Thesis advisor: Régine Jean-Charles / Taking Fatna Ait Sabbah’s two editions of La Femme dans l'inconscient musulman (1982 & 2010) as my point of departure, I analyze the image of the woman in several contemporary French and Arabic texts. Sabbah argues that buried in early Muslim pornographic texts lies an image of woman that reflects the unconscious view of her in the masculine imagination. In this image woman is positioned in opposition to the Muslim ethical system largely due to her subversive sexual desire. Sabbah’s texts raise key questions: Where a transformation of the feminine condition takes place, is it accompanied by a corresponding change in the image of the woman in the Muslim unconscious? How does the collective unconscious change? Is the unconscious always a reactionary force? Does contemporary literature reinforce Sabbah’s conception or depart from it? The novelists I have selected combine two pertinent attributes: they critique their own society and they examine female subjectivity, or in other words how a woman perceives her role, her identity and her consciousness. Through an analysis of heterodox texts, I focus particularly on how the Arab world sees itself. My first chapter compares Sabbah’s two editions, including her shift in tone and agenda, and the lacunae in her texts. In my second chapter I study Moroccan novelist Rajae Benchemsi’s Marrakech, lumière d'exil (2002) and Nawal el Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero (1975) in terms of how the erotic and space function in both texts. I explore the women characters’ compliance with or resistance to Maghrebian notions of feminine and masculine space. I argue that the individual choices regarding space help define the characters’ identity. In my third chapter I examine the Sufi view of woman as included in Rajae Benchemsi’s La Controverse des temps (2006) and Ahmed Toufiq’s Abu Musa's Women Neighbors (2006). I point out that the Sufi view presents a counter-discourse to Sabbah’s description of the image of the woman in the Muslim unconscious. If Fatna Sabbah sees woman in early erotic and orthodox texts as reduced to an exclusively sexual essence, these texts present a spiritual dimension to woman’s identity, a dimension which in the context of Sabbah’s work, I argue, has a transgressive aspect. In my fourth chapter I analyze the mother figure in two novels by the Algerian writer, Boualem Sansal: Harraga (2005) and Rue Darwin (2011). I describe the distance between the representation of the mother in Sansal’s work and the image of the woman in the Muslim unconscious as described by Sabbah. I conclude that while the image of the woman as described by Sabbah continues to be present in contemporary texts, other images, remarkable for their diversity, have emerged. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literatures.

A presente dissertação tem o objetivo de analisar nos romances O outro pé da sereia (COUTO, 2006) e Yaka (PEPETELA, 2006) a representação da situação colonial e os resultados da dicotomia colonizador e colonizado nas sociedades moçambicana e angolana, ficcionalizadas por Mia Couto e Pepetela nessas obras. Objetiva-se, ainda, verificar a forma como os romances mergulham no passado colonial de seus países de origem para problematizar questões acerca das sociedades citadas, avaliando as perspectivas que figuram no tempo presente. Estabeleceu-se, então, uma leitura a partir de um processo histórico comum, a colonização portuguesa, para explicitar as contradições resultantes desse período. Para tanto, nos apoiamos no diálogo entre literatura e história, presente nos romances estudados, para identificar e destacar as contradições coloniais, sobretudo em relação às representações da violência e do racismo nas duas obras. / This study aims to analyze the representation of the colonial situation and which are the results of the dichotomy colonizer and colonized in Mozambican and Angolan societies through the novels O outro pé da sereia (COUTO, 2006) and Yaka (PEPETELA, 2006). In addition, it aims to examine how the novels rely on colonial past of its countries to discuss issues about the societies mentioned, evaluating the prospects contained in the present. It was established an analysis of the novels from an historical process in common, which is the Lusitanian colonization, to explain the contradictions resulting from this situation. For that, we rely on a dialogue between literature and history, present in the reading of O outro pé da sereia and Yaka, to identify and highlight the colonial contradictions, especially the ones related to the representations of violence and racism in both novels.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study explores how selected West African war novels employ non-realist narrative modes to portray disruptions in the child’s development into adulthood. The novels considered are Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2007), Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is Not Obliged (2006), Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005) and Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen and Me (2005). These novels strain at the conventions of realism as a consequence of the attempt to represent the disruptions in child development as a result of the upheavals of war. A core proposition of the study is to present why the authors in question are obliged to employ non-realist modes in representing disrupted childhoods that reflect the social and cultural disorder attendant upon war. The dissertation also asks pertinent questions regarding the ideological effect of these narrative strategies and the effect of the particular stylistic idiosyncrasies of each of the authors in figuring childhood in postcolonial Africa. The novels in question employ surrealism, the absurd, the grotesque and magical realism, in presenting the first person narratives of children in war situations, or the reflections of adult narrators on children affected by war. This study further analyses the ways the aesthetic modes employed by these authors underscore, in particular, children’s experiences of war. Through strategic use of specific literary techniques, these authors highlight questions of vulnerability, powerlessness and violence on children, as a group that has been victimised and co-opted into violence. The study further considers how these narrative transformations in the representations of children in novels, capture transformations in ideas about childhood in postcolonial Africa.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This project investigates the emergence of near-future fiction in the post-colonial African novel. Analyzing The Rape of Shavi (1983) by Buchi Emecheta, Osiris Rising (1995) by Ayi Kwei Armah, Wizard of the Crow (2006) by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters (2006) by B. Kojo Laing, I gauge the impact of African science fiction (sf) on issues of historicity, economics, statism and localized identities and how these have adapted or are adapting to an increasingly globalized and technophilic world. Identifying sf's roots in the European travelogue, I attend to the way each author codes technology in the text and the manners in which technophilic spaces exacerbate or ease the frequent tension between modernity and tradition in African literature. By reading these works against novels by, among others, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Robert Heinlein, and Chinua Achebe, I conclude that recent developments in the African sf novel offer a compelling critique on the genre's colonial heritage and have progressively indigenized sf by wedding it to local traditions of orature and myth. While Black African sf production has been historically overlooked in literary studies, it is important to revisit early moves in the direction of African near-future fiction in order to contextualize the rising interest in the genre on the part of African authors.

