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The most critically successful works of two Central African novelists writing in French, Alain Mabanckou and Patrice Nganang, are told from the point of view of a narrator who, for one reason or another, could be considered intellectually inferior to the average person. This article will show that b...
| Published in: | Francosphères |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Liverpool University Press
2016-01-01
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| Online Access: | http://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/franc.2016.12 |
| Summary: | The most critically successful works of two Central African novelists writing in French, Alain Mabanckou and Patrice Nganang, are told from the point of view of a narrator who, for one reason or another, could be considered intellectually inferior to the average person. This article will show that by appropriating negative colonial stereotypes of Africans as child-like or animal-like, writers are able to provide a counter-discursive response to these stereotypes and gain greater stylistic freedom to indigenize the former colonial language, thanks to the intermediary of what we will call the intellectually subordinate narrator – a narrator who the reader expects, and therefore accepts, to be cognitively different. We will examine how this phenomenon works as a form of strategic exoticism in Mabankou’s Mémoires de porc-épic (2006) and Nganang’s Temps de chien (2001). |
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| ISSN: | 2046-3820 2046-3839 |