Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France)

Writing Through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean interrogates conventional notions of writing. The contributors―whose disciplines include anthropology, art history, education, film, history, linguistics, literature, performance studies, philosophy, sociology, translation, and visual arts―examine the complex interplay between language/literature/arts and the visual and virtual domains of expressive culture. The twenty-five essays explore various patterns of writing practices arising from contemporary and historical forces that have impacted the literatures and cultures of Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Morocco, Niger, Reunion Island, and Senegal. Special attention is paid to how scripts, though appearing to be merely decorative in function, are often used by artists and performers in the production of material and non-material culture to tell “stories” of great significance, co-mingling words and images in a way that leads to a creative synthesis that links the local and the global, the “classical” and the “popular” in new ways.