This dissertation draws on modern theories of the exotic in order to critique racialized, consumer-oriented representations of Arabs. Such representations often betray an exoticist and neo-colonial discursive pattern in which things Arab figure essentially as an index for a threateningly attractive otherness. Reading the texts of Leila Sebbar's Sherazade (1982), Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees (1996), Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (1996), and Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent (2003) and The Language of Baklava (2005), I argue that contemporary postcolonial fiction displays a patently self-conscious, self-parodic engagement with the constitutive paradoxes of the discourse of exoticism, especially when this discourse takes the Arab figure as its subject. I avail myself of "postexotic Arabness" as a tropological descriptor for such an engagement. Postexotic Arabness thus designates the creation of narrative dystopias that not only ironically recycle Orientalist configurations of things Arab but also implicate both authors and readers in an ultimately self-parodic re-assessment of the Arab exotic. The strategic exoticization of Arab otherness in these works, I argue, is also coterminous with a historically conscious critique of global consumer culture and unequal social relations of power.

This dissertation looks at representations of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and recovery in works by post-colonial women writers, specifically Bessie Head, Anita Desai, Le Ly Hayslip, and Medbh McGuckian. In examining the roles colonialism and patriarchy play among the forces which lead to mental breakdown, these postcolonial women writers depict a variety of manifestations of mental illness and a variety of traumatized characters. These authors identify the patriarchal equation of female sexuality with madness, and repressive and brutal attempts to control female sexuality as aspects of colonial and patriarchal worlds which are particularly devastating for women. At the same time racism, motherlessness, dispossession, disconnection from the feminine, and a hatred for hybridity are also identified as destabilizing conditions for both men and women. Judith Lewis Herman's Trauma and Recovery explicates in detail the similarities between the trauma experienced by men in combat and the trauma women experience in patriarchal societies. The symptoms of PTSD as described by Herman find striking parallels in the Frantz Fanon's work on colonized peoples. The mental breakdowns and neuroses depicted in post-colonial women's writing match these clinical descriptions and can frequently be traced back to the traumatic experiences of war, colonialism, and patriarchy. Chapter one focuses on Head's When Rain Clouds Gather and A Question of Power, and their prescriptions for healing. Chapter two focuses on Desai's Clear Light of Day and Baumgartner's Bombay, with particular emphasis on Partition. Chapter three focuses on Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War: Woman of Peace, and the interplay of Hayslip's Buddhist philosophy and her attempts to find safety and healing. Chapter four focuses on poems from several of McGuckian's works, but especially Captain Lavender and Shelmalier. I attempt to show connections not only among traumatic experiences in colonized countries, but also to other historical traumas, such as the Holocaust. I use concepts from Kalí Tal's Worlds of Hurt and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub's Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History to show these connections.

This dissertation is a two-fold project. The first half is a methodological examination of how memoirs can be used as instruments of historical understanding. The second half applies this methodology to the study of several memoirs written about life in the American south in the first half of the twentieth century. Memoir is a peculiar genre which straddles the disciplines of literature and history. Currently the field of autobiography studies is dominated by literary critics. However, there is nothing inherent about the genre dictating that this should be the case. This dissertation analyzes memoirs from a historical perspective. I argue that insights drawn from life writing have the potential to greatly enhance our historical understanding. I broach several topics including the problem of defining autobiography, the disciplinary proprietorship of the memoir, the relationship between history and theory, and the linkages between the historical study of memoirs and interdisciplinary conversations about historical memory. I describe the nature of historical reality, arguing that the individual thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and misperceptions of each historical agent are constitutive of the historical reality of a particular moment. Memoirs capture the entire universe as it appeared from one acknowledged perspective. Furthermore, skilled, creative writers are especially adept at capturing the complexity of a past moment. Authors of literary memoirs draw on the aesthetic power of literary language and on literary devices such as metaphor and irony to powerfully portray particular historical moments. I apply these ideas to an examination of memoirs about life in the segregated American south. I analyze memoirs written by African Americans, by whites, by men, by women, and by individuals with various political points of views. I find these accounts bear certain similarities to one another but are often strikingly at odds. Different ideas about the psychological impact of segregation, dissimilar characterizations of the black community, and contrary descriptions of the same moment and the same geographical space reveal that there is no singular Jim Crow experience. Historical reality is multifaceted, and the complexities of individual experiences are best captured in artfully constructed literary memoirs.

