Overview

Colonial Legacies in Francophone African Literature: The School and the Invention of the Bourgeoisie by Mohamed Kamara examines the representation of the colonial school and bourgeoisie in Francophone sub-Saharan literature. Mohamed Kamara contends that the so-called colonial bourgeoisie was invented by the colonizer through the school to perpetuate the ideology of the colonizer, and he interrogates the policies and practices of the school and the ways they were informed by discourses of racial difference. While many works, like those authored by Gadjigo and Alessandri, have interrogated the impact of the colonial school on the African individual and society, they do not focus on the relationship between colonial education and the emergence of the African bourgeois and bourgeoise. Accordingly, this book analyzes the various literary strategies used in selected texts to paint a portrait of the school and the class it produced in view of showing the organic relationship between the two. This book adds a fresh perspective on the intimate connection between the school and social transformation in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. Kamara suggests that the best solution for the continent resides in the continent’s ability to take what is good in its precolonial past and combine it with what makes sense in today’s reality.

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9781793644442

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Mohamed Kamara unleashes an inventory of terms – assimilation, cultural erasure, formation, mission, training – on a library of African literary works in order explore the symbiotic relationship between the colonial school and the emergence of a postcolonial bourgeois class. This culminates in a transcolonial analysis that sheds light on the impact of the French civilizing mission, a complex apparatus that provided the scaffolding upon which France’s empire was built. The historical legacies are relevant to contemporary debates on education and the imperative of decolonizing the curriculum, and underscore our collective responsibility when it comes to reassessing how institutions continue to shape mindsets, prevailing ideologies, and theories of race. -- Dominic Thomas, University of California, Los Angeles Mohamed Kamara presents a sophisticated analysis of the longue durée structured by the intersection between colonial education and class formation regarding its impact on the postcolonial West African nation-state. Colonial Legacies shows how the persistence of the colonial education system maintains a debilitating comprador bourgeoisie in power throughout West Africa that militates against sovereign national development and true independence. It is a long overdue examination of a critical aspect of imperialist legacies in Africa. -- James E. Genova, The Ohio State University

Author Information

Mohamed Kamara is professor of French and Africana Studies and chair of the Romance Languages Department at Washington and Lee University.

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