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Thèse
HIRCHI, Mohammed La Réécriture de l'histoire dans les littératures postcoloniales. (A. Khatibi, E. Glissant, V.Y. Mudimbe, A. Djebar)
This dissertation examines the theoretical and fictional works of four major postcolonial writers of French expression: Abdelkebir Khatibi (Morocco), Edouard Glissant (Martinique), Yves Valentin Mudimbe (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Assia Djebar (Algeria). These authors investigate the connections between interpretation, narration and cultural representations. Leaving aside traditional Eurocentric historicism and defining historical narration as simply one discursive code among others, they valorize the reappropriation of history through fiction. They also question the validity of the universalizing notions of history and culture and offer alternative modes of representations to static conceptions of the histories of colonial and postcolonial societies. This study argues that these authors' celebration of oral culture (especially Glissant and Djebar) and the problematization of narrative discourses is articulated within their project of destroying the ideological borders separating the particular and the universal. Their valorization of the oral over the written is one of the strategies used in order to stress the nomadic nature of postcolonial writing. This work also outlines the fluidity of oral traditions, their cross-cultural significance and their inscription within a transhistoric and a transnational space. The four authors propose theoretical perspectives that are constructed in the margins of conventional discourses that disregard historical and cultural dislocations, dispossessions and betrayals of the histories of postcolonial societies. The reference to key concepts such as <italic>pensée-autre, créolisation, entre-rivages</italic> and <italic>écart</italic> shows these writers' common concern of locating their theoretical perspectives across cultural and linguistic borders. Treating authors from various geographical areas in a cross-cultural context brings out intellectual dilemmas common to postcolonial writers. Although they differ in their ways of defining new paradigms for social, cultural and historical emancipation, Mudimbé, Khatibi, Glissant and Djebar stress the dynamic interaction between the fictional and the historical imagination. They offer original strategies for the recuperation of history through myth, legends and other modes of cultural transmission |