Désastre civilisateur : « L’Art de vaincre sans avoir raison »

Abstract

In his internationally renowned Ambiguous Adventure, the Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane recounts the Europeans’ “unruly art of conquest” in causing a “civilizing disaster.” How were the Diallobé people to survive the French occupation? Paradoxically, it was by sending their children to their school so that they could learn about that “unruly art.” Due to the autobiographical nature of his writing, the assumption can be made that this “unruly art” was also learned by Kane, who ended up making it his writing signature. With this in mind, literary plurilingualism, through which Kane reached the art of alternative reason, becomes the focus of this study.

Keywords:

• Plurilingualism in literature
• language contacts
• multilingual poetics
• literary linguistic
• cultural transpositions
• contemplative reading

Notes

1 Ndeye Bâ, “Le Plurilinguisme dans L’Aventure ambiguë de Cheikh Hamidou Kane.” Les Cahiers du GRELCEF, vol. 2, 2011, pp. 283–295.

2 Donald R. Wehrs, “Colonialism, Polyvocality, and Islam in L’Aventure ambiguë and Le Devoir de violence.” MLN, vol. 107, no. 5, 1992, pp. 1000–1027. 

3 Mbaye Diouf, “L’Islam en termes chrétiens: Quand L’aventure ambiguë ‘croise’ Pascal et Saint Augustin.” Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature, vol. 67, no. 1, 2006, pp. 44–58.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lydie E. Meunier

Lydie Meunier is a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Tulsa, in Oklahoma. She teaches linguistics applied to translation and to language pedagogy, as well as courses on cinema and literature from the African diaspora. With her work situated at the crossroads of linguistics and literature, Dr. Meunier has recently taken on a new area of research, exploring the notion of literary plurilingualism of post-colonial texts.