Description:
Negro-African literature in French is one of a number of appellations most commonly used to describe a body of literary texts written in French by Africans and those of African descent from roughly 1920 onward. Discussing the numerous other terms that have been used to designate the same body of texts (Colonial literature, Black literature, literature of Negritude), Jack explores the complex relationship between how literatures are named and how they are evaluated. The first thorough study of the history and criticism of Negro-African literature in French, this work gives an account of the development of a critical discourse and its influence on primary texts.
Brief description:
BELINDA ELIZABETH JACK is Lecturer in French at Christ Church, University of Oxford. She has been appointed British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow at the European Humanities Research Centre in Oxford. She is the author of An Introduction to Francophone Literatures.
Review Quotes: "Jack's book is a useful survey for anyone interested in the development not just of French-African literature, but of African literature or postcolonial literature in general, serving to show the long-standing nature of contemporary debates such as the problematic of writing in the language of the former colonizer. By historicizing the term Negritude and placing it within wider textual and cultural contexts, Jack's book serves as a corrective to the less generative and more typical approach of attempting to artificially fix the term in Paris in the 1930's."-Journal of Third World Studies