THE CULTURE AND LITERATURE OF THE SUB-SAHARAN AND NORTH AFRICAN (MAGHREBI) DIASPORA IN FRANCE

Dates: February 17, March 17, April 14, 2005
9 AM to 4 PM
11377 Bunche Hall, UCLA

This seminar will provide teachers with an invaluable opportunity to explore a broad range of cultural, social and political issues in contemporary France through texts and films in French. Seminar meetings will be conducted in French, thereby allowing teachers to achieve greater familiarity with the issues explored while also developing a critical vocabulary. Pedagogic concerns (teaching methodology, materials, resources, etc.) will be central to the seminar's structuring objectives.

France's history is now inextricably linked to Africa, from the "mission civilisatrice" and colonial schooling to "our ancestors the Gauls" and the Babar stories, from the war in Algeria to the "headscarf affair," and from the politics of Jean-Marie Le Pen to the emergence of African communities in France today.

Indeed, France's rejection of multiculturalism is due to what it perceives as the term's historical indebtedness to and inseparability from the American context, in which the accompanying discourses on civil and individual rights are seen as protecting citizens above and beyond the communitarian imperatives of the republican state. In France the primary concern remains the integrational, assimilationist drive toward the ambiguous ideal of "French-ness."

The colonial civilizing mission was premised on the attempt to create French cultural prototypes, whereas newly-formed French-Africans soon realized that this was an unattainable objective. Their status as colonized subjects and constructs forever precluded their access to some distant evolutionary point, much in the same way as today's ethnic minorities are relegated to the "banlieues." Such discourse is anchored in age-old colonial projections and stereotypes that symbiotically link diasporic Africans with what the media and certain politicians perceive as the "non-civilized" and "barbarous" practices associated with polygamy, excision and arranged marriages. These stereotypes in turn serve to justify the marginalization of these communities to the peripheries of urban centers. Ironically, the marginalization of these groups creates the very ghettos that the French perceive as the inevitable outcome of US multicultural politics.

All of these issues will be addressed through two novels (Le gone du Châaba by Azouz Begag and Le docker noir by Ousmane Sembene), one essay (Tahar Ben Jelloun, "Le racisme expliqué à ma fille") and three films (Le Gone du Chaâba, Salut Cousin, and La Haine).

Instructor: Professor Dominic Thomas, Department of French and Francophone Studies, UCLA. Author of Nation-Building, Propaganda and Literature in Francophone Africa and the forthcoming Black France.

Sponsored by the UCLA International Institute and its Centers for Near Eastern, African, and European and Eurasian Studies. Teachers As Scholars-Los Angeles is part of the national Teachers As Scholars program established and promoted by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.