ALA Lecture Series Presents:
Authors Speak: Colonial Education and Social Engineering in Francophone African Literature with Mohamed Kamara
Saturday October 26, 2024 at 11:00 AM EST; London, 3:00 PM; Lagos, 4:00 PM; Johannesburg, 5:00 PM; Nairobi, 6:00 PM
Join us on the ALA YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaYYHGM8iraoQF48xeCnMKw
Mohamed Kamara: a former president of the ALA, is Professor of French and Africana Studies and Chair of the Romance Languages department at Washington and Lee University. He is the author of When Mosquitoes Come Marching In: a Play in Spectacles and Colonial Legacies in Francophone African Literature: The School and the Invention of the Bourgeoisie. He is currently collaborating on two volumes, Children and Violence: Agency, Experience and Representation In and Beyond Armed Conflict and The Literature of Contemporary Sierra Leone: Trauma, Resilience, and Creativity.
In this lecture, Kamara interrogates the representation of the colonial school and bourgeoisie in Francophone sub-Saharan literature, including the discourses of racial difference that informed its policies and practices. Importantly, he offers a longue durée view of the colonial school as the most effective agent for the perpetuation of the colonial enterprise and its objectives. He contends, first, that the so-called indigenous bourgeoisie, unlike the European bourgeoisie that emerged organically and proactively out of historical forces, was a calculated creation of the colonial enterprise and the racist ideology that underwrote it. Secondly, it was through the school and the small army of middle figures it produced that the colonizer planned to perpetuate his domination of Africa.
