Doyle Calhoun
Biographic Data
| ID | 668513 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Doyle Calhoun |
| GIVEN NAMES | Doyle |
| FAMILY NAME | Calhoun |
| SIGNATURE | CALHOUN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5998-8215 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Caroline Séquin, Desiring Whiteness
Senegalese New(s) Media
Considered a staple of the French press since at least the nineteenth century, the fait divers —a catch-all category for short, often sensational news items such as murders, petty crimes, and suicides—has been taken up and transformed in West African cultural production. This essay focuses on the transformations and transpositions of the fait divers tradition in the work of Senegalese writer Aminata Maïga Ka (1940–2005), arguing that her short st…
A Kind of Literary Archeology
Slavery persisted in Morocco well into the twentieth century and throughout the French Protectorate (1912-56), long after it was abolished in other French-occupied territories (1848). While work by historians has illuminated a previously shadowy history of race and slavery in Morocco, less attention has been paid to the growing corpus of literary texts representing enslaved subjectivities under the Protectorate. Through their literary excavations…
The book of lonely idea(l)s
Notes1 Kane, L'Aventure ambiguë, 111.2 Ibid., 121.3 Ibid., 125.4 Jackson, The African Novel of Ideas, 147.5 Ibid., 147.6 Ibid., 145, 147.7 De Man, "The Resistance to Theory," 4.8 Jackson, The African Novel of Ideas, 175, 180.9 Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood, 8.10 Ibid., 9.11 Calhoun, The Suicide Archive.12 Jackson, The African Novel of Ideas, 20.13 Ibid., 188.14 Julien, "The extroverted African novel"; see also Julien, "The extroverted African …
Looking for Diouana Gomis (1927–58)
Nearly all analyses of Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de... (Voltaïque, 1962) and its eponymous film adaptation (1966) mention the fact that Sembène found inspiration for his text and film in a French newspaper report of a real suicide. However, scholars have not tracked down a copy of the original report or excavated the history of Diouana Gomis, the real woman whose suicide in 1958—on the heels of the 1958 Referendum and on the eve of Seneg…
Dead Narrators, Queer Terrorists
Even as suicide bombing attacks have become a disturbingly regular feature of today's geopolitical landscape, the phenomenon continues to figure an upper limit to thinking on contemporary violence. As psychoanalyst Jacqueline Rose writes in The Last Resistance , suicide bombing is considered "a peculiarly monstrous, indeed inhuman, aberration that cannot—or indeed must not—be understood."1 Although statistically, Rose points out, suicide bombings…
Unearthing the Subtext of Slavery in Zola's Germinal
On the surface, Zola’s Germinal (1885) has little to say about France’s non-European ‘others’, despite the facts that the coal industry and late-nineteenth-century imperial expansion were linked and the rise of the beet-sugar industry in Europe led to the eventual call for labourers of colour in France. Nonetheless, the subtexts of colonialism and slavery surface in the text via the tropes of colonial metaphor and metonymy. When Zola suggests the…
(Im)possible Inscriptions
This essay examines the tensions between inscription and voice, silence and servitude, that are staged in Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de... (1962) and its eponymous film adaptation (1966). In contrast to existing scholarship on La Noire de..., I center my reading on the space of suicide itself—the bathtub and the interior space of the bathroom—which I show to be a highly symbolic site, charged with meanings. Taking up Gayatri Spivak’s char…
Fanon's Lexical Intervention
This essay provides a subtly new reading of Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs ( Black Skin, White Masks; 1952) through a re-examination of one of its key terms: noirceur, or 'blackness'. While noirceur slips easily into English translation as Blackness, it was never available or viable in French as a way to speak about Black identity, at least not before Fanon. Hence the need for Negritude. By considering Fanon's use of noirceur as a case…
Colonial collectors
Missionaries collected and, in many cases, were instructed to collect not only linguistic data but also cultural artifacts and natural scientific specimens of various kinds. In doing so, they became motors of European “arm-chair” science and museum culture, supplying European universities and scientific institutions with curiosities and rarities from the colonies. What is the relationship between colonial collection practices and doing linguistic…
Small Dictionaries and Curiosity
Looking for Diouana Gomis (1927–58)
