This dissertation examines the use of mortuary tropes for the articulation of identities in seven Francophone Black narratives: Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée, Jean-Claude Fignolé's Les possédés de la pleine lune and Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove—for the Car…
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This dissertation, titled “La représentation de 1'identité mandingue dans le roman africain francophone subsaharien,” examines the historical, socio-cultural, political and linguistic representations of Mandingo identity in three novels; namely, L'Étrange destin de Wangrin by Am…
In this dissertation project I look at the politics of memory and mourning as read through the trope of the archive. In doing this, I use the navette or shuttle as a form of transit and as a reading methodology in order to travel on and between texts. The navette is also a weavi…
This dissertation analyzes literary and filmic representations of marriage in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. Marriage is an important topos and serves as a crucial narrative device because it provides a space to address issues of identity on several levels: personal, reli…
This dissertation explores embodiment in space through the narration of war, focusing on war novels written in French by authors from sub-Saharan Africa during the period from 1974 to 2001. This spatial approach comes from my finding that the majority of the texts focused on sit…
My dissertation, "A l'école du français: Politiques coloniales de la langue 1830-1944," confronts current debates surrounding multilingualism, the language of instruction, and the rewriting of history in former colonial sites. Applying historical, educational and socio-linguisti…
The Music of Voice examines the influence of music on twentieth-century literary theory and fiction. Bringing contemporary novels into dialogue with Said's notion of counterpoint, Bakhtin’s metaphorical polyphony, and other critical theories, this dissertation reevaluates author…
In this thesis, I propose to study the life and oeuvre of Leïla Sebbar who remains a little-known and studied writer. This marginalization seems to have resulted from the difficulty in properly positioning the author within a clearly defined literary field. She was born in Alger…
Following the publication of his first novel in 1968. Ahmadou Kourouma was ranked among African's most prestigious authors. The prominence of his works on school and university syllabi, the array of literary awards to his credit, as well as the countless scholarly papers inspire…
This thesis examines the role of the French language in contemporary Algerian literature. Traditionally, scholars have seen the use of French in Algeria as a residual artifact of French rule, or as an attempt to appropriate the language and subvert the colonial power. Neither of…
This dissertation is predominantly an analysis of urban (and suburban or peripheral) representations in four francophone postcolonial fictional narratives: Xala (1973) by Ousmane Sembène, Texaco (1992) by Patrick Chamoiseau, Les honneurs perdus (1996) by Calixthe Beyala, and La …
My dissertation explores rewritings of orientalism in contemporary Algerian Francophone literature. Examining nineteenth-century French and contemporary Algerian texts, I argue that Assia Djebar and Kateb Yacine's respective references to Eugène Fromentin and Gustave Flaubert ar…
This study examines nationalism and the figure of the nomad in the works of three Francophone writers from Djibouti: William J. F. Syad, Daher Ahmed Farah, and Abdourahman A. Waberi. Through close readings, this study examines the ways in which each writer refers to the mythical…
This is an examination of the thematic and formal elements of Ken Bugul's first six books (1982-2005). Fyfe contextualizes this Senegalese female author's works as a literary response to alienation in the post-colonial time period. Drawing on the performance and Wolofophone elem…
Normality as it relates to the human body and its abilities remains unexamined in Francophone literature. Many critics maintain that normality's Western parent fields, disability studies and freak culture, are culturally inadequate for such an endeavor. Curiously, Francophone no…
In this dissertation, entitled Mediterranean Imaginaries: Writing Transcultural Subjectivities in Contemporary Francophone Literature, I investigate literary inventions of the space of the Mediterranean within the overlapping traditions of twentieth and twenty-first century Fren…
The focus on the different types of exiles results from the historical, religious, social, cultural, and political events that cause the departure of the North Africans from their country. The division into four sections emphasizes the specific aspects of the issues the exiles e…
Since the mid-1980s, Francophone authors from both the Eastern and Western worlds have displayed a renewed interest in Scheherazade, the legendary storyteller of Les Mille et Une Nuits. This rediscovery of Scheherazade, particularly in the postcolonial context, serves as a vehic…
In this dissertation, I propose a new understanding of the relationship between the inhabitants of the metropole and the colonies, by showing how a number of major Twentieth-Century French and Francophone authors depict technology as a mediator, both productive and destructive, …