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Abstract
I came across Professor Palmer’s works as a student, and, as a professor, I have also used them in my courses. Imagining how students from a Francophone university used his theory of the African novel to further explore the rise of the Francophone novel, I use a letter format to reflect on two key aspects of Professor Palmer’s work: (1) the anthropological bias of the African novel and its Western lineage, (2) the way he describes his critical approach.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Richard Shawyer, Wisdom of the Sages: A Collection of Proverbs from Senegal Translated and Explained in English. 2009.
2 Shawyer.
3 Oupoh Bruno Gnaoulé. “Histoire, et littéraire et littératures africaines” Les Cahiers du GRELCEF. www.uwo.ca/french/grelcef/cahiers_intro.htm No 7. Le temps et l’espace dans la littérature et le cinéma Francophones contemporains. Mai 2015 p. 68.
4 Dorothy S. Blair, Senegalese Literature: A Critical History (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984) 36.
5 Blair 41.
6 Gnaoulé 72.
7 David Murphy, “Tirailleur, facteur, anticolonialiste: La courte vie militante de Lamine Senghor (1924-27)” Cahier d’Histoire: Revue d’Histoire critique (126: 2015) 16–17.
8 “La nouvelle pédagogie instituée à l’école William Ponty « qui, puisant son inspiration dans la plus pure tradition française, plonge dans la source profonde de la vie indigène » (Guy, 1934: 4). Les élèves maîtres devaient « travailler à faire connaître la nature et le passé de leur pays » par des devoirs de vacances ou mémoires portant sur la société africaine. Au plan politique, cette culture franco-africaine relevait en fait d’une stratégie qui, selon les mots de Paul Désalmand, « parlant du postulat de la supériorité de la civilisation européenne, visait non pas à valoriser les cultures africaines mais à les détruire ». De là découlera une production dramatique centrée sur la présentation révélatrice des moeurs indigènes, caractérisée au plan de l’écriture par le mimétisme des classiques français, et marquée du sceau de l’idéologie coloniale.” (Gnaoulé 69).
“The new pedagogy instituted at the William Ponty school ‘which, drawing its inspiration from the purest French tradition, plunges into the deep source of native life’ (Guy, 1934: 4). The student teachers had to ‘work to make known the nature and the past of their country’ by holiday assignments or memoirs on African society. On the political level, this Franco-African culture was in fact a strategy which, in the words of Paul Désalmand, ‘speaking of the postulate of the superiority of the European civilization, aimed not at valuing African cultures but at destroying them’. From this emerged a dramatic production centered on the revealing presentation of native customs, characterized in terms of writing by the mimicry of French classics, and marked by the seal of colonial ideology.”
According to Tobias Warner, this aspect of William Ponty’s pedagogy led to the supposition that ethnographic assignments may help elucidate the anthropological bias of the first African novelists. The fact that many of them were Ponty alumni—Bernard Dadié, Ousmane Socé Diop, Paul Hazoumé, Abdoulaye Sadji—led Leopold Senghor to dub early Francophone literature a literature of teachers.
9 Crystal Parikh, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019).
10 Susan Stanford Friedman. “Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading Narrative.” Narrative, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 12–23.
11 Cole 4.
12 Doreen Massey, “Concepts of Space and Power in Theory and in Political Practice” Doc. Anàl. Geogr. 55, 2009. 7.
13 Massey 22.
14 Massey 23.
15 Oupoh 69.
16 Dorothy Blair. Senegalese Literature: A Critical History, 32.
17 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2017) 1.
18 Levine7.
19 Palmer 6.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Oumar Chérif Diop
Oumar Chérif Diop is Professor of French and English at Kennesaw state University in Georgia, USA. His research deals with violence and trauma in postcolonial literatures. His recent publications include “Voices from the Margins: Female Protagonists Navigating Power-geometries.” (2020), “Happiness, The Wound and the Word: Aminatta Forna Joins the Conversation on Trauma (2019), Violence and trauma in Selected African literature (2018).