In this dissertation, Wor(l)ds in Progress, I intend to offer, as indicated in the subtitle, a study of contemporary migrant writings. In so doing, I assume a double role: that of literary student, in the first part; and that of translator, in the second. My assumption is that both translation and criticism are essential factors in assuring the continuity of literature. During the last decades, the world has rapidly changed. Mass movements of people characterize the contemporary world, and have become fundamental to its new order. The ways of representing, and narrating, the world have changed as well. Much migrant fiction has been written, and much has been written about it. In spite of individual differing positions, there is a general agreement that migrant literature considers, and urges readers to consider, people, places, histories, languages and poetics dynamically, in relation to each other, rather than as mutually exclusive absolutes. From a comparative perspective, I contribute to a conceptualization of migrant literature by analyzing what I consider some of its most representative works. In Part 1, "Words across Worlds" (Chapters 1-4), I examine three texts, each written by a migrant writer, respectively, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Caryl Phillips' A Distant Shore (2003) and Nuruddin Farah's Yesterday, Tomorrow (2000), concluding with an account of the recent birth of what might be called a "multicultural Italian literature". In Part 2, "Eccentric Visions of Italy" (Chapters 5-7), I propose the translation of three narratives---two from English into Italian, and one from Italian into English---by three of the authors whose works I examine in the first part---Farah, Phillips, and Ubax Cristina Ali Farah. Together, these texts offer an atypical, complex vision of Italy, challenging traditional ideas of a national, homogeneous, cultural identity. Although this dissertation cannot give a full account of the world's most recent migrant dynamics and their representational strategies, I intend nonetheless to focus on this evolving literary phenomenon through the study of a human experience common to men and women of every place and time: the impulse to tell stories.

Cette thèse tente de réfléchir sur l’écriture de Boubacar Boris Diop. Les romans de cet écrivain doivent une grande part de leur originalité à la présence obsédante des discours de la mémoire et de l’histoire. Son esthétique s’inscrit dans une revisitation permanente des récits de l'historiographie. Cette écriture convoque le passé et l'investit comme matériau dans cette exploration des formes du roman. Une telle démarche scripturale semble être la pierre angulaire de cette fiction aux confluences desquelles se rencontrent et s'intègrent systématiquement, aussi bien les genres romanesques hétérogènes de l'oralité (contes, épopées, mythes...), que des disciplines non romanesques. Cette stratégie de construction romanesque traduit, au-delà d'une simple exploration formelle et innovatrice des possibles du roman, une esthétique de distanciation et d'hétérogénéité qui traverse en filigrane l'œuvre de Boubacar Boris Diop. Cette forme d’écriture singularise son esthétique et constitue une rupture épistémologique dans le champ littéraire africain, qui a été souvent caractérisé par des récits linéaires classiques. L’usage de ces discours de l’histoire et de la mémoire, dans l’esthétique romanesque de Boubacar Boris Diop, s’articule d’abord dans une démarche de renouvellement des habitudes dans le champ littéraire africain, et ouvre aussi cette «phase autoréférentielle» (Sob, 2007 : 8) du roman en inscrivant son discours dans la modernité. Ensuite, cette pratique scripturale se construit sur l’élaboration d’un style romanesque particulier, se déployant dans une mise en scène et une parodisation permanentes du fonctionnement et des modalités de l’écriture. Sur fond d’une déconstruction perpétuelle des procédés de composition romanesque, se dessinent les contours d’une esthétique qui promeut et institue l’ambivalence généralisée comme le mode principal de son déploiement. Une telle pratique intertextuelle permet à l’écriture romanesque de se construire en confrontant les discours officiels de l’historiographie en général et l’histoire africaine contemporaine en particulier. En légitimant la déconstruction systématique comme dispositif de la composition romanesque, l’écriture se place dans une dynamique de «soupçon» qui sous-tend l’esthétique romanesque de Boubacar Boris Diop. La présente étude a le dessein de répertorier et d'analyser d'abord l'intégration des discours de l'histoire et de la mémoire, dans leurs manifestations et configurations dans l'œuvre de Diop, et ensuite, d'étudier leurs modalités d'insertion et d'utilisation dans l’élaboration de la fiction. Il s'agira, dans un cadre intertextuel, de voir comment ces discours sont investis et retravaillés par la fiction et, au-delà, d’essayer de repérer les motifs et les modalités discursives qui gouvernent leur usage. Une telle approche nous permettra d’appréhender les dimensions significatives de cette démarche scripturale et de voir éventuellement, s’il existe une poétique de la mémoire chez Boubacar Boris Diop. Les différentes théories sur la fiction, la mémoire et le discours historiographique nous serviront de charpente théorique qui sous-tendra notre thèse. / This thesis intends to reflect on the writing of Boubacar Boris Diop. The novels of this writer owe much of their originality to the haunting presence of the discourses of history, memory and narratives about the past. Revisiting the narratives of history and memory seems to be the cornerstone of this writing at the crossroads of which are systematically integrated