Although scholarship on human rights has burgeoned within literary studies in recent years, that scholarship primarily engages literature as an outlet for trauma and witnessing, rather than restoration and recovery. "The Art of Reconciliation in Rwanda" instead reflects upon the recuperative capacities of art to fuel State-led reconciliation programs. Concentrating on Rwandan literature, theater, film, and memorial sites following the 1994 genocide, I theorize the many literatures of reconciliation in terms of three distinct genres: transfiguration, trial, and memorialization. Existing debates about reconciliation within Rwanda have furthermore been dominated by social science and ethnographic research that wrongly reduce reconciliation to ethnic identity, thereby presuming that survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators only possess conflicting views over the national project to unify. But as the artworks I discuss differently indicate, Rwandan reconciliation has exceeded such formulaic categories to manifest in overlapping genres and vectors of identification that transcend ethnic divides. In my dissertation, genre thus offers a route to both creating and perceiving the “commonality within difference” so crucial to successful reconciliation politics.

À l’instar des romans africains et maghrébins qui s’inscrivent pour la plupart dans une perspective de confrontation avec le colonialisme, les textes que nous avons choisis peuvent se lire dans la perspective novatrice que Bertrand Westphal a significativement baptisée “géocritique”. Ces œuvres reflètent une esthétique qui puise sa particularité et sa richesse dans des origines hybrides, entre langue maternelle, d’éducation et langue de l’occupant ou de l’exil. Cette thèse est donc l’occasion de parcourir l’espace africain, créant ainsi un panorama de son horizon littéraire, notamment par l’étude des particularités de l’Afrique du nord et de l’Afrique subsaharienne ainsi que les rapports qu’elles entretiennent depuis la plus haute antiquité jusqu’à aujourd’hui. / Like most of African and Maghreb novels which are mostly enrolled with the confrontation of colonialism, the texts we have choosen can be read the original perspective that Bertrand Westphal has significantly named "geocritics". These works share an aesthetics of a richness which owes its originality to hybrid origins, between mother or learned tongue and occupant or exile language. This thesis is therefore an opportunity to explore the African space, shaping a panorama of its literary horizon, mainly by studying the particularities of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa and the relationships that they maintain from the highest Antiquity until today.

Thesis (M. A.(African Languages)) -- University of Limpopo, 2012 / It introduces the topic of the study, outlining the aims and purpose of the study. It touches on the significance of the study, methodology and literature review. It also contains definitions of the key concepts used in the study. Chapter two focuses on the obituary of the authors of Mibya ya Nyekanyeka and Byi n’wi khele matluka and characterization through Rimmon -Kennan’s methods. Chapter three focuses on the way in which the Vatsonga writers percive the character of pastors as depicted in Mibya ya Nyekanyeka and Byi n’wi khele matluka. Chapter four deals with the theme of each of the following books, namely: Mibya ya Nyekanyeka and Byi n’wi khele matluka. Chapter five. This chapter contains the summary, recommendations and conclusion of the study.

Thesis (M.A. (English Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2015 / This dissertation discusses the significance of the concept of mourning in post-apartheid South Africa as presented in the following selected post-apartheid South African literary texts: Ways of dying, a novel by Zakes Mda; Nothing but the truth, a play by John Kani and Freedom lament and song, a poem by Mongane Wally Serote. The dissertation interrogates the legitimacy of the prefix ‘post’ in ‘post-apartheid’ as a point of departure. It discusses the theories of key thinkers on the concept mourning and then applies their theories to the analysis of the selected literary texts thereby interpreting the selected literary texts as symbolic codes communicating messages about the state of politics in post-apartheid South Africa. 5