Romance Languages Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Romance Languages Theses and Dissertations by Subject "Africa"

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    BROKEN BOUNDARIES: ALTERNATIVE FUTURES IN WOMEN’S LITERATURE OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH (1984-2006)
    (University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Clementi, Jordan; Millar, Lanie
    DISSERTATION ABSTRACTTitle: Broken Boundaries: Alternative Futures in Women’s Literature of the Global South (1984-2006) How do Black women in the Global South envision alternative futures which subvert the prescribed patriarchal futures that dominate discourse? My dissertation examines the works of three Black authors from the Global South, specifically from Cameroon, Mozambique and Puerto Rico—Werewere Liking, Paulina Chiziane, and Mayra Santos-Febres, respectively—who write new futures in their works by redressing ways in which women are removed from narratives of the present and the past in order to build power to change the future. This dissertation seeks to join their works together through a deterritorialized understanding of the Global South, an economically marginalized space which exists in the unevenness of development across the globe. These writers explore ways in which they can challenge and subvert patriarchal boundaries placed on them to break them and redraw them as they see fit. Patriarchal systems oppress women and alternative solutions to social issues in various ways to maintain dominance. The works by these authors explicitly challenge that suppression; they succeed in breaking away by subverting language and expectations to find ways to sabotage dominant discourses. Each author intentionally reads genre, language, or cultural practice in a way which subverts dominant discourse and instead reads it in a way that benefits their needs. The primary outcome of this is that it redresses ways in which women are erased from narratives of the past and present, negating their creative solutions to present issues which not only affect them but everyone in the broader society. On top of that, these narratives then allow women to envision alternative futures which do not conform to the often grim and violent predictions of patriarchal discourse about the future. Their texts essentially demonstrate pathways which can be used to unwind the present and follow alternative routes into the future. My project attempts to demonstrate the diverse demonstrations of ingenuity which go into the vision of alternative futures and the ways that specific contexts can arrive at those futures through subversions of established genres, language, and cultural practices.
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    La Misère Intellectuelle dans quelques Fictions Cinématographiques et Littéraires de l'Afrique Subsaharienne
    (University of Oregon, 2013-10-10) Moneyang, Patrick; McPherson, Karen
    The deterioration of reason - defined as the faculty of thinking and its functioning in all human beings - is an essential question in Francophone Sub-Saharan literary and cinematographic fictions. This is one of many possible interpretations that can be derived from some novels and films produced during the period from 1950 to 2000 in this region. These cultural productions span an era marked in Africa by the "historical facts" of anticolonial struggles, decolonization, and (re) constructions of newly sovereign states that gained their independence from the European nations to which they had been subjected. The juxtaposition of these works leads to a critical realization: Half a century after the decolonization movements, African societies remain so dysfunctional that one is forced to ask if their inhabitants are still "normal," provided one can come to an agreement on what is normal. This speculation takes the form of a recurrent metaphor in the corpus: Africa is a continent ripped to shreds, irrevocably plunged into a dark night that has silenced reason. Taking up this metaphor, not only as a theme but also as a theoretical concern, I argue that the metaphoric uses of the night are an indication of a more critical reality, which is the intellectual journey of a population that has leapt into a state of impoverishment. I approach impoverishment both as the state of being deprived and the process leading to this deprivation, and I maintain my earlier characterization of intellectual as a synonym of reason. In this line, I describe intellectual impoverishment as the (progressive) loss of consciousness and rationality that befalls a large population of the continent. This loss is portrayed through the appearance and proliferation of various paradoxical figures that embody the "spiritual death" of the people. One portrayal of this death, the transformation of African populations into zombies, then serves to flesh out the concept of intellectual impoverishment. Thus, this dissertation investigates the socio-political processes through which critical thinking is annihilated in Sub-Saharan Africa, through an analysis of literary and cinematographic fictions by francophone authors of this region. This dissertation is written in French.