Behind the Seine and Other Scenery: African and European Male Intimacies in Western Cities

Building on the pioneering studies of Daniel Vignal (1983) and Chris Dunton (1989), this paper discusses three West African novels of the 1970s about African students’ homosexual experiences in European cities—Sierra Leonean Yulisa Amadu Maddy’s No Past, No Present, No Future (1973), Guinean Saïdou Bokoum’s Chaîne (1974), and Nigerian Dillebe Onyeama’s Nigger at Eton (1982). The premise in such novels is that the young African male is initiated back home by a European priest and later experiences what Maddy calls “the white scene” in European cities, which excludes the possibility of a “black scene” back home. These ambiguous texts are presented as a necessary prelude to the (still reluctant) acknowledgment of African homosexualities, with their ancestral foundations in relational nexuses that accommodate same-sex desire

Cheryl Stobie, Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels

Long considered a “third choice” or simply an “invisible” way of being sexual bisexuality has now moved beyond its common association with “having your cake and eating it, too” to become a sexuality that undoes sexual orientation as a category and, more generally, “undoes genre,” as Judith Butler would have it. While most analysis of bisexuality has been confined to sexology and literary and cultural studies in western contexts, Cheryl Stobie’s unprecedented study applies a bisexual epistemol..

The Logos-Eaters: The Igbo Ethno-Text

A decade and a half after Achebe revised Conrad\u27s jaundiced vision of men-eating Africans in his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958),1 sociolinguists were noting that the anthropophagi were not African but European and devoured not men but words. As the French Marxistinfluenced linguist, Louis-Jean Calvet, contends in his Linguistique et colonialisme (1974), \u27Le premier anthropophage est venu d\u27Europe. II a devore le colonise ... il a devore ses langues; glottophage donc.\u272 \u27Glottophagia\u27 thus refers to the fact that many African languages were \u27devoured\u27 by the colonizing powers and supplanted by the European languages which, Gerard reminds us, had themselves fallen prey to the Romans\u27 Latin linguistic imperialism.3 Modern colonial glottophagia was achieved, according to Calvet, by demoting African languages to the status of \u27patois\u27 or \u27dialects\u27 in a way analogous to the Victorians\u27 demotion, in the vocabulary, of African kings to chiefs and of nonMuslim priests to \u27witch-doctors\u27. Cal vet pushes the argument even further by suggesting that the turn-of-the-century practice of linguistics inexorably completed the process of glottophagia in the colonies under European rule: \u27La linguistique a ete jusqu\u27a l\u27aube de notre siecle une maniere de nier Ia langue des autres peuples, cette negation, avec d\u27autres, constituant le fondement ideologique de notre superiorite de !\u27Occident chretien sur les peuples exotiques que nous allions asservir joyeusement\u27 (Linguistique, p. 10). Linguistic imperialism is here presented as the most insidious and pervasive aspect of colonialism, for, more than economic or political imperialism, it depersonalizes the colonized to the extent of estranging him from his own language and his linguistic group

What Next Miranda?: Marina Warner\u27s Indigo

Each century seems to have its own interpellative dream-text: The Tempest for the 17th century; Robinson Crusoe for the 18th century; Jane Eyre for the 19th century; Heart of Darkness for the turn of this century. Such texts serve as pre-texts to others; they underwrite them. Yet, in its nearly four centuries of existence, The Tempest has washed ashore more alluvial debris than any other text: parodies, rewritings and adaptations of all kinds. Incessantly, we keep revisiting the stage of Shakespeare\u27s island and we continue to dredge up new meanings from its sea-bed

Mending the Schizo-Text: Pidgin in the Nigerian Novel

Post-colonial West African writers writing in English may have been too scripturally schizophrenic, too busy with the dichotomy mother tongue/ other tongue, to account fully for the presence of auxiliary contact languages in their writing. Yet it is in that space in-between, in the contact language itself, that writers like Kafka and Louis Wolfson2 have nestled to redefine writing in the mother tongue. I will here examine how Pidgin has insinuated itself into the very texture of Nigerian writing, at first under the decorative guise of an unobtrusive, \u27auxiliary\u27 language confined to dialogues and, subsequently, as the potential vehicle for multilingual and cross-cultural hybridized poetics

Spinning a Yarn with Marina Warner

We are here meeting within the context of \u27Antwerp 93\u27 in Belgium. From what I understand, this country is not alien to you

Against the Straightgeist: Queer Artists, “Shakespeare's England,” and“Today's London”

International audienceI aim to document the performance of gender not so much in Shakespeare’s Englandas in contemporary England in relation to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marlowe’sEdward II. I have chosen to focus on three moments of adaptations of the play bytwo British queer-identified authors, Derek Jarman and Philip Osment, and in twomedia—theatre and film. These liminal moments outline the semantic andideological shift from “camp” to “gay” on to “queer.”Cette étude envisage la manière dont les rôles sexués et le genre étaient vécus nonseulement dans l’Angleterre de la Renaissance mais également dans l’Angleterrecontemporaine, à travers le prisme des adaptations au théâtre et à l’écran de LaTempête de Shakespeare et d’Edward II de Marlowe. Sont dès lors éclairés troismoments-clés de ces adaptations par deux artistes queer, Derek Jarman et PhilipOsment, qui esquissent le glissement sémantique et idéologique du « camp » enpassant par la mouvance « gay » pour aboutir au « queer »

WRITING WOMEN'S RITES: EXCISION IN EXPERIENTIAL AFRICAN LITERATURE

International audienceSynopsis-This article examines "excision" (a.k.a. "female circumcision," Female Genital Mutilation [FGM] or, more recently, Female Genital Cutting [FGC]) in African Women's first-person accounts. While considering the shift from female third-person narratives to "experiential" texts, the article also outlines three steps-(1) in-passing; (2) auto(-)biography; and (3) suturing-in delineating the herstory of the representation of excision in postcolonial African literature, which in turn, contributes to the general shift in the literary text from rite to mutilation so that women's rites now clash with human rights

Post-Identité : futures politiques identitaires

International audienc