Colonial Legacies in Francophone African Literature

Mohamed Kamara is professor of French and Africana studies and chair of the Romance Languages Department at Washington and Lee University.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Colonialism, Colonial Education, and the Invention of a Subaltern ClassChapter 1: Pedagogy of the Colonized: Theories, Ideologies, and Policies of the Colonial School in Francophone Black AfricaChapter 2: From Theory to Practice: The Colonial School in Francophone African LiteratureChapter 3: Making Good Wives and Good Mothers: The Education of Women in Colonial West AfricaChapter 4: When Slaves, Bastards, and Dogs Rule: The Colonial School as Agent of Social TransformationChapter 5: The Colonial School and the Emergence of New African TypesChapter 6: Reality or Invention? Literary Representation of the Bourgeoisie on TrialConclusion: A Literature of FailureBibliographyAbout the Author

Mohamed Kamara unleashes an inventory of terms—assimilation, cultural erasure, formation, mission, training—on a library of African literary works in order to explore the symbiotic relationship between the colonial school and the emergence of a postcolonial bourgeois class. This culminates in a transcolonial analysis that sheds light on the impact of the French civilizing mission, a complex apparatus that provided the scaffolding upon which France’s empire was built. The historical legacies are relevant to contemporary debates on education and the imperative of decolonizing the curriculum, and underscore our collective responsibility when it comes to reassessing how institutions continue to shape mindsets, prevailing ideologies, and theories of race.