French 341PA - Courses in Francophone Studies: 'Paris dans l'Imaginaire Africain'

The relation between colonizer and colonized is two-fold. On the one hand, we have a visible, concrete and immediate form of domination. It is military, economic, social and political. It constrains the body. On the other hand, we have the ideological, less visible, subtler and yet more destructive colonization: that of the mind. This course will have two components: First, we will briefly summarize how, through its educational system and its major narratives (textbooks, essays, literature, and film) the colonizer constructed and controlled both his own image and that of its "silenced" colonized other. Second, we will more substantively explore how, after WW1, through the early 1960s, the colonized, breaking his silence, used "the barrel of the pen" and the camera to account for his own lived experiences of the "Metropole" (Paris and France as a whole).

Prereq: Two courses in French at the 200 level.