AWEJ. Special Issue on Literature No.2 October, 2014 Pp. 36-47
Crossing the Borders: Comparing Postcolonial Fiction Across Languages and Cultures
Bensalem Dahhan
Center for Open Studies
University of Glasgow, Scotland
Abstract
Reading literary production from different literary and cultural backgrounds has been enabled by the growth of postcolonial studies. Postcolonial studies and its comparative perspective, however, have focused almost entirely on literary production from the British Empire. This paper aims to address these limitations by engaging with the work carried out by scholars on the links between postcolonial studies and the new comparative literature, and by exploring the possibilities that this engagement offers. This kind of work leads to an active exploration of a dialogue between writers, theorists and scholars working on the British and French empires, so that a truly comparative literature might emerge. The other aim of this paper is to translate this kind of comparative literature into an exploration of the links between postcolonial African fiction of French and English expression.
Keywords: comparative literature; postcolonial studies; Francophone/Anglophone postcolonial fiction, identity.