Birth of a Nation? The Origins of Senegalese Literature in French

Bibliographic Data

ID9250852
AuthorsDavid Murphy (0000-0002-2445-7799)
Year2008
Volume39
Issue1
Pages48-69
Publication date2008-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/ral.2008.39.1.48
OpenAlexW2016624504
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited18

Although most critics chart Senegalese literary history from the 1930s and the rise of Negritude, there also exist a small number of texts from the 1850s-1020s that are usually classified as a sort of proto-Senegalese literature. This article focuses on Abbé David Boilat's Esquisses sénégalaises (1853) and Bakary Diallo's Force-bonté (1926), both of which occupy a deeply ambiguous position within the national literary canon because of their open support for French colonialism. The article contends that the status of these texts as key works in the Senegalese national canon rests on a specific vision of their Franco-African "hybridity." By questioning the value and the limitations of the notion of "hybridity" in relation to colonialism and nationalism in Senegal, the article aims to discover whether these texts by Boilat and Diallo might be deemed to signal the birth of a nation or the birth of a colony

Art · Canon · Colonialism · Ethnology · Genealogy · History of literature · Hybridity · Literature · Nationalism · Political science · Relation (database) · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · African history and culture studies · African Studies and Ethnography · Anthropology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Law

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