This article seeks to resituate some of Congolese literature--both from the Mobotu era and the Kabila eras--in the current and ongoing dialogue about human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo ...(DRC) from which it has been excluded. We will begin by examining a few of the reasons for this exclusion in literary practice and criticism--highlighting problems of temporality, availability, and accessibility--before delving into close readings of poetry by Tchicaya u Tam'si, an essay by Bolya Baenga, and a poem by Marie-Louise Mumbu. each of these three writers challenges a rhetoric centered around statistics and draped in sensationalism to bring awareness in poetic form to the dreaded Holocaust on Congolese territory that followed the Rwandan genocide, the devastating Congo civil wars, and a rape crisis that continues even today. When literary voices from the DRC can be reconsidered as part of the discursive archive of human rights in which they obviously partake, we may at once attend to the ingrained imperialism that has plagued human rights discourse since its inception and find new ways out of the Western-driven impasses to the struggle for justice in the DRC.
This article discusses Tchicaya U Tam'si's The Glorious Destiny of Marshall Nnikon Nniku (Le Destin glorieux du Maréchal Nnikon Nniku, prince qu'on sort) as a satirical response to the dictatorship ...of Joseph-Desire Mobutu and his policy of authenticity. I examine Mobutu's authenticity campaign as a transnational phenomenon that involves accepting and performing international perceptions of Africa as “traditional” and suggest that Tchicaya's play uses this transnationality to both critique and resist policies such as Mobutu's. Furthermore, I claim that “authentic” power such as Mobutu's is primarily a transnational performance and that Tchicaya's resistance—embodied in the play by Lheki—is equally transnational and performative.
This dissertation is an analysis of “new African theater” as illustrated in the works of three francophone African writers: the late Congolese Sony Labou Tansi (formerly known as Marcel Ntsony), the ...late Congolese Félix Tchicaya, who wrote under the pseudonym Tchicaya U Tam'si, and the Cameroonian Werewere Liking. The dissertation examines plays by these authors and illustrates how the plays clearly stand apart from mainstream modern French-language African theater. The introduction, in Chapter 1 provides an explanation of the meaning that has been assigned to the term “new African theater.” It presents an overview of the various innovative structural and linguistic techniques new theater playwrights use that render their work avant-garde. The chapter also studies how new theater playwrights differ from mainstream ones, especially in the way they address and present their concerns regarding the themes of oppression, rebellion, and the outcome of rebellion. The information provided in this chapter serves as a springboard to the primary focus of the dissertation, which is a detailed theoretical and textual analysis of experimental strategies used by the three playwrights in the areas of theme, form, and language. Chapter 2 shows how Liking experiments with indigenous ritual form, symbolic ritual language, and body language while presenting concerns about the oppression of women in La puissance de Um (1979) and Les mains veulent dire (1987). Chapter 3 demonstrates how oppressive leadership is presented by Labou Tansi in his ritualistic, yet grotesque, La parenthèse de sang (1979) and the grotesque in Je soussigné cardiaque (1981). Chapter 4 explores U Tam'si concerns with oppression in modern Africa illustrated through the indigenous funeral dirge in Le bal de Ndinga (1979), and the grotesque and the absurd in Le destin glorieux du Maréchal Nnikon Nniku (1979). Chapter 5 provides a commentary on the revolutionary nature of the three playwrights' works and discusses the accessibility of these works to the audience for whom they are intended.
Provider: - Institution: - Data provided by Europeana Collections- 2 fot.: bl. y n; 20 x 25 cm = 8 x 10 inch + textos de los reversos- Véanse en ficheros adjuntos textos de los reversos- All metadata ...published by Europeana are available free of restriction under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. However, Europeana requests that you actively acknowledge and give attribution to all metadata sources including Europeana
Provider: - Institution: Gredos. Repositorio Documental de la Universidad de Salamanca - Data provided by Europeana Collections- "Lara, Fernando, 1947-" también ha firmado sus artículos como "Valle, ...Ramón"- "Este Artículo pertenece a la sección Arte, Letras, Espectáculos. "- All metadata published by Europeana are available free of restriction under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. However, Europeana requests that you actively acknowledge and give attribution to all metadata sources including Europeana
"Meanwhile": this conjunction of simultaneity sums up Benedict Anderson's classical theory of the formation of imagined communities that, once upon a time, became nations in the experience of their ...subjects. Here, Bal relates this conjunction's literary usage in an expanded field.
