This dissertation argues for an alternative history of postcolonial literature anchored in the cultural exchanges of Africa and Asia. The project claims a strong, but tenuous Africa-China imaginary emerged during 1960s decolonization through the Afro-Asian Writers' Bureau founded in 1957. Analysis of their anthologies of world literature reveals an early crystallization of a postcolonial aesthetic rooted in Afro-Asian expressions of solidarity. As a result, the Bureau's Sino-Soviet split in 1966 would magnify Africa as a contested ground of "literary" realpolitik. This dissertation locates the emergence of postcolonial literature outside of a colony's relationship to a colonial metropole. Also, it reexamines Cold War literary networks from a postcolonial perspective. African engagement with Chinese literary theory thereby yields a provocative South-to-South vector of decolonization's aesthetic history.

Former French President Charles de Gaulle's famous claim that Belgian bande dessinée character Tintin was his only international rival speaks to the ubiquity of bandes dessinées in the francophone world while underlining their participation in imperial cultural hegemony. Similarly, in Peau noire, Masques blancs, Frantz Fanon also highlights the popularity of European bandes dessinées in the francophone world and observes the negative psychological impact of such texts on non-European readers who identify with Western explorer characters rather than with the racialized stereotypical images of non-European characters. One major factor for this is that the emergence and development of French and Belgian bandes dessinées took place during the height of European colonialism; bandes dessinées subsequently drew from and participated in a visual culture--such as travel postcards, brochures and keepsakes from colonial expositions, and in particular advertisements for exotic goods such as Banania--that helped construct the European imaginary of Africa. Moreover, bandes dessinées published in France and Belgium were exported to the colonial territories with the mission civilisatrice. This dissertation analyzes how contemporary cartoonists seek to disrupt the continued prevalence of colonial iconography in mainstream European bandes dessinées through satire and through experimentation with the limits of this medium. The goal is to demonstrate how such texts combat Western stereotypes of Africa and how they reconfigure European imperialist discourses to generate new modes of thinking about and representing sub-Saharan Africa.

Though many sub-Saharan African bandes dessinées are didactic in nature and subject to censorship, there are two genres to which contemporary African cartoonists seem to gravitate: autobiographical bandes dessinées that focus on quotidian life and lived-experiences and journalistic bandes dessinées that foreground postcolonial violence. Chapters one and two center on the first genre in the work of Gabonese cartoonist Pahé and in the Aya de Yopougon series by Ivorian Marguerite Abouet and French Clément Oubrerie. Chapter three shifts focus to an investigation of the long-lasting sociopolitical effects of European colonialism in central Africa in the work of Belgian cartoonist Jean-Philippe Stassen with particular attention paid to his work on the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and its continuing aftermath.

“'French-ish’: Liminal Identities in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana” examines the role of cross-media, hyper-contemporary folklore performances in the crystallization of national and regional identity. Due to their status as France’s only Caribbean overseas departments (DOMs), Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana are politically French. However, a fraught history and complex local reality create tension with French Republican ideals. As a result, questions of nationality are incredibly complex and this region occupies a liminal status I term “French-ish.” A dialogue of the theoretical works of Benedict Anderson, Homi K. Bhabha, Etienne Balibar, Pierre Nora, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, and Lydie Moudileno has proven essential in unpacking this complex positioning. The resulting framework illuminates not only how this liminal identity functions and is perpetuated, but also the key role that folklore performances play in its perpetuation.

The Introduction provides a broad discussion of nationhood, the history of folklore in the region, and my project. The first chapter then applies this framework to the region, illustrating how remembering and forgetting by different groups create competing national narratives that forge the liminal, French-ish positionality. The second chapter provides a detailed description of the modern folklore performances—spanning books, Spotify, YouTube videos, social media, online publications, festivals, interviews, and more—that comprise my corpus, highlighting the ways that these performances are evolving. The third chapter analyzes the impact of these shifts in medium, arguing that modern iterations are ultimately less intersubjective and therefore meaning relies more on the performer’s intent. The fourth chapter examines individual performances, finding that regional “insiders” use Creole folklore primarily as a site of remembering while metropolitan French “outsiders” use it as a site of forgetting. The final chapter argues that, while globalization and capitalism influence all modern performances, tales told by insiders for outsiders are especially commodified. Ultimately, the application of my framework shows folklore’s function as a site or commodity both within and outside nationhood to reinforce, reify, and/or subvert Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana’s French-ish-ness.

