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From Negritude to Afrodiaspora: Multidimensional Resonances of Africanness

Fall, Alioune Badara
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1624877369080968

Abstract Details

2021, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, French and Italian.
Concepts such as race, ethnicity and cultural origin, have always been foundational in representations of cultural identities in African Literature. While these cultural concepts enabled early African writers, among whom the Negritude generation, to express transcultural articulations of racial identity, the later generations, some of whom can be identified as Migritude writers, have been presented as transnational writers whose individual experiences with migration dominate their representations of cultural identity in Africa and the Black Diasporas. Rather than framing race, ethnicity and cultural origin as essentialist and divisive cultural constructs, the prominence of mobility in contemporary African literature enables a transcultural conception of African identities. This conception of Africanness is based on a transnational understanding of race, ethnicity and origin as markers of cultural heterogeneity in the contemporary representation of African identities and encourages the preservation of cultural particularities in the Global black diaspora. Through a comparative textual analysis of four case studies from Francophone and Anglophone contexts, this dissertation questions discourses of cultural sameness and revisits the representation of the concept of Africanness in contemporary African literature. While I contend that– Alain Mabanckou’s Bleu Blanc Rouge (1998), Daniel Biyaoula’s l’Impasse (1996), Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) – capture the African immigrant experience, I argue that the mobility of their black protagonists conveys a transcultural conception of Africanness. This representation of Africanness, theorized in twentieth century Negritude discourse, probes heterogenous descriptions of hybridity and shows how cultural difference contributes to transnational cultural productions between Africa and its Black diasporas. Thus, race, ethnicity and origin are fundamental components of a discourse of hybridity that discounts the coloniality of cultural sameness and promotes the prevalence of cultural difference. This argument offers a critique of modern perceptions of hybridity that deny how African cultures are mobile and permeate the frontiers of the Global North and challenges the modern racialist understanding of race and ethnicity as the foundation of the nation-state. This transnational conception of Africanness demonstrates how African cultures are transposable and shift our conceptions of race, place and scale. The movement of African protagonists to the Global North in these four novels disrupts the constructions of the Global North and the Global South as center and periphery and changes the cultural perceptions of identities in Global urban settings. This transnational paradigm shows that local and global constructions of cultural identity are not mutually exclusive and entail different cultural categories that present contemporary cultural identities as translocal. Yet, this translocation cannot just be limited to representations of cultural dynamics in the Global North because the African continent has always constituted a central place of cultural transformation. Therefore, Africanness is grounded on endogenous cultural systems, that include but are not limited to, Afrophone languages, literatures and cultural systems which form a constitutive part of transnational cultural productions in the continent and its diasporas.
Lucille Toth (Committee Co-Chair)
Adeleke Adeeko (Committee Co-Chair)
203 p.
African Studies
Africanness, Migritude, Afrodiaspora, Hybridity, Coloniality, Transculturalism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Fall, A. B. (2021). From Negritude to Afrodiaspora: Multidimensional Resonances of Africanness [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1624877369080968

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Fall, Alioune . From Negritude to Afrodiaspora: Multidimensional Resonances of Africanness. 2021. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1624877369080968.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Fall, Alioune . "From Negritude to Afrodiaspora: Multidimensional Resonances of Africanness." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1624877369080968

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1624877369080968
© 2021, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License From Negritude to Afrodiaspora: Multidimensional Resonances of Africanness by Alioune Badara Fall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.