GENDER HIERARCHY AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF FEMININITY: THE IMPOSED MASK

Résumé de l'article

La question de l’identité féminine telle que socialement construite et imposée à la femme constitue l’objet de cet article. À partir de la déclaration de Simone de Beauvoir selon laquelle l’on ne naît pas femme mais que l’on le devient, il retrace comment cette identité de la femme se construit progressivement dans la société. Il s’inspire de la démarche marxiste et de la sémiotique de Julia Kristeva pour montrer que les rapports sociaux entre l’homme et la femme sont une représentation mimétique du système capitaliste avec en son coeur l’exploitation de l’homme par l’homme. Ainsi, tout comme le capitaliste, l’homme s’appuie-t-il sur sa position de dominant, de pourvoyeur que lui confère le patriarcat pour étendre sa domination sur la femme. Celle-ci à son tour apparait comme un prolétaire, un esclave qui semble ne rien pouvoir faire pour renverser la situation et prend son statut comme un fait naturel. La raison fondamentale qui définit la femme comme un être de seconde classe s’enracine dans la division historique du travail qui confère à la femme le travail ménager non rémunéré et à l’homme celui de chef de famille, de pourvoyeur du bien-être familial, de maître. C’est cette division bipolaire du travail social qui sert de ciment à l’oppression sociale dont la femme est victime au point que ce qui relève du social devient naturel voire culturel. Aujourd’hui encore, la femme continue d’être considérée comme un individu de second rang au motif qu’elle est le « sexe faible ». Elle ne doit pas avoir les mêmes prérogatives que l’homme, être son égale. Cette vision des choses laisse à penser qu’on naît femme.

HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NARRATIVE THEORIES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

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BRITISH POLITICAL SCENE IN JONATHAN COE’S THE CLOSED CIRCLE

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Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle gives full vent to the disappointment and disenchantment of a middle age lived in a time of New Labour. This article sheds a critical light on the representations of the British political history in the works of Jonathan Coe. Specifically, it discusses how the transition from the post war consensus politics and the welfare state to neoliberalism is represented, and how these transformations that British society has undergone in Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair’s era are the subject of political analysis and criticism in the works of Coe.

UNCOMPLETED ASPECT MARKING FROM STANDARD ENGLISH TO NIGERIAN PIDGIN: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

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An utterance act involves using grammatical markers, such as, markers of tense, aspect, modality and determination. Specific grammatical forms mark the operation types the utterer carries out. The aim of this paper is to highlight the complexity of uncompleted aspect marking, from Standard English (SE) to Nigerian Pidgin (NP), and conversely. Based on Antoine Culioli’s “enunciative operations theory”, this paper analyses be+ing as an uncompleted aspect marker, identifies its NP equivalents and accounts for their use. NP markers involved in this uncompleted aspect marking process seem to be different from SE be+ing; they are markers driving meanings by themselves and do not lend themselves to some meaning variations as their SE equivalents would do.

THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY IN GAYL JONES’ CORREGIDORA

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Slavery remembrance parallels different narratives in Corregidora. These narrations aim to resist historical erasure. Fighting oppression occurs not only in slavery era but also during Ursa’s relations with her husband Mutt and her sexual partner Tadpole. This article underscores how the author presents the rendering of the past and the subsequent trauma resulting from ancestors’ bondage in characters’ lives. We argue that past and present interconnect with the characters’ lives in so far as what happened centuries ago seem to repeat with them. The main protagonist’s incapacity to fulfill her foremothers’ motto of bearing children has effects on her psyche which result in her trouble relationships with her lovers. When she discovers her great grandmother’s secret, only can she start a new life free from a haunted past.

MODALITY IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE, BETWEEN RADICAL AND EPISTEMIC

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This paper aims at pinpointing the type of modality used in science and technologies discourse among regular classifications of modals in Meta Operational Grammar and Theory of Enunciative Operations. The main analyses will be made in the light of Theory of Enunciative Operations to determine the accurate value(s) of modals may, can, shall, will, must, have to and need in science and technologies discourse simply called here scientific discourse. To do so, I rest on samples of data stemming from science and technologies, merely recognizable by the denomination scientific discourse. Those samples are from first year courses in English I have been entrusted with, at the University of Man, in Republic of Côte d’Ivoire.