different types of heterogeneous narrative genres of orality such as legends, epics, myths, non-fictional and non-novelistic disciplines such as historiographical discourse. This strategy of constructing fiction translates, beyond a formal and innovative exploration of the possibilities of the novel, an aesthetics of distance and heterogeneity which runs through Boubacar Boris Diop’s literary work. This literary posture is based on the deconstruction of the forms of traditional narrative which are replaced by a very polyphonic narrative enunciation. This literary approach distinguishes the aesthetical work of Boubacar Boris Diop and operates an epistemological rupture in the African literary field, characterized by traditional linear narratives. Moreover, the use of these discourses of history and memory falls, first and foremost, within the framework of a renewal of literary habits in the African literary field. It also opens this "self-referential phase" (Sob, 2007: 8) of the novel by relating its discourse and its content to modernity. Then, this scriptural approach is built on a particular novelistic style, unfolding in a staged and a permanent parodisation of the functioning and the modalities of fictional writing. Amid a constant deconstruction of the methods of the novel’s composition, is outlined a literary aesthetics which promotes ambivalence as the main mode of deployment which runs through the novel. This intertextual practice enables the fiction to construct itself by undoing the discourses of the past such as History and memory. In justifying the systematic deconstruction as a device for the fictional elaboration, Diop’s writing creates a dynamics of "suspicion" that underpins his writing. This study intends to identify and analyze, first and foremost, the integration of the notions of history and memory in the writing process of Diop. Then we will study their configurations and their methods of integration and use in the fiction. In an intertextual framework, we will see how these notions of memory and history are reinvested and reworked through the fiction, and then, we will try to identify the aesthetical and literary motives which govern their use. Such an approach will enable us to apprehend the relevant dimensions of this posture of writing and to see whether there is a poetics of memory through Boubacar Boris Diop’s writing. The different theories of fiction, memory and history will be the theoretical framework through which we will approach this work.

Cette thèse a pour objectif d’examiner l’œuvre romanesque du Togolais Sami Tchak (de son vrai nom Sadamba Tcha Koura). Parmi les écrivains africains francophones dits de la nouvelle génération, il se distingue par une esthétique qui s’inscrit essentiellement dans une dynamique transgressive et transculturelle. À travers un recours systématique au matériau de la sexualité, Sami Tchak construit une poétique, qui, au-delà de son audace transgressive, de son aspect délibérément choquant et provocateur, s’attache à interroger l’existence humaine, à mettre en évidence les misères et les faiblesses de l’Homme. En outre, cette poétique de la sexualité est porteuse de sens du social : elle sert de prétexte à l’auteur pour dépeindre l’existence de ceux qu’il appelle des « vies sans horizon », des « vies sans relief », mais aussi pour déconstruire la doxa. Mû par le désir de s’imposer comme une voix individuelle, de s’éloigner du dogme enfermant de l’africanité, Sami Tchak choisit de marquer son propre territoire littéraire par le biais d’une démarche transculturelle, en ancrant son œuvre dans la mémoire de la littérature. Cet ancrage se double d’une construction polysémique de l’espace. La présente étude s’appuie sur une triple approche, intertextuelle, sociocritique et transculturelle. Par exemple, elle montrera que, contrairement à une certaine critique qui le soupçonne de tourner le dos à l’Afrique, le projet romanesque de Sami Tchak procède d’une conscience à la fois africaine et universelle : même dans les romans qui se déroulent dans l’espace latino-américain, on remarquera que l’auteur possède l’art d’évoquer l’Afrique, surtout à travers des discours allusifs, implicites. / This thesis aims to examine the novels of the Togolese writer Sami Tchak (whose real name is Sadamba Tcha Koura). Among the so-called New Generation of francophone African writers, he is noted for his fiction that lies within a transgressive and transcultural dynamics. Through a systematic use of sexuality, Sami Tchak creates a poetics that, on the other side of his transgressive boldness and his deliberately shocking and provocative aspect, seeks to examine human existence, to highlight human misery and weaknesses. In addition, this poetics conveys social meaning: sexuality serves as a pretext for the author to depict the lives of those he calls “lives without horizon” or “lives without depth”, and also to deconstruct the doxa. Sami Tchak wants to be heard as an individual voice. He wants to distinguish himself by diverging from the dogma of “Africanity”. Thus, he marks his own literary territory through transcultural features: literary memory assumes a central place in his fiction, which is also characterized by a polysemic configuration of space. The theoretical framework used in this study concerns intertextuality, sociocriticism and transculturality. For instance, the thesis will show that contrary to the literary criticism which suspects him of turning his back on Africa, the fiction of Sami Tchak proceeds from an African and universal consciousness: even in the novels that take place in the Latin American countries, we notice that the author has a talent for talking about Africa, especially through allusive discourse.

