Christopher Hogarth

Autobiography in the Language Classroom

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways that autobiography can be used across language curricula. It begins by presenting ways that autobiography can be manipulated in a beginning language course to further students’ reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. It then presents an upper-level course in autobiography, detailing the course content, philosophy, and assessment materials.

Introduction: Mobility across media in the Francophone world:

This introduces the special issue on mobility across media in various areas of the Francophone world. Articles treat the notion of mobility as understood in film, literature, visual art and advertising and explore how genres as well as national traditions intersect. They explore a range of representations of mobility, such as the mobility between people, between genres, between languages, between artistic forms and between texts across historical periods. We show that the terminology regarding movement is constantly mobile itself, having undergone significant slippage in recent decades. Overall, this volume does not seek to arrest, but to add to, the understanding of the diverse modes of mobility present in the contemporary world.

A liminal staging of pan-Africanism: Shifts in messages on migration from Abasse Ndione’s Mbëkë mi to Moussa Touré’s La Pirogue

This article examines the adaptation from book to film of a recent Senegalese tale of clandestine migration by boat. Abasse Ndione’s Mbëkë mi (2008) foregrounds the motivations for migration for Senegalese youth and provokes readers’ sympathy for its migrating characters. It uses a heteroglossic lexicon which is nevertheless anchored in the French language on which the author must rely in order to publish his message. Moussa Touré’s film La Pirogue, by contrast, although sponsored by agents promoting francophonie, includes French and African languages in equal measure. This article examines the ethnic, religious and linguistic differences that the film points up as it represents contemporary migration.

Editors' Introduction: Interrogating Scandal

‘Scandale’ was the theme of a series of 2017 plays staged by the “Paris des Femmes” troupe. Anne Rotenborg, the troupe’s director, invited nine female playwrights to compose short pieces with a limited number of actors based upon this theme. Playwrights included Le€ıla Slimani, Marie Nimier, Christine Angot, Sylvie Germain, and Nancy Huston. As Carole Fr echette notes in her introduction to the published volume of the plays, the playwrights were initially confused over the meaning and parameters of the word ‘scandale.’ Some looked for a dictionary definition of “scandale,” she writes, and found “grave affaire malhonnête, honteuse, qui a un grand retentissement dans le public... querelle bruyante... fait qui heurte la conscience, le bon sens, la morale, suscite l’ emotion, la r evolte” (9–10). The playwrights slowly began to appropriate this slippery concept, “ a le retourner dans tous les sens.” The plays that resulted from this experimentation took different approaches to the notion of scandal, ranging from intimate affairs, to relationships undergoing dishonesty or betrayal, to representations of public shame and personal offence. Fr echette claims that scandal constitutes “l’app etit de notre monde” (11) and perceives a thirst for scandal in contemporary public and private life. She argues that scandals can range from “grandes affaires d’ Etat” to “affaires intimes.” Indeed, at the same time as the plays were being performed, presidential favorite François Fillon saw his campaign irreparably damaged by a scandal involving misuse of public funds regarding payments to his wife and children for allegedly fake jobs as his political assistants. “Penelopegate,” a perfect example of Fr echette’s scandalous “grande affaire d’ Etat” recalls the financial scandal that derailed Nicolas Sarkozy’s political campaign one year before. Fr echette writes that a Google search for “scandale” will generate around 20,200,000 results that range from private to public scandals and contain, beyond references to Donald Trump’s latest comments, references to controversial bra collections, athletes’ artificially inflated muscles, technical

The Nature of Scandal in Alain Mabanckou's Work

ABSTRACT This article investigates the manner in which the most-discussed contemporary Francophone African intellectual, Alain Mabanckou, is considered a figure of scandal, first by comparing him to previous scandalous figures in the Francophone arena (Ouologuem, Beyala) then by discussing his interventions regarding the political commitment of the writer. This is followed by a discussion of Mabanckous use of new media, prize systems, and his role as writer-critic-academic, which have contributed to the creation of a unique platform from which to generate scandal.

Translating Africa to Italians: Mediating a presence

ABSTRACT Collaborations between African immigrants in Italy and Italian writers led to the production of several socio-literary works in the early 1990s. The Italian contributors appear to have acted as linguistic experts who allowed (often Francophone) Africans to place representations of their lives and those of other immigrants in Italy into Italian discourse. The fruits of these collaborations are thus, to some extent, translations of oral stories. The collaboration between Saidou Moussa Ba and Alessandro Micheletti, which led to the novel/educational manual La promessa di Hamadi, is examined in order to tease out the process and consequences of such intercultural collaborative translation.

Nomadic Francophonie, Francophone Nomads: The Case of the Senegalese Novel

Il me semble que si je disais que Christopher Hogarth a travaillé sur la « littérature sénégalaise », je régresserais intellectuellement dans la mesure où son travail m’a précisément offert les outils conceptuels nécessaires à une radicale réévaluation de ce que j’entendais par ces mots-là. Pour reprendre les distinctions que Michel de Certeau établit dans L’Invention du quotidien, cette thèse intitulée « Maladies of Migration in the Senegalese Novel » nous apprend comment passer de ce « lieu » qu’est « la littérature sénégalaise » à un « espace », c’est-à-dire non plus un territoire clos mais un « lieu pratiqué » faits de récits de voyage, de déplacement et de migration qui aident et forcent les protagonistes à redéfinir la frontière (Certeau 173). Si le « lieu » de la littérature sénégalaise nous oblige, malgré nos réticences, à parler de « propre », de pays d’origine et de migrant, de langue nationale et de langue de l’exil, de postcolonisation et de métropole, « l’espace » qui s’ouvre dans ces chapitres ne ré-imagine pas un nouveau Sénégal postcolonial mais se demande ce qui est guéri et ce qui est rendu malade par les récits de voyage qui inventent leur propre « économie scripturaire » (Certeau 915). La thèse de Hogarth repère patiemment les symptômes culturels et poétiques qui se manifestent dans l’écriture et dans nos lectures lorsque le « fou » de L’Aventure ambiguë de Cheikh Hamidou Kane converse avec Le Docker noir d’Ousmane Sembene ou avec le narrateur du Cavalier et son ombre de Boubacar Boris Diop, lorsque la Belgique de la narratrice du Baobab Fou de Ken Bugul entre en collision avec l’Italie de Saidou Moussa Ba (La Promessa di Hamadi). La cartographie de cet « espace » transnational et translinguistique n’est pas une entreprise euphorique puisque le critique met plus volontiers l’accent sur les «maladies »