Xavier Luffin

Religious and secular Cape Malay Afrikaans: Literary varieties used by Shaykh Hanif Edwards (1906-1958)

In the context of the White and Christian-dominated Afrikaans language movements, followed by apartheid, little attention has been paid to an Afrikaans literary variety used among Muslim Cape Coloureds, a group often referred to as ‘Cape Malays’. Descending mainly from Asian slaves brought by the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company), and bearing the marks of cohabitation with non-Asian populations at the Cape, the Cape Malays at an early stage developed a distinct religious culture through their adherence to Islam, as well as a distinct Cape Dutch linguistic identity through their connections with the Dutch East Indies and the Islamic world. These cultural idiosyncrasies found expression in a local literature, religious and (more rarely) secular, using as a medium a variety of Cape Dutch/Afrikaans written either in the Arabic alphabet or in the Roman alphabet.

Sudanese Magical Realism: Another Kind of Resistance to the Colonial/Imperialist Power?

In a postcolonial perspective, magical realism is generally associated with Latin American literary production, even if the works of some African authors writing in English and in French are increasingly analysed in terms of magical realism. However, the impact of this literary movement on Arabic literature is still largely understudied. Sudan offers several examples of authors whose fiction could be considered as belonging to magical realism. A better understanding of Sudanese magical realism and its criticism in Arabic may reveal some shortcomings of the Euro-American theory and enlarge its definition. For instance, the idea that the social and political criticism of magical realism focuses on the West as a colonial agent does not fit the Sudanese examples: the Sudanese authors concentrate their criticism on national political powers, the colonial past being often secondary. A second example is the language: Euro-American criticism considers that African magical realism authors ‘africanize’ the languages of the former colonial powers, as a form of cultural revenge; however, the status of Arabic in Sudan cannot fit this theory. A third example: religious hybridity in Latin American and African magical realism is considered to result from the encounter between Christianity and local beliefs. But the Sudanese examples clearly underline the encounter between Islam and African beliefs, a dimension which is absent in Euro-American postcolonial criticism.

Senegalese, Gurkha, Sikh . . . : The French and British Colonial Troops in the Eyes of the Arab Writers

AbstractThe former great European colonial empires had incorporated soldiers recruited in their colonies into their armies. Several Arab authors from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Morocco remember them through their novels and short stories, giving us an interesting perception of the “Other”: strangers brought into the Arab world by other strangers. They also represent different negative faces of the colonial period: the exploitation of the indigenous population, the dilemma of Muslims forced to fight their brothers . . .