. Drawing on examples of both fictional and non-fictional responses to the genocide, this essay discusses the implications of Rwandan authors’ insistence on the veracity of narratives that are sometimes difficult to believe. Emphasizing the importance for Rwandan writers, particularly survivors, of eliciting empathy from their readers, this essay will show that the documentary pact is an effective means of appealing to our shared human experience.PostprintPeer reviewe