The deterioration of reason - defined as the faculty of thinking and its functioning in all human beings - is an essential question in Francophone Sub-Saharan literary and cinematographic fictions. This is one of many possible interpretations that can be derived from some novels and films produced during the period from 1950 to 2000 in this region. These cultural productions span an era marked in Africa by the "historical facts" of anticolonial struggles, decolonization, and (re) constructions of newly sovereign states that gained their independence from the European nations to which they had been subjected. The juxtaposition of these works leads to a critical realization: Half a century after the decolonization movements, African societies remain so dysfunctional that one is forced to ask if their inhabitants are still "normal," provided one can come to an agreement on what is normal. This speculation takes the form of a recurrent metaphor in the corpus: Africa is a continent ripped to shreds, irrevocably plunged into a dark night that has silenced reason. Taking up this metaphor, not only as a theme but also as a theoretical concern, I argue that the metaphoric uses of the night are an indication of a more critical reality, which is the intellectual journey of a population that has leapt into a state of impoverishment. I approach impoverishment both as the state of being deprived and the process leading to this deprivation, and I maintain my earlier characterization of intellectual as a synonym of reason. In this line, I describe intellectual impoverishment as the (progressive) loss of consciousness and rationality that befalls a large population of the continent. This loss is portrayed through the appearance and proliferation of various paradoxical figures that embody the "spiritual death" of the people. One portrayal of this death, the transformation of African populations into zombies, then serves to flesh out the concept of intellectual impoverishment. Thus, this dissertation investigates the socio-political processes through which critical thinking is annihilated in Sub-Saharan Africa, through an analysis of literary and cinematographic fictions by francophone authors of this region. This dissertation is written in French.

Cette thèse s’inscrit dans le cadre des études comparées pluridisciplinaires, alliant la littérature à un autre outil d’expression artistique, la photographie. Les démarches comparatistes ont, en effet, contribué à l’émergence d’idées et d’axes d’analyses exclusifs que l’analyse traditionnelle se limitant stricto sensu à l’œuvre n’aurait pas permis de voir, d’où la naissance, depuis peu encore, de la littérature générale et comparée en tant que discipline à part entière. De plus, celle-ci permet l’ouverture de brèches non négligeables sur d’autres disciplines, ce qui permet l’établissement d’un dialogue pluridisciplinaire qui s’installe au cœur de la littérature. Celle-ci devient apte à s’allier, dans une démarche comparatiste, tantôt à la peinture, tantôt au cinéma ou encore à la photographie. De ce fait, cette thèse vise à instaurer un dialogue entre la littérature francophone maghrébine et la photographie. En s’appuyant sur un corpus puisé essentiellement dans la littérature francophone maghrébine contemporaine, nous tentons d’élucider la subtilité de ce dialogue. Ainsi, la photographie a bouleversé le rapport à l’image dans la tradition maghrébine. Plusieurs autres ouvrages affiliés à cette littérature postcoloniale mettent en scène des œuvres photographiques qui sont aptes à témoigner d’une relation nouvelle à l’image, comme on peut le voir notamment dans les travaux de Leïla Sebbar (Mes Algéries en France , par exemple), ou encore dans les écrits de Mohamed Dib qui revient sur ses lieux de la mémoire que sont la photographie et l'écriture (Tlemcen, ou les lieux de l'écriture ). Le rapport à l'image est très présent dans ces textes : nous lisons des témoignages qui s'opèrent à travers des descriptions réalistes de l'espace et des scènes écrites, orchestrées par une fiction qui semble respecter les différentes fonctions diégétiques d'un roman. En parlant de cette relation nouvelle du texte à l'image, nous faisons d'abord allusion au lien texte/archive. La photographie sera alors considérée comme étant une "archive" que le romancier francophone réinvestit dans un récit contemporain. Nous touchons là à la fonction "génératrice" de la photographie et nous tentons de répondre à des questions comme : quelle photographie a généré tel texte? Quelles techniques sont utilisées par l’auteur pour la mettre en scène dans son texte? La littérature postcoloniale acquiert une notoriété non négligeable. Recourant – encore – à la langue du colon, elle devient un genre à part entière qui a toute sa place dans le paysage littéraire et artistique. La photographie jalonne ces œuvres qui y recourent, intuitivement, dans le but de garder