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Cette thèse a pour objectif d’examiner l’œuvre romanesque du Togolais Sami Tchak (de son vrai nom Sadamba Tcha Koura). Parmi les écrivains africains francophones dits de la nouvelle génération, il se distingue par une esthétique qui s’inscrit essentiellement dans une dynamique transgressive et transculturelle. À travers un recours systématique au matériau de la sexualité, Sami Tchak construit une poétique, qui, au-delà de son audace transgressive, de son aspect délibérément choquant et provocateur, s’attache à interroger l’existence humaine, à mettre en évidence les misères et les faiblesses de l’Homme. En outre, cette poétique de la sexualité est porteuse de sens du social : elle sert de prétexte à l’auteur pour dépeindre l’existence de ceux qu’il appelle des « vies sans horizon », des « vies sans relief », mais aussi pour déconstruire la doxa. Mû par le désir de s’imposer comme une voix individuelle, de s’éloigner du dogme enfermant de l’africanité, Sami Tchak choisit de marquer son propre territoire littéraire par le biais d’une démarche transculturelle, en ancrant son œuvre dans la mémoire de la littérature. Cet ancrage se double d’une construction polysémique de l’espace. La présente étude s’appuie sur une triple approche, intertextuelle, sociocritique et transculturelle. Par exemple, elle montrera que, contrairement à une certaine critique qui le soupçonne de tourner le dos à l’Afrique, le projet romanesque de Sami Tchak procède d’une conscience à la fois africaine et universelle : même dans les romans qui se déroulent dans l’espace latino-américain, on remarquera que l’auteur possède l’art d’évoquer l’Afrique, surtout à travers des discours allusifs, implicites. / This thesis aims to examine the novels of the Togolese writer Sami Tchak (whose real name is Sadamba Tcha Koura). Among the so-called New Generation of francophone African writers, he is noted for his fiction that lies within a transgressive and transcultural dynamics. Through a systematic use of sexuality, Sami Tchak creates a poetics that, on the other side of his transgressive boldness and his deliberately shocking and provocative aspect, seeks to examine human existence, to highlight human misery and weaknesses. In addition, this poetics conveys social meaning: sexuality serves as a pretext for the author to depict the lives of those he calls “lives without horizon” or “lives without depth”, and also to deconstruct the doxa. Sami Tchak wants to be heard as an individual voice. He wants to distinguish himself by diverging from the dogma of “Africanity”. Thus, he marks his own literary territory through transcultural features: literary memory assumes a central place in his fiction, which is also characterized by a polysemic configuration of space. The theoretical framework used in this study concerns intertextuality, sociocriticism and transculturality. For instance, the thesis will show that contrary to the literary criticism which suspects him of turning his back on Africa, the fiction of Sami Tchak proceeds from an African and universal consciousness: even in the novels that take place in the Latin American countries, we notice that the author has a talent for talking about Africa, especially through allusive discourse.