"Display on Display: Migrating Identities in Contemporary Francophone Literature and Music" examines Francophone cultural works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that grapple with constructions of sub-Saharan African immigrant identity in France. Its cultural studies methodology responds to a current lacuna in traditional philology-based literary studies that divorces literary expression from its wider cultural context, bringing to the fore questions of corporeality, history, and identity formation. The texts this project analyzes--broadly defined to include literature, music, fashion, dance, and visual art--lay bare the ways in which articulations of alterity, paradoxically, helped to solidify images of Frenchness. The works, I argue, critique rigid notions of identity in two principal ways. The texts examined in the first half of this study--by Didier Daeninckx, J. R. Essomba, Salif Ke�ta, and Me�way--call into question how 1990s French political discourse ignored the ways in which the larger histories of colonization and the slave trade laid the foundation for contemporary migratory pathways. By resuscitating these historical moments in conjunction with sub-Saharan African immigration, the works call into question immigrants' exclusion from historically-based notions of national identity. Yet by associating the black body with these historical moments, these works risk suggesting that there exists a homogeneous black community in France that would share such histories. In the second half of this study, thus, I turn to more recent works by Alain Mabanckou and L�onora Miano that both establish and question the existence of a black community in France (and its relationship to diaspora and origin), scrutinizing the criteria upon which such a community would be based. Each of the works selected for this study also exposes how specters of the borders the immigrant figures cross are remapped onto the landscape in which cultural objects (including the texts themselves) circulate. Keenly attuned to the generic classifications--"Francophone," "world music," and "African immigrant literature," among others--that package them and their authors, the works (just like this project) ultimately seek to transcend such disciplinary boundaries.

This dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary approach to ask why in Senegal, home of president-poet Léopold Sédar Senghor and host to two World Black Arts Festivals, theater appears so drastically reduced from the heights of what critics consider the "Golden Age" of Culture of the 1960s and 70s. In fact, theatrical production within this country has become something of a blind spot in the fields of Literary and Performance Studies, since textual analyses and performance fieldwork both prove essential to understanding how theatrical practice is conceived, produced and transmitted within this West African country and former colony. From a contemporary perspective, written texts for stage production, especially published ones, are scant and rarely come to performance, a fact that has called many to declare the apparent death of theatrical practices in Senegal. However, research on the ground reveals that the very term theater takes on a rather different meaning within this country, generally encompassing a more popular, community-based approach and often displaying an unreserved and conscious embrace of non-textual, collective and at times seemingly plagiaristic approaches to drama.

Here we will explore archival material and oral histories, using performance fieldwork and textual analysis to discover how artists and performers have come to craft the Senegalese stage - official and otherwise - as it exists today. This will include a discussion of the influence of pedagogical discourses and disputing models of Culture in Senegalese theater, as well as how these are circumvented through performance. This work focuses on pivotal places and events in the crafting of the Senegalese stage, with chapters on pedagogical reform and performance at the Ecole William Ponty; Léopold Sédar Senghor and André Malraux's complementary views and uses of Culture and the staging of these through the theater of the 1966 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar, as read against the 1969 Festival Panafricain d'Alger; as well as contemporary efforts to craft a subversive and activist form of theater operating along global and transnational networks.

“Memorializing the Genocide of the Tutsi Through Literature, Song, and Performance” examines how the 1994 Rwandan genocide has been commemorated in literature, music, and theater performances. Over the past twenty years, in the goal of reconciliation, the Rwandan government has developed a single acceptable narrative of the atrocity; this discourse is enacted and perpetuated through cultural practices (such as yearly commemoration events and marches) and through selective silencing (discussions of ethnicity are illegal in Rwanda). Far from smoothing over the troubles of the past, this rewriting of Rwandan history creates a set of complex challenges for the scholar seeking to interpret representations of genocide, particularly insofar as the cultural texts in question produce counter narratives that question both the official story and their own capacity to represent the trauma of ethnic cleansing.

