In this thesis, I am interested in studying how African writers incorporate cinema in their works while focusing on the impact of Western and Asian films on the African public. My corpus includes writers such as Abdoulaye Sadji (Maïmouna), Ousmane Sembène (Les Bouts de bois de Dieu), Sylvain Bemba (Rêves portatifs), Tierno Monénembo (Cinéma), Henri Lopes (Le Pleurer-Rire) and Alain Mabanckou (African psycho and Verre Cassé). I use criticism by Freud, Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jean Bellemin-Noël, Christian Metz, Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and others to analyze, through the mechanisms of alienation, of depersonalization and corruption of the imaginary, the transmutation that cinema lovers in the African novel undergo. By « transmutation », I mean the process which leads to the expulsion of the individuality of some characters. This transformation will be manifested by an overactive imagination, by the exaltation of the most extravagant fantasies and by the violence inherent to the characters that now, in a perverse way, strive to reproduce in their social world the fictional world of movies that they have watched and which are fully disconnected from their environment. As these characters do not manage to draw the line that separates cinematic facts from their illusions, the narrative will suggest the confusion between cinema and "reality". Therefore, the loss of direction and other dealings will lead to personality disorders and criminal behaviors. / Thesis (Ph.D, French) -- Queen's University, 2010-07-23 13:33:45.297

Both African writers and literary critics have long used the ideology of "Négritude" and the political commitment it generated as the theoretical basis for their works. However, since independence in Africa, this common practice started to lose momentum due to a shift in the social and political realities. Furthermore, in recent decades, new generations of African writers have moved away from the "Négritude" movement's beliefs. Nevertheless, there are still some nostalgic writers and critics who cling to this historic movement that shaped African literature and thought for half a century. The above two trends paved the way for my starting hypothesis: is it still possible to evaluate what Abiola Irele calls the "African imagination" in the narrative, and especially novels, without the traditional criteria of political commitment and ideology? To answer this fundamental question, I define my analytical method as a "politiscopie." This neologism is formed in the image of the word "radioscopie." "Politiscopie" combines the stem for politics, "politi-," with the suffix "-scopie," from the Latin scopium (instrument for viewing) and the Greek skopein (to look at). And I define "politiscopie" as the analytical examination of political discourse in literary text. This examination is stripped of the conscious or unconscious analytical tendency that I call "l'humeur idéologique des critiques," or "the ideological mood of critics. "This dissertation is divided into two parts and an introduction, in which I define political discourse based on L'archéologie du savoir by Michel Foucault. The first part--chapters one and two--is a "politiscopical" examination, an examination of political discourse in African novels since 1990. I discuss the explicit and implicit political discourse present in the considered novels. In the second part--chapters three and four, I attempt to tease out the triangular relationship between Africa, the writer, and the relevant political realities. I investigate the political representation of Africa by the new generations of African writers, and then I look at the impact of distance on those writers to see whether the location of the authors--abroad or on the African continent--affects the way they treat African political debates.