une trace, une empreinte d’un passé houleux et mouvementé.Trois auteurs, trois univers littéraires avec leurs divergences et leurs convergences. A travers une démarche intersémiotique, nous explicitons la poétique de la photolittérature dans Le Démantèlement de Rachid Boudjedra, L’Incendie et Tlemcen ou les lieux de l’écriture de Mohammed Dib et Journal de mes Algéries en France et La Jeune fille au balcon de Leïla Sebbar.La photographie n’est plus un simple support auquel recourent ces auteurs pour illustrer leurs textes. Elle est tatouée de manière indélébile dans leur manière d’écrire, de parler, d’être. L’écrivain maghrébin postcolonial est de ce fait un photographe scriptural. Il réinvestit ce même œil qui a vu, qui a observé et a assisté à une guerre de libération dans une écriture où le regard est au centre de tout. Même quand il n’est pas explicitement question de photographie, cette dernière transparaît d’une manière ou d’une autre à travers la mise en scène des espaces, des personnages (quand il s’agit de fiction) et des faits relatés. Le texte dépasse en ce sens le simple entendement descriptif pour épouser une écriture ekphrastique dans laquelle l’auteur semble décrire les différentes composantes d’un cliché qu’il a sous les yeux et qu’il nous donne à voir à travers ses mots. / This thesis is part of multidisciplinary comparative studies, combining literature with another tool of artistic expression which is photography. Comparative approaches have in fact contributed to the emergence of exclusive ideas and axes of analysis that the traditional analysis, which is strictly limited to the work, would not have made it possible to see. Hence, the very recent birth of the general and comparative literature as a distinct discipline. Moreover, it allows the opening of significant breaches on other disciplines, which helps to the establishment of a multidisciplinary dialogue that takes place at the heart of the literature. The latter becomes able to combine in a comparative approach painting, cinema and even photography. This thesis aims to establish a dialogue between the francophone Maghreb’s literature and photography. Based on a corpus drawn mainly from contemporary francophone Maghreb’s literature, we try to elucidate the subtlety of this dialogue. Thus, photography has upset the relationship to the image in the Maghreb’s tradition. Several other works affiliated to this postcolonial literature show photographic works that are able to testify on a new relation to the image, as can be seen in particular in the works of Leïla Sebbar (Mes Algéries en France, for example), or in the writings of Mohamed Dib who returns to his places of memory such as photography and writing (Tlemcen, ou les lieux de l’écriture). The relation to the image is very present in these texts: we read testimonies that are carried out through realistic descriptions of space and written scenes, orchestrated by a fiction that seems to respect the different diegetic functions of a novel. Speaking of this new relationship between text and image, we first allude to the text / archive link. Photography will then be considered as an "archive" that the Francophone novelist reinvests in a contemporary narrative. Here we touch on the "generating" function of photography and we try to answer questions such as: which photography generated such text? What techniques are used by the author to stage it in his text? The postcolonial literature acquires a considerable notoriety. Still using the language of the colonist, it becomes a genre in its own right which has its place in the literary and artistic landscape. Photography intersperses these works intuitively, with the aim of keeping a trace, an imprint of a stormy and turbulent past. Three authors, three literary universes with their divergences and their convergences. Through an intersemiotic approach, we explain the poetics of photoliterature in Rachid Boudjedra's Le Démantèlement, Dib’s L’Incendie and Tlemcen ou les lieux de l’écriture and Journal de mes Algéries en France and La Jeune fille au balcon of Leila sebbar. Photography is no longer a simple medium to which these authors resort to illustrate their texts. It is tattooed indelibly in its way of writing, speaking and being. The post-colonial Maghreb’s writer is thus a scriptural photographer. He reinvests the same eye that has seen, watched and witnessed a liberation war in a writing where the gaze is at the center of everything. Even when it is not explicitly a question of photography, the latter can be seen in one way or another through the staging of spaces, characters (when it comes to fiction) and related facts. In this sense, the text goes beyond the simple descriptive understanding to embrace an ekphrastic writing in which the author seems to describe the different components of a cliché that he has under his eyes and which he gives us to see through his words.

