I teach courses in French language at the beginning, intermediate and advanced levels.
My advances courses cover the areas of Francophone literatures, cinema and cultures, immigration in France and the study of Blackness in American novels, and French poetry. I always challenge my students to overcome the barrier that stigmatizes African creations, and their alleged inaccessibility for non-Africans.
My research deals with the expression of tradition in West African novels, envisioned within the parameters of African writers’ “dual nature” allegedly “rooted” in ancestral tradition and Western style literacy. I question the nature of tradition and orality in African fictional novels and surmise that these concepts function as the reminiscence of the exotic representation of the non-European “Other”, invented by ethnographers and adopted by African critics as the explanation of African exceptionalities.
In my incoming book, I argue that West African novels represent, in their very nature, a departure from oral tradition as they fully assume literacy and multiple traditions as characteristics of the post-colonial Africa. I therefore suggest that what is defined as “orality” in African literature could be better defined as a strategy of “désécriture”of the dynamic integration of disparate cultural elements throughout African history.