Pub Date : 2019-03-05DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823284634.003.0005
Tobias Warner
In the 1950s, linguistic research became privileged terrain for articulating political and aesthetic visions in soon-to-be independent Senegal. The poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s eventual first president, made the study of African languages into a source of political and artistic legitimation even as he consecrated French as the language of culture. This chapter traces Senghor’s research on African languages and explores his intellectual rivalry with Cheikh Anta Diop, the progenitor of modern Wolof writing. After independence, polemics over how to write Wolof culminated in the censorship of Ousmane Sembène’s film Ceddo, which was banned for its use of a double letter “d” in its title (a spelling convention that Senghor had made illegal). This chapter explores how debates over writing systems came to figure the stakes of decolonization—who was authorized to speak for the past and who would shape the terms in which the future would be imagined.
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Pub Date : 2019-03-05DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823284634.003.0009
Tobias Warner
This epilogue restages the book’s central arguments on the language question, translation, and literary comparison through a reading of Aimé Césaire’s 1966 play Une saison au Congo[A Season in the Congo] and its recent Wolof translation by Boubacar Boris Diop. The focus is on the nature of a separation between audience and address in Césaire’s play and on how this nature changes across the work’s different versions and circumstances. Through this reading, the epilogue models what a comparative method attuned to the variability of literature might resemble.This in turn sets the stage for a conclusion that reflects on the challenge decolonization continues to pose to world literature.
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Pub Date : 2019-03-05DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823284634.003.0003
Tobias Warner
Colonial classrooms in French West Africa introduced literary studies to negotiate the perils of teaching colonized students to express themselves in their “own words.” Elite colonial schools became hotbeds of what can be called para-literary modes of authorship: students were obliged to draw on literary models, but could not appear to be writing literature. The central example is an archive of some eight hundred auto-ethnographies produced by elite West African students at the William Ponty School from 1933 to 1950. In order to graduate, students wrote ethnographies of their communities over their summer vacation. While students were urged to avoid “false literary descriptions,” in practice they were encouraged to mine literary techniques to produce accounts of their break with tradition and socialization as modern subjects. This chapter explores the impact of para-literary writing on literary production in French and vernacular languages and reflects on the terms in which literary history is imaginable.
{"title":"Para-literary Authorship: Colonial Education and the Uses of Literature","authors":"Tobias Warner","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823284634.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823284634.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Colonial classrooms in French West Africa introduced literary studies to negotiate the perils of teaching colonized students to express themselves in their “own words.” Elite colonial schools became hotbeds of what can be called para-literary modes of authorship: students were obliged to draw on literary models, but could not appear to be writing literature. The central example is an archive of some eight hundred auto-ethnographies produced by elite West African students at the William Ponty School from 1933 to 1950. In order to graduate, students wrote ethnographies of their communities over their summer vacation. While students were urged to avoid “false literary descriptions,” in practice they were encouraged to mine literary techniques to produce accounts of their break with tradition and socialization as modern subjects. This chapter explores the impact of para-literary writing on literary production in French and vernacular languages and reflects on the terms in which literary history is imaginable.","PeriodicalId":384798,"journal":{"name":"The Tongue-Tied Imagination","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116785940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-05DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823284634.003.0006
Tobias Warner
Modern Wolof literature and film emerged in the 1960s, when artists set out to break with French and yet ended up being obliged to make francophone versions of their works anyway. This chapter explores how the first Wolof film and novel, Ousmane Sembène’s 1968 Mandabiand Cheikh Aliou Ndao’s 1967 Buur Tilleen,make creative use of this paradoxical situation. As a condition of his funding, Sembène had to shoot two versions of Mandabisimultaneously, with his actors performing first in Wolof and then in French. Ndao had to translate his Wolof novel into French after failing to find a publisher. Working between the multiple versions of these artworks that now exist (including the unreleased, French version of Mandabi), this chapter explores how Sembène and Ndao develop a multilingual strategy that can be called counterpoetics, which refashions the obligation to work in two languages into a productive aesthetic constraint.
{"title":"Counterpoetics: Translation as Aesthetic Constraint in Sembène’s Mandabi and Ndao’s Buur Tilleen","authors":"Tobias Warner","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823284634.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823284634.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Modern Wolof literature and film emerged in the 1960s, when artists set out to break with French and yet ended up being obliged to make francophone versions of their works anyway. This chapter explores how the first Wolof film and novel, Ousmane Sembène’s 1968 Mandabiand Cheikh Aliou Ndao’s 1967 Buur Tilleen,make creative use of this paradoxical situation. As a condition of his funding, Sembène had to shoot two versions of Mandabisimultaneously, with his actors performing first in Wolof and then in French. Ndao had to translate his Wolof novel into French after failing to find a publisher. Working between the multiple versions of these artworks that now exist (including the unreleased, French version of Mandabi), this chapter explores how Sembène and Ndao develop a multilingual strategy that can be called counterpoetics, which refashions the obligation to work in two languages into a productive aesthetic constraint.","PeriodicalId":384798,"journal":{"name":"The Tongue-Tied Imagination","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132577791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature:","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvb938br.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvb938br.10","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":384798,"journal":{"name":"The Tongue-Tied Imagination","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115430807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-05DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823284634.003.0008
Tobias Warner
Beginning in the 1980s, Senegal became one of the first countries to accept structural adjustment loans from the IMF, resulting in a period of intense deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state. The effects of structural adjustment were felt across the cultural field. As the state ceased trying to dictate the terms of culture, the horizon of political action for Wolof language literature and literacy activism shifted as well. This chapter examines how the oppositional stance of vernacular language advocates has been remade since the heyday of state-centered cultural policy. Since 1980 it has become difficult to sustain the nation-language-people unity that has often served as a regulative ideal for vernacularizations since Herder. Focusing on the work of the novelist Boubacar Boris Diop, this chapter analyzes how vernacular writers take stock of their age of austerity by developing strategies that satirize, query, and critique the uncertainties of literary address.
{"title":"Aesthetics After Austerity: Boubacar Boris Diop and the Work of Literature in Neoliberal Senegal","authors":"Tobias Warner","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823284634.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823284634.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Beginning in the 1980s, Senegal became one of the first countries to accept structural adjustment loans from the IMF, resulting in a period of intense deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state. The effects of structural adjustment were felt across the cultural field. As the state ceased trying to dictate the terms of culture, the horizon of political action for Wolof language literature and literacy activism shifted as well. This chapter examines how the oppositional stance of vernacular language advocates has been remade since the heyday of state-centered cultural policy. Since 1980 it has become difficult to sustain the nation-language-people unity that has often served as a regulative ideal for vernacularizations since Herder. Focusing on the work of the novelist Boubacar Boris Diop, this chapter analyzes how vernacular writers take stock of their age of austerity by developing strategies that satirize, query, and critique the uncertainties of literary address.","PeriodicalId":384798,"journal":{"name":"The Tongue-Tied Imagination","volume":"124 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133615918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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