LAMACS

Olivette Otele

Paris, juillet 2008

La Grande-Bretagne a célébré le bicentenaire de l’abolition de la traite
en 2007.

Cette commémoration fut le moment que choisit le gouvernement
britannique pour amorcer un processus de rassemblement des sujets de Sa
Majesté sur la question de l’identité britannique (britishness) et sur
le multiculturalisme, tout en essayant de revaloriser une histoire
coloniale glorifiée par les nostalgiques de l’Empire ou contestée par
les communautés minoritaires, mais rarement porteuse de principes
unificateurs. Cet anniversaire intervient plus de quatre siècles après
que les premiers bateaux anglais aient sillonné les côtes africaines en
quête de marchandises diverses, comme des épices ou des esclaves. De
quelle manière cette nation, tournée vers ses cousins continentaux,
parvient-elle à se sortir du marasme économique dans lequel elle est
plongée au XVIIe siècle : guerres de succession européennes et conflits
religieux, pour devenir la première puissance maritime, économique et
négrière, en particulier au XVIIIe siècle ?

L’histoire coloniale de l’Angleterre commence avec l’annexion des
territoires qui lui étaient géographiquement proches. Incorporés à la
couronne anglaise, le pays de Galles et l’Irlande se voient obligés de
participer à la conquête anglaise, au-delà de la Méditerranée et
outre-Atlantique. Officiellement uni à l’Écosse par l’acte d’Union en
1707, le Royaume-Uni domine les mers au cours de la même période. En ce
qui concerne le commerce négrier, le royaume s’est inspiré des méthodes
utilisées par les Portugais et les Hollandais afin de supplanter la
France, sa principale concurrente dans le domaine de la traite.

Cette étude est une invitation à porter un regard nuancé sur l’histoire
de ce commerce, en allant au-delà des considérations économiques et en
naviguant dans les eaux troubles de l’abolition de 1807, afin de
comprendre de quelle manière l’écriture de l’histoire du commerce
triangulaire britannique a bien souvent évité de s’attarder sur la
question éthique que pose le commerce d’êtres humains.

Sonjah Stanley-Niaah

University of Ottawa Press, August 2010

DanceHall combines cultural geography, performance studies and cultural studies to examine performance culture across the Black Atlantic.

Taking Jamaican dancehall music as its prime example, DanceHall reveals a complex web of cultural practices, politics, rituals, philosophies, and survival strategies that link Caribbean, African and African diasporic performance.
Read the rest of this entry »

Afua Cooper

University of Georgia Press

The untold story of Canadian slavery and the burning of old Montréal

In 1734, Montréal burned. A slave woman, Marie-Joseph Angélique, was blamed for the fire. Born in Portugal, bought and sold into the United States, then to New France, where she was baptized anew and given her new name, she was said to have put hot embers in the roof of her mistress’s house to seek revenge for having been sold yet again. After a two-month trial she was found guilty and sentenced to have her hand cut off before she was burned alive.

Read the rest of this entry »

Alexie Tcheuyap

Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa

Les réécritures filmiques du roman africain francophone

De l’écrit à l’écran est le premier ouvrage qui aborde la problématique de la réécriture filmique du roman africain francophone. L’ouvrage est composé de deux parties indépendantes. Dans la première partie, l’auteur synthétise les oeuvres romanesques prééxistantes qui ont été adaptées a l’écran.

Dans la deuxième partie, qui s’articule sur trois temps, il se réfère aux idées de Comolli et de Habermas selon lesquelles la technologie et l’esthétique sont au service de l’idéologie pour allier culture et politique. L’auteur poursuit son argumentation en traitant de deux sujets particulièrement à propos: la place des femmes dans la société, la littérature et le cinéma africains, et l’aspect ludique dans ce cinéma complexe dans cette ère post-coloniale. Il se sert de la sémiologie de l’image, de la poétique et des théories post-coloniales pour définir les enjeux théoriques, idéologiques et sémantiques de la reprise filmique des textes littéraires. Il pose des paramètres importants dans la poétique de l’écriture et de la réécriture en montrant notamment le rôle de l’acte créateur dans l’altérite du texte d’arrivée dont la légitimite ne saurait tenir d’un média. L’ouvrage démontre que la réécriture est, de ce fait, transgénérique et transmédiatique.

