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<p>Saidou, Amina. Bachelor of Arts, Universite Abdou Moumouni de Niamey, Spring 2006; Master of Arts, Universite Abdou Moumouni de Niamey, Winter 2009; Bachelor of Arts (English/TESOL), Wilson College, Spring 2011; Master of Arts, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Spring 2013; Doctor of Philosophy, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Spring 2018 Major: Francophone Studies Title of Dissertation: Allegorie initiatique et engagement feminin a travers la litterature et le cinema francophones de l?Afrique subsaharienne et du Maghreb Dissertation Director: Dr. Amadou Ouedraogo Pages in Dissertation: 382; Words in Abstract: 380 ABSTRACT African women?s struggle for freedom can be thought of as an initiatory journey, an allegorical quest. Their long-lasting fight for emancipation happens to be about challenging and subverting traditional, patriarchal, and religious institutions. This research that focuses on female main characters analyzes the process of their emancipation as a journey. Through this study, we aim at deconstructing western feminist ideology and its stereotyping of African women. In doing so, we contribute to an understanding of African women identity(ies). Women in West and North Africa, just like westerners, often face misogyny and discrimination. Socio-cultural beliefs, religious, political, and historical standpoints are proven to be factors that contribute to undermining women?s self-fulfillment. Also, they are factors set to create discrepancies between African and Western feminisms as well as between African types of feminisms. Therefore, these factors should be taken into consideration when conceptualizing and analyzing African women. Although this can be true for most African women, authors construe and characterize their female characters as heroines. They discharge themselves of ?masculine domination.? This work first examines the representation of African women social status and interaction in francophone literary and cinematographic works. Next, based on critics like Pierre Bourdieu?s concepts of habitus and symbolic violence, the second chapter analyzes African women?s social behavior in reaction to oppression. Though violence is experienced through habitus, women who escape can free themselves through an undertaken journey. In this way, the third chapter examines women?s use of different strategies to resist oppression. Consequently, women need to overcome various challenges that they encounter. Overall, we ground our research on theories such as post-colonialism, deconstruction, feminisms, negofeminism, and the concept of ?everyday resistance? or cultural resistance. Also, we examine the authors? standpoints and purposes through their representation of heroines. African women are no more where/who they used to be. Nevertheless, because of deep-rooted and obsolete African cultural beliefs, they still have to fight hard for a more advanced emancipation. Unperceived violence can be more damaging for women who face challenges. Key fundamental aspects are the persistence in raising awareness and revisiting African traditions, values, and practices; encouraging women?s political and religious education; and fostering their economic enterprises for financial self-reliance. Most importantly, women?s self-awareness with regard to their ?reproduction of symbolic violence? is the key factor for this battle ground.

<p>This study investigates what continuities and divergences exist among selected Black autobiographies. The selected autobiographies of slaves, creative writers, and political activists are discussed both as texts produced by individuals who are in turn products of specific societies at specific periods and as interconnected books. The project pays particular attention to the various societies that produce the autobiographies directly to identify influences of environmental and cultural differences on the texts. To foreground the network these autobiographies form, on the other hand, the study adopts a cross-cultural approach to examine the continuities and divergences in them. The texts analysed are selected from Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean. Chapter one discusses some previous studies in Black autobiographies, the comparative model for studying Black autobiographies, the choice of the term autobiography, what constitutes Black autobiographies, and the self-in-service-of-community pattern of Black autobiographies. Chapter two theorizes Blackness as one of the continuities in the texts studied and foregrounds its transformative capabilities. Since various Black societies have experienced one form of colonialism or another and are in one post-colonial stage or another, chapter three discusses the relevance of post-colonial theory to a transnational study of Black autobiographies. Chapter four discusses oral African autobiographies as parts of institutionalised autobiographical traditions in African societies and the ways in which features of orality influence the written forms of the genre. Chapter five situates slave autobiographies as counter-narratives to the colonial encounter in William Shakespeare's <i>The Tempest</i>. Along with chapter five, chapters six and seven examine the continuities in Black autobiographies in terms of Blackness, resistance, the importance of naming, community, and rewriting history in the face of racist accounts of the past, and divergences in relation to concepts of Africa, religion, gender, and language. The concluding chapter summarises the continuities and divergences earlier discussed and suggests possible future directions in the study of Black autobiographies.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 493-507). Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation investigates the artistic and linguistic strategies employed by the Kenyan literary magazine Kwani? during a period of intense social and political upheaval. Between the peaceful end of Daniel Arap Moi's dictatorship in 2002 and the violence that followed the contested Presidential elections of 2007, writers for the magazine used a language called sheng&mdasha youth-affiliated urban slang comprised of a complex, rapidly shifting blend of Kiswahili, English, and other local languages&mdashto negotiate between the global hunger for English and their country's complex cultural, political, and linguistic demands. The dissertation builds on a growing body of scholarship in literary criticism, linguistics, and cultural studies to document sheng's emergence as a literary idiom within Kenya, as well as the way it evolved as it traveled beyond the country's borders via inclusion in primarily English-language texts such as Uwem Akpan's short story collection Say You're One of Them.

Thesis (Doctoral)--Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle Paris III. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [1237]-1260).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Dept. of Philosophy, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Doctoral)--Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle Paris III. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [1237]-1260).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2002. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 493-507).