Cette thèse tente de réfléchir sur l’écriture de Boubacar Boris Diop. Les romans de cet écrivain doivent une grande part de leur originalité à la présence obsédante des discours de la mémoire et de l’histoire. Son esthétique s’inscrit dans une revisitation permanente des récits de l'historiographie. Cette écriture convoque le passé et l'investit comme matériau dans cette exploration des formes du roman. Une telle démarche scripturale semble être la pierre angulaire de cette fiction aux confluences desquelles se rencontrent et s'intègrent systématiquement, aussi bien les genres romanesques hétérogènes de l'oralité (contes, épopées, mythes...), que des disciplines non romanesques. Cette stratégie de construction romanesque traduit, au-delà d'une simple exploration formelle et innovatrice des possibles du roman, une esthétique de distanciation et d'hétérogénéité qui traverse en filigrane l'œuvre de Boubacar Boris Diop. Cette forme d’écriture singularise son esthétique et constitue une rupture épistémologique dans le champ littéraire africain, qui a été souvent caractérisé par des récits linéaires classiques. L’usage de ces discours de l’histoire et de la mémoire, dans l’esthétique romanesque de Boubacar Boris Diop, s’articule d’abord dans une démarche de renouvellement des habitudes dans le champ littéraire africain, et ouvre aussi cette «phase autoréférentielle» (Sob, 2007 : 8) du roman en inscrivant son discours dans la modernité. Ensuite, cette pratique scripturale se construit sur l’élaboration d’un style romanesque particulier, se déployant dans une mise en scène et une parodisation permanentes du fonctionnement et des modalités de l’écriture. Sur fond d’une déconstruction perpétuelle des procédés de composition romanesque, se dessinent les contours d’une esthétique qui promeut et institue l’ambivalence généralisée comme le mode principal de son déploiement. Une telle pratique intertextuelle permet à l’écriture romanesque de se construire en confrontant les discours officiels de l’historiographie en général et l’histoire africaine contemporaine en particulier. En légitimant la déconstruction systématique comme dispositif de la composition romanesque, l’écriture se place dans une dynamique de «soupçon» qui sous-tend l’esthétique romanesque de Boubacar Boris Diop. La présente étude a le dessein de répertorier et d'analyser d'abord l'intégration des discours de l'histoire et de la mémoire, dans leurs manifestations et configurations dans l'œuvre de Diop, et ensuite, d'étudier leurs modalités d'insertion et d'utilisation dans l’élaboration de la fiction. Il s'agira, dans un cadre intertextuel, de voir comment ces discours sont investis et retravaillés par la fiction et, au-delà, d’essayer de repérer les motifs et les modalités discursives qui gouvernent leur usage. Une telle approche nous permettra d’appréhender les dimensions significatives de cette démarche scripturale et de voir éventuellement, s’il existe une poétique de la mémoire chez Boubacar Boris Diop. Les différentes théories sur la fiction, la mémoire et le discours historiographique nous serviront de charpente théorique qui sous-tendra notre thèse. / This thesis intends to reflect on the writing of Boubacar Boris Diop. The novels of this writer owe much of their originality to the haunting presence of the discourses of history, memory and narratives about the past. Revisiting the narratives of history and memory seems to be the cornerstone of this writing at the crossroads of which are systematically integrated different types of heterogeneous narrative genres of orality such as legends, epics, myths, non-fictional and non-novelistic disciplines such as historiographical discourse. This strategy of constructing fiction translates, beyond a formal and innovative exploration of the possibilities of the novel, an aesthetics of distance and heterogeneity which runs through Boubacar Boris Diop’s literary work. This literary posture is based on the deconstruction of the forms of traditional narrative which are replaced by a very polyphonic narrative enunciation. This literary approach distinguishes the aesthetical work of Boubacar Boris Diop and operates an epistemological rupture in the African literary field, characterized by traditional linear narratives. Moreover, the use of these discourses of history and memory falls, first and foremost, within the framework of a renewal of literary habits in the African literary field. It also opens this "self-referential phase" (Sob, 2007: 8) of the novel by relating its discourse and its content to modernity. Then, this scriptural approach is built on a particular novelistic style, unfolding in a staged and a permanent parodisation of the functioning and the modalities of fictional writing. Amid a constant deconstruction of the methods of the novel’s composition, is outlined a literary aesthetics which promotes ambivalence as the main mode of deployment which runs through the novel. This intertextual practice enables the fiction to construct itself by undoing the discourses of the past such as History and memory. In justifying the systematic deconstruction as a device for the fictional elaboration, Diop’s writing creates a dynamics of "suspicion" that underpins his writing. This study intends to identify and analyze, first and foremost, the integration of the notions of history and memory in the writing process of Diop. Then we will study their configurations and their methods of integration and use in the fiction. In an intertextual framework, we will see how these notions of memory and history are reinvested and reworked through the fiction, and then, we will try to identify the aesthetical and literary motives which govern their use. Such an approach will enable us to apprehend the relevant dimensions of this posture of writing and to see whether there is a poetics of memory through Boubacar Boris Diop’s writing. The different theories of fiction, memory and history will be the theoretical framework through which we will approach this work.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. List of figures shows incorrect page numbers. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 670-720).