Bryan Prince

2009, McClelland & Stewart

One enslaved family’s incredible struggle for freedom

An extraordinary story of one couple’s determination to free themselves and their children from slavery and make a new life in Canada. Prior to abolition in 1865, as many as 40,000 men, women, and children made the perilous trip north from enslavement in the United States to freedom in Canada. Many were aided by networks that came to be known as the Underground Railroad. And the stories that emerge from the past about these journeys are truly remarkable.

In A shadow on the household, Bryan Prince, a descendant of slaves, brings to life the heart-wrenching story of the Weems family and their struggle to liberate themselves from slavery. John Weems, a man who purchased his own freedom, paid the owner of his enslaved wife and eight children an annual fee to keep them together at one plantation. But when that owner died, the Weemses were cruelly separated and scattered throughout the South. Heartbroken and desperate, John resolved to raise the money to buy his family’s freedom and reunite them. Mining newspapers, private letters, diaries, estate records, marriage registries, and abolitionist papers for details of a story cloaked in secrecy, Bryan Prince has rescued the Weems family and their plight from historical oblivion.

An unforgettable story of love and persistence, played out in four countries (the United States, Canada, Jamaica, and the United Kingdom) against the backdrop of the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a growing abolitionist movement, and the heroic efforts of the Underground Railroad, the Weems family saga must be read to be believed.

Pierre Ndoumaï &

2007, Harmattan

Pourquoi les Noirs n’ont connu que l’expérience de la souffrance au cours de leur histoire récente? Comment expliquer le fait que tous les maux semblent s’être donné rendez-vous sur le continent noir? Comment expliquer l’assimilation du Noir au deuil, à la paresse, aux ténèbres? Le Dieu de la Bible n’est-il pas complice du sort des Noirs? L’auteur cherche à répondre avec rigueur méthodologique en faisant appel à l’exégèse biblique, l’histoire, l’anthropologie et la sociologie.

Nina Reid Maroney

2001, Greenwood Press

Kingdom of Christ, Empire of Reason

Rather than treating the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment as defining opposites in 18th century American culture, this study argues that the imperatives of the great revival actually shaped the pursuit of enlightened science. Reid-Maroney traces the interwoven histories of the two movements by reconstructing the intellectual world of the “Philadelphia circle.” Prophets of the Enlightenment had long tried to resolve pressing questions about the limitations of human reason and the sources of our knowledge about the created order of things. The leaders of the Awakening addressed those questions with a new urgency and, in the process, determined the character of the Enlightenment emerging in Philadelphia’s celebrated culture of science.

Tracing the influence of evangelical sensibility and the development of a Calvinist parallel to the philosophical skepticism of enlightened Scots, Reid-Maroney finds that the Philadelphians “love of science” rested on a radical critique of human reason, even while it acknowledged that reason was the “dignifying and distinguishing property of human nature.” Benjamin Rush alluded to an enlightenment wrought by grace in his image of the Kingdom of Christ and the Empire of Reason. In the post-Revolutionary period, the redemptive Enlightenment of the Philadelphia circle reached its greatest cultural power as a vision for scientific progress in the new republic.

Boulou Ebanda de B’béri

2006, Bayreuth

A horizontal labyrinth of transgeographical practices of identity

“This book is an excellent examination of the role of cinema as a conduit of black expressions of identity. It illustrates that since its inception, films have played an important part in generating, on the one hand, imaginary significations about black people, and, on the other hand, imaginative signifying practices harmonized with black expressions of identity. Indeed, Dr. Boulou Ebanda de B’béri’s Mapping Alternative Expressions Of Blackness in Cinema takes the reader into an uncommon horizontal labyrinth, with one of the most important questions of present and past centuries: the fabrications and representations of identity. His book truly unpacks the categories of racial, cultural and political identity in order to discern the reenacted practices of blackness linking the socio-historical experience of black peoples to their trans-geographical expressions of Africanicity in film. He concludes that specific paradigms of communication, such as ‘affecitivity’ and ‘resilience’, determine the ways in which some blacks articulate their practices of identity through the medium of cinema.

Examination of these paradigms as discursive practices of ‘détournement’ or ‘marronage’ allows us to understand the more complex effects of Africanicity or blackness as a necessary signifying practice of cultural and historical experiences of black people.”

Boulou Ebanda de B’béri, Co-Edited with Pierre C. Belanger, Mahmoud Eid, Mark Lowes, and Evan Potter

2007, Oxford University Press

The central objective of this text is to expose students to various conceptual frameworks that will allow them to comprehend and problematize their everyday life experience with mass media texts. Each section includes insightful classics, carefully selected texts from various scholars and institutional productions, an introduction, and a study guide.