University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Approaching the Witness: Narratives of Trauma in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Literature and Film George Stevens Macleod University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the African Languages and Societies Commons, African Studies Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Macleod, George Stevens, "Approaching the Witness: Narratives of Trauma in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Literature and Film" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1867. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1867 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1867 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Approaching the Witness: Narratives of Trauma in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Literature and Film Abstract Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman’s pioneering work in trauma theory provided innovative critical frameworks for reading textual and filmic esponsesr to mass violence. Yet trauma theory is rarely applied to African cultural production, despite the recent explosion of novels, memoir, and film from Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa grappling with civil war and genocide. In close analyses of child soldier novels, Rwandan genocide survivor memoirs, and Francophone African films, this dissertation effects such a theoretical rapprochement while simultaneously probing the limits of trauma theory’s assumptions concerning speech, temporality, and political representation. The first chapter, entitled “Giving Voice to the Icon: The Child Witness to Violence in Francophone African Fiction,” rereads Ivorian author Ahmadou Kourouma’s child soldier novel Allah n’est pas obligé (2000) arguing that Kourouma creates a “language of trauma,” which reveals how discourses of collective suffering risk limiting our understanding of violence’s psychological impact on individuals.