BRIDGING THE VALLEY OF NIHILISM IN AUGUST WILSON’S FENCES

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Drawing on Cornell West’s concept of black nihilism, this paper analyses August Wilson’s Fences, putting forward the rhetoric of black psychological annihilation and the way the author suggests an infusion of hope, breaking the metaphorical or psychological enslavement of the African American for a positive change. The change is built out of death, or metaphor of death that abounds in the play, as it is the case in most of August Wilson’s plays.

SLAVE REBELLION IN ANDRE PHILIPPUS BRINK’S AN INSTANT IN THE WIND

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This paper on slave rebellion in André Philippus Brink’s An Instant in the Wind foregrounds master-slave dialectics in the context of slavery in South Africa. Seen through the prism of postcolonialism, this work seeks to highlight slaves’ reaction to the lot of abasements inflicted to them by their bosses, and their search of freedom. Victims of the slaveholding discourse of the Cape white masters, the indentured people methodically lead a peaceful revolt which quickly culminates into a violent showdown. All these postcolonial struggles have a hopeful outcome through both the auto-critique slavery system of thought, the collapse of differences.

A MARXIST READING OF ERNEST GAINES’ A LESSON BEFORE DYING

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This study presents A Lesson Before Dying as a Marxist work insofar as the fictional society that it depicts explores all the significant characteristics of capitalist societies. Laying bare class division in St Raphael parish, it reveals the existence of a bourgeois class made up of wealthy landlords and authorities at the head of local institutions on the one hand, and a proletarian class, the black community, which is actually its working class. Eventually, the study reveals that, in a purely Marxist perspective, the base of this society is the plantation economy which generates a specific superstructure. Mainly established to defend the interests of landowners, this superstructure is displayed through a biased judiciary system, through repressive and ideological apparatuses that seek to reinforce blacks’ subservience, but equally through individuals whose activity consists in defending the labor ideology.

POÉTIQUE TRAGIQUE ET TRAGÉDIE, POUR L’ESQUISSE D’UNE POÉTIQUE DU TRAGIQUE DANS LA POÉSIE NÉGRO-AFRICAINE; UNE ILLUSTRATION DU MICROCOSME IVOIRIEN DANS LA MÈRE ROUGE DE CEDRIC MARSHALL KISSY

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THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF ART: A STUDY OF CHINUA ACHEBE’S NO LONGER AT EASE, A MAN OF THE PEOPLE AND ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH

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Art appears as one of the most controversial literary and social concepts in the minds of modern Africans. For some Africans, art is nothing but a game the use of which is for the only delight of the eyes. In addition, it is the human achievement that should be subservient to no moral, political, didactic or practical purpose. Moreover, they assume that its purpose must be to exist solely for the sake of its own beauty, and it can be judged only by aesthetic criteria. But others, including Chinua Achebe, see it as a committed and utilitarian notion. This study intends to scrutinize Achebe’s novels so as to lay bare his conception of art and to discover the appropriate way one ought to make use of it. A socio- critical study of the characters has revealed that art must no longer be seen as a mere object of luxury ,and that it can also be a weapon for African artists, writers and other intellectuals in their struggle for the wellbeing of the populations in newly independent countries.

COLONIALISM AND RACISM IN TSITSI DANGAREMBGA’S THE BOOK OF NOT

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Colonialism does not only control the material resources of a country, but it also subjugates people by distorting, disfiguring and destroying the traditional African life. As if it was not enough, racial doctrines became the ideological cornerstone for colonial theories and policies. Racial oppression dehumanizes people, violates and attacks social groups: Blacks and Whites. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel The Book of Not is very close to her people and consequently their social realities: what they faced during British imperialism. As a result, this paper aims to show Dangarembga as a social critic who denounces the effects of colonialism and racism in Zimbabwe through the image of Tambu, the main character of The Book of Not.