Literature has been the main focus of Rwandan cultural studies post-1994 (particularly the work of the Ecrire par devoir de m?moire project). My first chapter participates in and simultaneously contests this narrow focus by analyzing how novels about the genocide – Le pass? devant soi by Gilbert Gatore and Murambi: Le livre des ossements by Boubacar Boris Diop – suggest the insufficiency of the written word and, by extension, the urgent need to turn to other media. In subsequent chapters, I focus on two alternative cultural vectors – music and theater – forms that can perform commemoration in ways that literature cannot. The second chapter focuses on musical works performed at the 20th-anniversary commemoration ceremonies (known as Kwibuka20). Although they hew closely to government rhetoric, the lyrics, when read attentively, reveal a far more ambiguous narrative, particularly in their treatment of perpetrators and the supposed inevitability of the genocide. Finally, I turn my attention to theater, which, like music, was highlighted in 2014 and is also capable of reaching a wider population. By comparing these recent plays to previous commemorative productions, I demonstrate how the narrative of genocide continues to change in compelling and often unexpected ways.

“Authorship, Audience, and Authenticity: Strategies of Meta-Representation in Contemporary African Arts” examines the ways artists, filmmakers, and authors from Cameroon, Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo represent themselves, their art, and the influence of their work within a contemporary, global network of the arts in Africa. As an interdisciplinary study at the intersection of cultural studies, film studies, art history, and literary analysis, this project draws from a broad range of contemporary media such as literature, academic essays, interviews, works of philosophy, documentary film, YouTube videos, and painting so as to understand how strategies of meta-representation are used to depict the pressures of authenticity and the process of artistic production in contemporary African works. A comparative methodology that combines multiple mediums of artistic production allows for broader discussion of the challenges of authenticity in African art. Additionally, such an approach responds to a gap in current scholarship on African metafiction and studies that consider the techniques of meta-representation across art forms. The first chapter analyzes three novels— La Promesse des fleurs by Patrice Nganang, African Psycho by Alain Mabanckou, and Je vous souhaite la pluie by Elizabeth Tchoungui—in order to understand how these authors employ metafictional devices to depict the production, reception, and objectives of literature. The second chapter examines the films of Jean-Marie T�no, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, and various Internet and television productions to demonstrate how African filmmakers use representations of cinema in order to grapple with the future of filmmaking on the African continent. Finally, the third chapter studies paintings included in two exhibitions, Beaut� Congo and Jeunes Regards Urbains II, to demonstrate how works of contemporary African art represent their own history and reception in an international art market. Looking to works of literature, art, and film that stage artistic production, I argue that representations of the arts found within African cultural productions provide the viewer or reader privileged access to the artistic process and offer a distinctive and multifaceted vision of the literary, cinematic, and artistic environments in Africa today.

My dissertation investigates questions of education in the discourses and representations employed by writers from Central and West Africa who work in the French language. In my project, I question not only the ways education, including French language acquisition and literary pedagogy, continues to be affected by its colonial foundations, but also how this education is reproduced socially in cultural productions and concepts of identity by writers both in France and across Africa. The first chapter examines the ways francophone African women writers subvert the generic form and traditional themes of the roman � formation to reflect the gendered obstacles girls faces to obtain an education. In the second chapter, I present the history of two petites revues (little magazines) produced and published by Congolese writers to demonstrate how they employed literary techniques and didactic discourses to furnish new cultural spaces in the years leading up to independence. The third chapter investigates the use of educational discourses during the debates sparked by the “Pour une litt�rature-monde en fran�ais” manifesto published in Le Monde by the leading writers in the French-speaking world. Lastly, the final chapter analyzes the status of African arts exhibited in French museums since colonialism through the cinematic productions engaging these issues in this type of setting.

I posit that the colonial education system created a network of mobility allowing students and instructors from France and the colonies to move around the empire. After decolonization, alternate networks of mobilities developed, including relocation for educational or vocational training and clandestine migration. My dissertation incorporates governmental and journalistic archival materials as well as critical readings of literary texts by francophone writers of African origin who record these networks. By focusing on the ways literary pedagogy and educational institutions were incorporated into colonial operations in dialogue with postcolonial literary texts, I demonstrate how French literature both assisted colonial expansion and became the primary mode of cultural representation to document the continuity of mobilities between France and Africa.