This thesis aims at analysing comparatively the literary production of three African female authors - the Cape Verdean Dina Salústio (1941), the Mozambican Paulina Chiziane (1955) and the Angolan Rosária da Silva (1959) - so as to observe the authors' cultural construction of their complex postcolonial nations from a female-focalized point of view and their representation of the women of these nations interacting with the transcultural contexts of each analysed country. Their works demonstrate the importance of thinking nationalism and national identity through gender, simultaneously highlighting the potential of situated gender analysis for the understanding and contestation of the power networks that consolidate the supremacy of hegemonic discourses. Hence, the main argument that this thesis develops in three distinct chapters (each one devoted to the literary production of each author) and in the light of a particular theoretical framework is that the building of the post-independence nations under analysis is structured through gender differentiation. The point of departure for this project is the work developed by specific postcolonial theorists who analyse and deconstruct hegemonic discourses of identity. Hence, Benedict Anderson's understanding of the nation as an 'imagined political community' (1991) is explored and widened by Homi Bhabha's theorization of the dynamics of national discourse (1990), whose instability comes from the friction between its pedagogical and performative dimensions. This emphasis on empowering marginality takes us to Edward Said's reflections on exile (2001). For Said, the condition of exile represents an irrecoverable displacement of the human being as regards her/his own homeland, a state which she/he will permanently try to revoke. Andrea O'Reilly Herrera (2001) uses the term insílio to emphasise the psychological and emotional dimensions of this state, which precedes the actual physical exile. Reflections on the active involvement of the displaced in the renegotiation of the nation are also at the core of Mary Louise Pratt's theorization of contact zones, autoethnography and transculturation (1991). The emphasis on the disruptive potential of autoethnography is recaptured in Graham Huggan's study of the Post-Colonial Exotic (2001), focusing specifically on the potential of what he called 'celebratory autoethnography'. Nonetheless, considering that these approaches are largely gender blind, the study questions their premises further by incorporating postcolonial feminist theories and feminist theories from sociology. Anne McClintock (1995) and Nira Yuval-Davis's (1997) important proposal of the analysis of nationalism through the lens of a theory of gender power gave access to multiple experiences of the nation. Amina Mama's (2001) proposal of the analysis of individual and national identity through gender with a view to understanding and dismantling the power structures in operation adds to these strong theorizations. Considering that the three examined countries had one-party socialist regimes immediately after independence, Catherine Scott's study on gender and development theories (1995) facilitates a situated analysis of gender as well. Through this outlook, the study assesses the feasibility and limitation of the application of such theories to the gender-related issues in the specific context of postcolonial lusophone Africa. Furthermore, it explores the possible existence of common 'lusophone postcolonial' spaces that link these women's experiences of Portuguese colonialism and the socialist experiment. Women who Give Birth to New Worlds: Three Feminine Perspectives on Lusophone Postcolonial Africa, submitted by Maria Tavares to the University of Manchester for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2010.

Thesis advisor: Hans de Wit / The current displacement crisis in the German context has focused scholarly attention on refugee student access to higher education. However, much less research has attended to supports at higher education institutions (HEIs) for enrolled migrant and refugee students. In fact, education research in the German setting rarely focuses on students from any migrant background, though these students comprise between 20-25% of all German tertiary enrollment. This study uses Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2014) and a postcolonial lens to analyze “equal opportunity” plans and programs at 32 German HEIs across all 16 federal states. Data sources include the “equal opportunity plan” unique to each HEI (Gleichstellungsplan) and interviews with “equal opportunity office” (Gleichstellungsbüro) faculty and staff. Key findings include a bureaucratization and numerification of diversity in the German case, as well as an almost exclusive focus on diversity as gender. This dissertation offers a potentially transferable theoretical model, which may be relevant in national settings with increasingly diverse student populations, histories of colonial possession or fantasy, or primarily public higher education systems (Bhabha, 1994; El-Tayeb, 2016; Kilomba, 2008; Said, 1979). / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Thesis advisor: Kalpana Seshadri / The novel is generally read through a Western lens that privileges both individual subjectivity and the nation-state. My dissertation acts as an intervention into the critical tradition that sees the novel as a genre preoccupied with the individual, the nation-state, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship through which the two relate to each other. This tradition includes seminal theorists Ian Watt, Fredric Jameson, and Benedict Anderson as well as contemporary critics such as Pascale Casanova and Joseph Slaughter. Transnational Communities challenges this accepted framework for understanding the novel genre through an examination of novels which decenter the categories of individual and nation-state and argues that in this moment of unprecedented globalization, the novel’s ability to imagine new forms of community is an increasingly relevant social function. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

The first section of this thesis was developed from two major papers I had written during my coursework for the degree. The first, entitled “Orientalism and Dionysos: a look at translations of Euripides’ Bakkhai,” was written for Edwin Genzler’s Translation and Postcolonial Theory class in the spring of 2002. The second, “Postcolonial Greek: Hellenism and Identity in the Early Roman Empire,” was written for Maria Tymozcko’s Translation Theory and Practice class in the spring of 2007. Together, they argue that Greek literature is postcolonial in that it was used by the Roman Empire to certain ends, which resulted in its interpretation being influenced and changed by means of that Roman power and legacy throughout Western Europe, and that Euripides’ Bakkhai in particular was misinterpreted for centuries as a result of that influence. The second section of my thesis is a translator’s note, which discusses the particular theory behind my translation strategy, as well as the choices I made concerning spelling, lines missing from the manuscript, et cetera. The third section of the thesis is the translation itself, on which I began in the fall of 2002 and finished this past summer. The final section of this thesis is a commentary on the play itself. I have focused on the concepts of sophrosune (safemindedness) and paideia (education) around which to weave my analysis. The central idea is that the play serves as a lesson to the audience that sophrosune is part of Dionysos’ sphere, and to deny the life-affirming nature of his ritual is to court danger—the danger of rigidity and oppression. The death of Pentheus, after he rejects this education despite Dionysos’ best efforts to dissuade him, is merely an object lesson, not the repudiation of Dionysos’ worship and the Greek gods as a whole that previous generations have held it to be.

