Instructor: Dr. Martial Frindethie
Schedule: Fall 1996
Office room: 3121 JMZ
Email: mf107@umail.umd.edu
Tel: 405-4035
Listserv: lit242@umail.umd.edu
Office hours: Mondays 11-12PM; Wednesday 1-2 PM; Fridays 11-12PM, and by appointment. It is a good idea to call ahead before coming as there are occassions when I might have a meeting that overlaps with my office hours.

Course Description

In their making, Francophone African and Caribbean literatures are continually revealing themselves as literatures and counter-literatures, simultaneously emulating the "father" and denouncing his gesture, proclaiming their autonomy and effacing their own signatures. Through some representative novels, poems, and essays, this course will explore and discuss these various movements in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures.

Course Objectives
At the completion of this course, students will be able to:

• articulate some of the main theoretical and philosophical directions in Black Francophone literatures since pre-World War I.
• Effectively discuss thematic and rhetorical questions in Black Francophone literatures.
• Develop an understanding for issues of specificity and idversity within the Black Renaissance in French Letters
• Access resources to continue self-development as researchers interested in the field of Black Francophone literatures.

Required Readings

Mariama Ba, So Long a Letter
Reda Bensmaia, The Year of Passages
Aime Cesarie, Return to My Native Land,
Maryse Conde, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
Leon Damas, Selected poems
Camara Laye, The Dark Child
V.Y. mudimbe, The Rift
L.S. Senghor, selected poems
Sembene Ousmane, God's Pieces of Wood

Additional Readings:
These are jigsaw readings. As part of a small group, each student will choose to read and discuss with other sutdents from other groups a specific text selected by and discussed in his/her group. In total, each student will have read only a very limited number of additional texts. However, from the group interactions, he/she will have been somewhat introduced the contents of a variety of texts.

• John and jean Comaroff, Africa Observed
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (selected passages)
• Levy-Brhul, The psychology of peoples (Selected passages)
• Claude levi-Strauss, The savage Mind (Selected passages)
• Langston Hughes, selcted poems
• Alain Locke, The Legacy of Ancestral Art
• Cheik Anta Diop,Barbarism or Civilization (selected passages)
• Selected texts from Tropiques
• Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (selected passages)

Grades

Participants in this class will be graded on the quality and effort put into class participation (group discussions), e-mail dialog (three entries>,reflective writing(between two and three 5-page reaction papers), and presentations (two 20-minute exposes on weeks 8 and 14).

Attendance:

I expect all classes participants to be in attendance during all class sessions.
- All participants in the course are required to schedule at least one meeting with me.

Course Requirements:
For a grade of pass or B

• Class Participation:
  During class time, there will be ample opportunity for class members to contribute in large or small group discussion. Full consideration of the issues to be examined in each class demands the participation of each and every student. You might or might not be assigned a specific role within your discussion group. Either way, your contribution to your group and the whole class will be considered in determining your final grade in this course.

• Participation in e-mail dialog:
  By the second week of class, you should all have applied for an e-mail account. An e-mail list will be established and running for participants in the course. You are expected to contribute at least three entries by the end of the semester (at least one message every five weeks). Messages should be no longer than three paragraphs. Whenever possible, I will pose one or more questions to the list to debate. E-mail dialogue between course participants can take the form of answers to the questions or comments on any other issues concerning our readings.

• Two Reflective Writing Assignments (due by the second day of weeks 5 and 8):
  Your writing may be:
  
  • A further inquiry of a particular issue (relating our readings) raised in class or in e-mail dialogue>
    
  • Your personal evaluation of one of the novels we are reading (you may chose to examine such aspects as stylistics, rhetoric, thematics, etc.)

• Two Presentations (due weeks 8 and 14)
  Either individually or with another student, you will select a piece in the folio and do an elaborate ecpose of it in the light of classroom input as well as your independent investigation. Your presentation should take no more than ten minutes + ten minutes for reactions. Exposes can also take the form of explanation of an original piece in the folio for which an English translation is not available.

• No more than 3 absences during the semester.