Nearly all analyses of Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de... (Voltaïque, 1962) and its eponymous film adaptation (1966) mention the fact that Sembène found inspiration for his text and film in a French newspaper report of a real suicide. However, scholars have not tracked down a copy of the original report or excavated the history of Diouana Gomis, the real woman whose suicide in 1958—on the heels of the 1958 Referendum and on the eve of Seneg…
Colonial collectors
Missionaries collected and, in many cases, were instructed to collect not only linguistic data but also cultural artifacts and natural scientific specimens of various kinds. In doing so, they became motors of European “arm-chair” science and museum culture, supplying European universities and scientific institutions with curiosities and rarities from the colonies. What is the relationship between colonial collection practices and doing linguistic…
Small Dictionaries and Curiosity
(Im)possible Inscriptions
This essay examines the tensions between inscription and voice, silence and servitude, that are staged in Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de... (1962) and its eponymous film adaptation (1966). In contrast to existing scholarship on La Noire de..., I center my reading on the space of suicide itself—the bathtub and the interior space of the bathroom—which I show to be a highly symbolic site, charged with meanings. Taking up Gayatri Spivak’s char…
Fanon's Lexical Intervention
This essay provides a subtly new reading of Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs ( Black Skin, White Masks; 1952) through a re-examination of one of its key terms: noirceur, or 'blackness'. While noirceur slips easily into English translation as Blackness, it was never available or viable in French as a way to speak about Black identity, at least not before Fanon. Hence the need for Negritude. By considering Fanon's use of noirceur as a case…
Unearthing the Subtext of Slavery in Zola's Germinal
On the surface, Zola’s Germinal (1885) has little to say about France’s non-European ‘others’, despite the facts that the coal industry and late-nineteenth-century imperial expansion were linked and the rise of the beet-sugar industry in Europe led to the eventual call for labourers of colour in France. Nonetheless, the subtexts of colonialism and slavery surface in the text via the tropes of colonial metaphor and metonymy. When Zola suggests the…
Looking for Diouana Gomis (1927–58)
Nearly all analyses of Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de... (Voltaïque, 1962) and its eponymous film adaptation (1966) mention the fact that Sembène found inspiration for his text and film in a French newspaper report of a real suicide. However, scholars have not tracked down a copy of the original report or excavated the history of Diouana Gomis, the real woman whose suicide in 1958—on the heels of the 1958 Referendum and on the eve of Seneg…
Dead Narrators, Queer Terrorists
Even as suicide bombing attacks have become a disturbingly regular feature of today's geopolitical landscape, the phenomenon continues to figure an upper limit to thinking on contemporary violence. As psychoanalyst Jacqueline Rose writes in The Last Resistance , suicide bombing is considered "a peculiarly monstrous, indeed inhuman, aberration that cannot—or indeed must not—be understood."1 Although statistically, Rose points out, suicide bombings…
The book of lonely idea(l)s
Notes1 Kane, L'Aventure ambiguë, 111.2 Ibid., 121.3 Ibid., 125.4 Jackson, The African Novel of Ideas, 147.5 Ibid., 147.6 Ibid., 145, 147.7 De Man, "The Resistance to Theory," 4.8 Jackson, The African Novel of Ideas, 175, 180.9 Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood, 8.10 Ibid., 9.11 Calhoun, The Suicide Archive.12 Jackson, The African Novel of Ideas, 20.13 Ibid., 188.14 Julien, "The extroverted African novel"; see also Julien, "The extroverted African …
Senegalese New(s) Media
Considered a staple of the French press since at least the nineteenth century, the fait divers —a catch-all category for short, often sensational news items such as murders, petty crimes, and suicides—has been taken up and transformed in West African cultural production. This essay focuses on the transformations and transpositions of the fait divers tradition in the work of Senegalese writer Aminata Maïga Ka (1940–2005), arguing that her short st…
A Kind of Literary Archeology
Slavery persisted in Morocco well into the twentieth century and throughout the French Protectorate (1912-56), long after it was abolished in other French-occupied territories (1848). While work by historians has illuminated a previously shadowy history of race and slavery in Morocco, less attention has been paid to the growing corpus of literary texts representing enslaved subjectivities under the Protectorate. Through their literary excavations…
Caroline Séquin, Desiring Whiteness
History (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · African history and culture studies (6 works) · Art (6 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Colonialism (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture (4 works) · History (4 works)