THE AMERICAN DREAM IN LANGSTON HUGHES’ SELECTED POEMS

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Pendant longtemps, le rêve américain a inspiré la communauté Africaine Américaine. Cette notion est présente dans la littérature Africaine Américaine comme dans la pièce de théâtre The Raisin in the Sun de Lorraine Hansberry et dans des poèmes comme ceux de Langston Hughes. En nous servant des outils du post-colonialisme et de la stylistique, nous analyserons dans un corpus de poèmes écrits par Langston Hughes la lutte de la communauté Africaine Américaine pour réalisation du rêve américain.

LA LITTERATURE COMME UN EXAMEN DE MEMOIRE, D’OUBLI ET DE RECONCILIATION

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Cette réflexion vise à proposer une esquisse de solutions aux règlements des conflits sociaux tendant à déconstruire les familles africaines qui en gardent d’éternels souvenirs. La littérature en contrepartie s’érige en une discipline avant-gardiste pour prôner le pardon, l’oubli et la réconciliation. L’écrivain Ougandais Okot p’Bitek, et Ola Rotimi, Amos Tutuola du Nigéria en font une investigation littéraire en condamnant avec véhemence les partisans de la violence.

VIOLENCE, INCEST AND DELAYED DECODING IN THE SCOTTISH BALLAD, “EDWARD, EDWARD” (CHILD 13)

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THE HOMELESS HOUSEHOLD: A REFLECTION ON THE FAMILY IN TONI MORRISON’S SULA AND SONG OF SOLOMON

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Black American families are intertwined by the vestige of slavery that emasculated the black slave, subsequently giving the black woman the position of family leader. Concentrating on Toni Morrison’s Sula and Song of Solomon, this article proposes a re-evaluation of black feminism. The objective is to analyze such families in which the fathering woman’s role is one of the hegemonic. But it appears that despite her sense of sacrifice, she fails to play two roles, that of the mother and the one of the father who is absent. The emotional instability of most characters in the two fictions reads, therefore, as a result of the unstable family circle that presents the image of an open circle. That is how, the discussion suggests moving from the community of women to the construction of black American families where the mother and the father constitute the two pillars of their stability.

THE VOICE IN THE PERIPHERY: BLACK CULTURE IN TONI MORRISON’S TAR BABY

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Although the slavery system in America was founded on the negation of Blacks’ cultural values brought from Africa, Toni Morrison shows in Tar Baby that analyzing black culture differently leads to a conflict between white and black race. White people denied any culture in the process of the Blacks’ dehumanization. Whites destroyed black culture and imposed them theirs. Blacks meanwhile, revived cultural values of the black race to show Whites that they had an advanced culture that gave meaning to their existence and identity. They highlight the importance of their culture that contributes to their integration into the fabric of the society in The United States of America.

The NGURARIO or Marriage in Fiction and Real Life

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This paper analyses the NGURARIO or marriage ceremony in fiction and real life. We will study Ngugi’s I Will Marry When I Want, a subversive book and Manthia Diawara's documentary film Who Is Afraid of Ngugi? The first text is the English version of Ngaahika Ndeenda, a play in kikuyu, critical of the regime and performed by peasants and workers. The film is showing how Ngugi was crowned on his return in 2002 to Kenya despite the tragedy that results in his return. The two texts include the performance of the Ngurario, the final step in a marriage ceremony. The film echoes cultural pessimism raised by the play.

THE DRAMATIZATION OF THE FEMALE BODY: DISCOURSES OF RESISTANCE AND POWER IN OF EVE ENSLER’S THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES

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Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (TVM) is an atypical play that centers on the most intimate part of the female anatomy: her vagina. This paper analyzes the double play of “jouissance” as the site of pleasure and resistance through the body and words. As a hearing and sharing of women’s experiences with one another, Ensler’s play delineates a new aesthetic grounded in the performance of individual and collective stories through the mediation of their voices/bodies. This paper analyzes the dramatization of the female body as site of resistance and power.

AMERICA’S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION IN DON DELILLO’S LIBRA

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The present paper is an analysis of Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), which reads as a representation and fictionalization of politics. It is constructed from the perspective of Linda Hutcheon’s theory of Postmodernism which “questions the very bases of any certainty.” The objective of this study of the novel is to put into question America’s Revolution in its claim of the values that founded the nation. The picture of America as an unfinished revolution results from that process of de-sedimentation.