38 | 2024
Paroles spoliées. Itinéraires de la littérature orale
In the wake of their colonial conquests, the colonial powers not only appropriated territories and cultural property: they also collected words. More precisely, missionaries, administrators, ethnologists and linguists transformed oral utterances —whose nature and function varied greatly in their original context—into written texts, which were soon grouped under the label of “oral literature”.
This threefold transfer — from oral to written form, from one language to another, and from one cultural context to another — and the conditions of colonial asymmetry under which it took place inevitably led to distortions. The sources of the texts were sometimes erased, and their meaning was altered or lost. Many anthologies of African, Oceanian, and other folktalescontinue to be published today without any consideration of their provenance.Some of these texts, however, have had remarkable trajectories, especially when they came into the hands of avant-garde poets such as Tristan Tzara, Blaise Cendrars, or Jerome Rothenberg, or of writers who were themselves from (formerly) colonized territories, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor or Patrick Chamoiseau.
This issue, informed by the principles of provenance research conducted on museum objects, brings together Francophone and German scholarship. It presents case studies from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, to explore the questions raised by these texts — namely, what forms of appropriation are at play in these transfers, and can they be subverted?
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Introduction
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Appropriation, Provenance, and Restitution: The Case of Verbal Arts [Full text | translation | en]
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Dossier
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Recels et passerelles littéraires. Circulations de contes créoles entre la Martinique et l’Hexagone [Full text]Literary Plundering and Bridges: The Circulation of Creole Tales Between Martinique and France [Full text | translation | en]
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Sur les traces du « Gambadeur-de-la-plaine ». Trajectoire d’un conte ronga [Full text | translation | fr]
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The Journey of a Baoulé “War Song”: From Colonial Violence to Negritude [Full text | translation | en]
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Sound Poem/Māori Chant: An Inquiry into Tristan Tzara’s “Toto-vaca” [Full text | translation | en]
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Forgery, Fraud, and “Theft of Voice”: Circulation of Walam Olum [Full text | translation | en]
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Archives
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The Swiss Mission and the Invention of Tsonga Literacy [Full text | translation | en]
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Traduction
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Sur la définition du primitivisme littéraire [Full text]Introduit par Irene Albers et Andreas SchmidOn the definition of literary primitivism [Full text | translation | en]Introduction by Irene Albers and Andreas Schmid
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Archives sonores
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Archives sonores. Introduction [Full text]Sound archives. Introduction [Full text | translation | en]
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The Challenges of Sharing (Colonial) Sound Archives in Rwanda [Full text | translation | en]
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The 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition’s Dahomean Sound Archives: Chronicle of a Research-Creation Project [Full text | translation | en]
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Varia
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Chroniques cinéma
En collaboration avec le Comité du film ethnographique, festival Jean Rouch-
Transformations du cinéma guarani [Full text]La Transformation de Canuto [Full text | translation | en]
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Le legs d’un ethnologue en partage. Collection, films, photographies et archives de Bohumil Holas [Full text]Inherited from Bohumil Holas: An Anthropologist’s Films, Photographs, and Archives [Full text | translation | fr]
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