This dissertation examines the question of nationalism in recent literary productions from the Republic of the Congo, and considers the pertinence of a nation-based approach to the study of ...francophone sub-Saharan African cultures. The relationship between literature and politics in the Congo is especially interesting because the Marxist-Leninist government authorities have attempted to sponsor an official literature of the State. A particularly creative group of writers (including Emmanuel Dongala, Henri Lopes and Sony Labou Tansi) have ignored government control, and succeeded in producing a literature in the tradition of resistance writing in which aesthetic considerations such as innovative linguistic practices and narrative techniques have been foregrounded. I argue that the history of decolonization has contributed to increased regional specificities, and that an inquiry along the lines of Richard Bjornson's idea of a "universe of discourse" has much to offer. In a sociological context in which the discourse of nationalism has remained inseparable from the discourse of the State, Adrien Huannou's broad definition of "national literatures" seems somewhat problematic in its failure to distinguish between resistance and official authors, and their respective relationships with the ruling postcolonial elite. This dissertation is divided into six chapters. The first chapter provides a historical, literary, and political overview of the Congo, which I maintain is essential to our understanding and appreciation of the literary texts. Chapter two examines how various power mechanisms have been acquired, maintained and manipulated. Chapters three, four and five explore selected works by resistance authors, compare their different approaches to literature, and treatment of nationalism. The final chapter investigates the historical origins of Marxist aesthetics, socialist realism and state propaganda. It concludes with a discussion of how these paradigms have been adapted by official writers, including Leopold-Pindy Mamonsono, Claude-Emmanuel Eta-Onka and Xavier Okotaka-Ebale. At the end of this dissertation, an appendix includes the transcripts of interviews with Emmanuel Dongala and Claude-Emmanuel Eta-Onka, conducted in French in Brazzaville in December, 1994 and January, 1995.
(In Mutulufwa, military titles are kept in a basket and handed out like sweets.) Following a lurid coronation ceremony-featuring shrieking and erotic dancers in bright plumage, ..."boudoum-boudoum"-sounding drums, fireeating sorcerers, and nose-pierced warriors-the Maréchal unleashes his megalomaniacal new ideological program of "Nnikonnicunism" whose central agenda is sociopolitical regression, notably the criminalization of all work and the general ruination of the state's infrastructure. The Guadeloupean novelist and playwright Simone Schwarz-Bart focuses on the exacerbating socio-economic disparities of the global economy in her ground-breaking 1987 play Ton beau capitaine, a poignant and lyrical treatment of migration and exile. Yet Wilnor's dreams of a contented retirement, in which he is the captain of his life, his wife, his home, are dashed when he learns from his wife's own recorded voice that she is to bear the child of another man.
Examining the historical context within which many francophone African writers find themselves, particularly the political and economic instability that leads so many to choose exile, she probes the ...narrative techniques that convey the sense of loss and disillusionment common to writers of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa: fragment, irony, parody, repetition, as well as the recurring theme of madness in a world marked by violence. By combining a detailed theoretical study with textual analysis of four major francophone writers, Tissières provides us with an informative study that should encourage students and scholars of francophone African literature to read francophone African texts through a new critical lens.
Poetry Today Taylor, John
The Antioch Review,
10/2008, Letnik:
66, Številka:
4
Book Review
Taylor reviews several poetry books by Tehicaya U Tam'si, including Arc musical/Epitome; La Veste d'interieur/Notes de veille; and Le Mauvais Sang/Feu de brousse/A triche-coeur.
PDF
