Packaging post, coloniality : the manufacture of literary identity in the francophone world
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Packaging post, coloniality : the manufacture of literary identity in the francophone world
(After the empire)
Lexington Books, c2005
- : pbk
Available at 1 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-183) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Packaging Post/Coloniality, Richard Watts breaks from convention and reads Francophone books by their covers, focusing on the package over the content. Watts looks at the ways that the 'paratext'-the covers, illustrations, promotional summaries, epigraphs, dedications, and prefaces or forewords that enclose the text-mediates creative works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia whose place in the French literary institution was and remains a source of conflict. In order to be acceptable for French bookstore shelves, the novels, essays, and collections of poetry created in colonial territories were deemed to need explanation and sponsorship by an authority in the field. Watts finds the French mission civilisatrice, or 'civilizing mission,' manifest in prefaces, introductions, and dedications inserted in the books that appeared in the metropole during the height of French imperialism. In the postcolonial era, book packaging reveals a struggle to reverse the power dynamic: Francophone writers introduced each others' texts, yet books still appeared with covers promoting stereotypical images of the Francophone world. This fascinating journey through a particular cultural history of the book is a unique take on the quest for a literary identity. Watts concludes his study by looking at English mediations of Francophone works, with a chapter on reading and teaching Francophone literature in translation.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction: Paratexts and the Mediation of Culture Part 2 The Colonial Paratext and Its Imperial Desires Chapter 3 Black Text, White Masks: The Colonial Paratext in Sub-Saharan Africa Chapter 4 "The Felicitous Graft:" Hybridity and Anxiety in Indochina and North Africa Part 5 The Textual Histories of Decolonization Chapter 6 Senghor and Sartre between the Colonial and the Postcolonial Chapter 7 Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Its Displacements Part 8 Postcolonial Transfigurations of the Books Chapter 9 Glissant, Lopes, and the Ambivalence of the Postcolonial Paratext Chapter 10 Gender and the Paratext Chapter 11 Reading and Teaching Francophone Literatures in Translation
by "Nielsen BookData"