Unit name | African narratives of migration |
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Unit code | FREN30039 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | H/6 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
Unit director | Professor. Ruth Bush |
Open unit status | Open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | Department of French |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Migration is a defining feature of African cultural and political history. This course will explore how a range of writers and filmmakers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have represented experiences of movement: from the migrations that shaped pre-colonial empires in West Africa, to the traumatic forced migration of the transatlantic slave trade, and more recent patterns of movement from Africa to Europe and North America. We will consider literary texts and films from Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali and Togo that engage with this theme, in order to consider diverse creative responses to migration as a process of self- and societal transformation. Our reading will be framed by recent theorisations of travel, exile, cosmopolitanism and globalization.
Successful students will:
Teaching will be via seminars, which will include short lectures, student presentations and class discussion.
2 x 3000 word essays (each representing 50% of the mark for the unit), testing ILO’s 1-5.
Bernard Binlin Dadié, Un Nègre à Paris (1959)
Ousmane Sembene (Dir.), La Noire de… (1966)
Yambo Ouologuem, Le Devoir de violence (1968)
Sami Tchak, Place des fêtes (2001)
Fatou Diome, La Préférence nationale (2001)
Moussa Touré (Dir.), La Pirogue (2012)