Djibril Diop Mambéty, Sony Labou Tansi, and the Recourse to the Imaginary

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the imaginary and political engagement in two experimental Francophone African works: Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki and Sony Labou Tansi’s La Vie et demie. Rather than explicating the political motives for writing and filming imaginatively, this paper analyzes the effect that experimental postcolonial fictions have on their viewers and readers. It argues that the concept of as-if imagining offers new synthetic ground between aesthetic and political projects that are often perceived to be in tension with one another.

Keywords:

• Francophone Africa
• imaginary
• Mambéty
• Sony Labou Tansi

Notes

Notes

1 See Armstrong, Paul B. “The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Iser’s Aesthetic Theory.” New Literary History, vol. 31, no. 1, 2000, pp. 211–223, for more on Iser’s theory of play and the social function of literature.

2 See Henry, Paget. “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications.” Clr James Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, 2005, pp. 79–112.

3 Sony Labou Tansi was convinced that literature should not be confused with propaganda: “La maladresse même belle de répéter sept fois le mot peuple dans un poème ne rendra pas le poème engagé mais simplement alourdi, ou médiocre” (“L’Écrivain”).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michaela Hulstyn

Michaela Hulstyn is Assistant Professor of French at Florida State University (Ph.D. Stanford, 2016). She works on cognitive and philosophical approaches to French and Francophone literature. Her book project, Altered States and Narrative Unselfing in Global French Literature, explores the twentieth-century narrative models that writers use to communicate altered states of selfhood. She has previously been published in MLN and Women in French Studies.