For an A grade

• In addition to everything listed above, you will write - a short reflective paper(5-8 pages) discussing and illustrating with examples taken from the novels the relevance or irrelevance of the use of the expression "blasphemous letters" in regard to Tituba and The Year of Passages (due by the first day of the week 14)

Week 1:
Introduction--The imperial discourse of alterity
In this chapter, my intent is to introduce students to the kind of ethnocentric and universalistic discourses that in Europe have disseminated the idea of inferiority of the colonized and consequently justified Europe's colonizing enterprise as well as its treatment of Natives populations in Africa and the Americas. We will read such authors as Levy-Brhul, Comaroff, Mignolo, Conrad, etc.

Week 2:
The plea--le pli--the fold
- The legacy of Western literatures
This chapter will familiarize students with the kind of literatures, which in the postwar era challenged the universalitic tendency of Europe and put forth the claim of alternative civilizations. Emphasis will also be put on the primitivist and exoticist aspect of these literatures. Reading will comprise such writers as Leo Frobenius, Benjamin, Appolinaire, and writers and artist of the Negro Renaissance. If available, films about the "sudden" importance of Negro art in paris in the 20s will be shown.

Week 3:
Blacks dig up their past
- The American Inspiration
Selected pieces of Claude MacKay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James W. Johnson, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale HUrston, Alain Locke, L. Before the African's reclaiming of his/her race, Black American writers and artist were already involved in a literature of race restoration as they were convinced that as Blacks, they were carriers of a certain authentic ancestral essence. It is even fair to sau that it is their themes (emotivity, exuberance, dance, rhythim, orality) that inspired the African writer in search of identity. We will also read poems written by Black French writers acknowledging their indebtedness to the artist and writers of the Negro Renaissance.

Week 4:
The Gateway to Culture and Civilization.

• The Kingdom of Childhood:
  Remembrance of recollection is the way to reach out to the essence of civilization and culture. For civilization and culture inscribe themselves upon the apparently insignificant acts, facts and gestures experienced during the childhood years. Thus, Camara Laye and Senghor can, as grown ups, understand the mystical importance and funstion of the scenes, smells, sounds, colors, tastes, shapes, and forms that surrounfed them as children, and which they took for granted. Howeverm recollections are not always rich with joyous moments as we can see in Cesaire's Notebook. Unlike Senghor or Laye, Cesaire's recollections of his childhood are very painful and frustrating experience that makes vivid to him pictures of his family's poverty, the burlesque ofhis island, and the racial injustice of the White(French). Even there, though, Cesaire's poor and unhappy childhood described in the Notebook is counterbalanced as he later seems to explain it as a child's inability to understand his island with sophisticated senses. The Cesaire who, in the Notebook, finally "accepts (his) race" is henceforth the more cultivated, refined and poetic imginationthat can go below the mere surface of things. We will discuss the pertinence of the kingdom of childhood for Black French writers in their quest for identity through such readings as:
  Laye's The Darck Child
  Senghor, selected poems (Joal, Night in Sine, To the Music of Koras and Balaphon , Elegy of the Circumsed)
  Rene Menil, "Couleur d'enfance, couleur de sang."
• Surrendering to nature Francophone Black writers were convinced that Leo Frobenius was right: They were Human-plants(living in harmony with the cycle of nature) rather than human-animal (driven by a desire to dominate their environment). The Balck writer argued therefore that only by accepting to live their true nature--as opposed to what Europe wanted them to be--could they attain fulfillment. Their writings reflected their desire to celebrate this "true nature" or to answer this fundamental question posed by Cesaire: "Who are we and What? admirable question!"
  - Rene Menil, "Naissance de Notre Art" (Folio)
  - A. Cesaire's Return to My Native Land.