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This research examines urban renewal in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb of 30,000 inhabitants located in the northeast of Paris. It studies the modalities of spatial racialization, nation building, and subject formation among Afro-French young men living in the city. It also builds on a world-historical perspective to explore the diasporic webs in which the lives of Afro-French are embedded. Taking spatial racialization as a point of entry, the study attempts to understand how governmental strategies and urban policies regulate lives and residential patterns in the city. Three lines of investigation are pursued: 1) an examination of Afro-French racialization and genealogies; 2) an analysis of narratives and struggles of these communities and their impact on neoliberal spaces; 3) an exploration of the various ways spatial governmentality constrains and/or produces Afro-Frenchness. The primary purpose of this ethnographic research is to comprehend the French colonial history and its impact on the racialization of diasporic Afro-French living in metropolitan France. For this end, the study proposes the notion of "Afro-French," an analytical concept that designates a constellation of groups from Sub-Saharan, North African, and Caribbean origins. The term provides a heuristic to comprehend the urban and cultural experiences of diasporic sub-groups who have different but overlapping genealogies. Second, the project helps understand why Afro-French living in Clichy-sous-Bois embody and at the same time transgress official narratives of the nation. It argues that France's nationalism, like other forms of European nationalisms, is facing a contradictory moment in the neoliberal conjuncture. On the one hand, discourses about liberalization of the economy involve the deployment of narratives that celebrate mobility and flexibility. This new dependence on a global neoliberal economy destabilizes national economies and erodes the state's structures. On the other hand, state actors diffuse identitarian and xenophobic discourses that blame ethnic and religious minorities for the socio-economic crisis. Third, the study argues that spatial governmentality and urban strategies enable certain aspects of Afro-Frenchness but constrain others: there is no homogenous or unified logic to regulate lives and spaces in Clichy.

<p> This dissertation examines postcolonial narrative fiction as a site of cosmopolitanism that is self-consciously local and global at the same time. I argue that, in order to think through a form of cosmopolitanism that takes seriously questions of social justice, we must think through the way cosmopolitan world-views are articulated in place. Much is made of the deterritorializing forces of both cosmopolitanism and globalization, but, as the novels I examine suggest, this ignores the simultaneous re- and multi-territorialization that is always ongoing. This gap in cosmopolitan theory means that everyday lived cosmopolitanism, which enacts this oscillation between the global and the local, is often left outside the scope of theory. Fiction offers a corrective to cosmopolitan theory by paying particular attention to that which is often outside of the scope of this theoretical paradigm. Postcolonial theory's emphasis on the importance of political responsibility and the remembrance of past and ongoing violence informs this project.</p> <p> In this dissertation, I primarily engage with the two dominating strains of cosmopolitan theory: liberal-bourgeois cosmopolitanism and vernacular cosmopolitanism. I read these theoretical models alongside cultural geography and eco-criticism to account for what I term "territorialized cosmopolitanism." I suggest that territorialized cosmopolitanism enacts a dialectical movement between the global and the local and this movement between these two zones prompts ethical and political responsibilities to others (both human and nonhuman) both physically nearby and distant - reflecting the shaping role place defined in physical and cultural terms-- has in developing cosmopolitanism.</p> <p> Focussing my reading on novels that address cosmopolitanism through different kinds of places (the metropolis, the regional city, and the rural community), I argue that different places focus a territorialized cosmopolitan sensibility in different ways. What these differences suggest is the importance of un-learning typical notions of how place is used and represented - particularly in relation to the global. A territorialized cosmopolitan sensibility, in these novels, allows for and encourages this unlearning. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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