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Packaging Post/Coloniality
The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World
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2005
Summary
In Packaging Post/Coloniality, Richard Watts breaks from convention and reads Francophone books by their covers, focusing on the package over the content. Watts looks at the ways that the 'paratext'—the covers, illustrations, promotional summaries, epigraphs, dedications, and prefaces or forewords that enclose the text—mediates creative works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia whose place in the French literary institution was and remains a source of conflict. In order to be acceptable for French bookstore shelves, the novels, essays, and collections of poetry created in colonial territories were deemed to need explanation and sponsorship by an authority in the field. Watts finds the French mission civilisatrice, or 'civilizing mission,' manifest in prefaces, introductions, and dedications inserted in the books that appeared in the metropole during the height of French imperialism. In the postcolonial era, book packaging reveals a struggle to reverse the power dynamic: Francophone writers introduced each others' texts, yet books still appeared with covers promoting stereotypical images of the Francophone world. This fascinating journey through a particular cultural history of the book is a unique take on the quest for a literary identity. Watts concludes his study by looking at English mediations of Francophone works, with a chapter on reading and teaching Francophone literature in translation.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2005
ISBN-Print
978-0-7391-0856-7
ISBN-Online
978-0-7391-5859-3
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
191
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Acknowledgments No access
Introduction: Paratexts and the Mediation of Culture No access Pages 1 - 24
1 Black Text, White Masks: The Colonial Paratext in Sub-Saharan Africa No access
2 "The Felicitous Graft": Hybridity and Anxiety in Indochina and North Africa No access
3 Senghor and Sartre between the Colonial and the Postcolonial No access
4 Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retourau pays natal and Its Displacements No access
5 Glissant, Lopes, and the Ambivalence of the Postcolonial Paratext No access
6 Gender and the Paratext No access
7 Epilogue: Reading and Teaching Francophone Literatures in Translation No access