Week 5:
Negritude, a counter-literature
- Incompossible communities
As a counter-literature to narratives of imperial imagination, it was absolutely important for Negritude to ascertain the possibility of a culture and civilization not necessarilycompatible with the West, and yet, not inherently contradictoryeither . It is therefore, a culture or civilization that will not only ignore "western" canonc, but also, and above all, will enclose and exhaust them in a collective truth content that is irrelevant to Black people, this in order not to imperil the erection of an authentic Black-ness. Thus if the equation 2+2=4 is"tru", in the world of Cesaire's Notebook, the equation 2+2=5 is also possible. Though each equation might be said impossible in the world of the other, taken in their own worlds, neither equation is inherently contradictory. The world in which each equation is true is the best world for that equation to be possible. We will therefore discuss Cesaire's assertion that 2+2=5, no longer as a simple surrealist trope ( as most critics have claimed), but rather as a discursive irony, the suspension of rationality for the celebration of mytho-poetics.
- Cesaire's Return to My Native land
- Leon Damas: selected poems (folio)
- Frantz Fanon's dialectic of recognition in Black Skin, White Masks, the argument of violence in The Wretched of the Earth

Week 6:
Negritude, a counter-literature.
- Compossible/complementary communities
While for Caribbean writers such as Cesaire, Damas, and especially Fanon, it is impossile for the colonizer and the colonized to share the same cultural, political, and ideological space without antagonism, for African writers like Senghor or Laye, it is necessary that both the colonized and the colonizer compose for the erection of a point de capiton (a nodal point). Senghor is convinced that Black culture is the complementary of the White culture, and his poems display a romantic vision of a humanist project of symbiosis that transcends racial differences. For him, each culture is necessarily relevant in the world of the other. Thus, Senghor's poetry attempts a reconciliation between his deep conviction of Europe's monumental guilt and the necessity to forgive Europe for a humanist world.
- Laye's The Dark Child
- Senghor. selected poems (in Memoriam, Prayer for Peace, New York, SOngs for Signare, To a Black Woman with Blond Hair)

Week 7:
Negritude, an established literature Blacks celebrate their past
Senghor, the early Cesaire, and many Black French writers are convinced that there is a racial dimension to culture and that each race is endowed through the art and literature of that race. Blacks, they argue, have a propensity for analogical or intuitive thinking whereas Whites are more inclined to analytical or discursive thinking. Writers of the Negritude believe that the attentive observer of Black art, rites, poetry, and myths can seize this racial authenticity at the discursive and theatrical levels.

- A mytho-poetic tradition (analogical vs discursive):

• Senghor on Black art (excerpts from Liberte)
• Suzanne Cesaire's "Le malaise d'une civilisation"

- A rhetorical specificity: Niane's Sundjata (folio)

- A thematics of flora and fauna

• Senghor, selected poems (Man and Beast, Congo, Elegy of Midnight)

Week 8:
Presentations

Week 9:
A Teleological projection
The literature of Negritude was more concerned with becoming, especially a social and communal becoming than an individual one. Here, the role of the hero is to be a collective consciousness, the sum of his people's ideals. The individuaL narratives come from together in the making of the communal quilt that tells the story of the whole community. - The epic Hero

• Senghor (Chaka)
• Niane's Sundjata
• Cesaire's Toussaint in Return to My Native Land

• Sembene's God's Bits of Wood

Week 10:
Initiation and Gender politics
In men's writings what are the forms of the rituals society, and therefore gives him/her the right to speech? iin Which ways do these forms provilege one gender to the detriment of the other?
-Men's narratives

• laye's The Dark Child
• Sembene's God's Pieces of Wood
• Mudimbe's The Rift
• Senghor, selected poems

Week 11:
Initiation and Gender Politics:
What happens when women start to write their own stories? How do they re-write the laws of initiation, and what are some of the political and social consequences of this "disruption" of the established order? -Women's narratives

• Ba's So Long a letter
• Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
• Warner Vieyra's As the Sorcerer Said

Week 12:
Tragedy of the Schizophrenic

• Sembene's God's Pieces of Wood
• Conde's Tituba
• Mudimbe's The Rift
• Warner Vieyra's As the Sorcerer Said
• Ba's So Long a letter

Week 13:
Blasphemous letters
Is it possible in one's quest for identity to remain passionately and unconditionally loyal to so-called cultural imperatives while at the same time being true to oneself? Can the post-colonial subject write with no apology?

• Conde's Tituba
• Reda Bensmaia's The Year of Passages

Week 14:
Presentations

Week 15:
Conclusion