- #Combinng logic world history world literature christian how to
- #Combinng logic world history world literature christian archive
This means using the colonial archive (documents, objects, drawings, masks) as a palimpsest to rewrite history from the point of view of African needs today, while being aware that the colonial paradigm cannot be ignored because it is now part of our global, common history.
#Combinng logic world history world literature christian how to
This notion of reprendre, of recasting an interrupted tradition, led him to a meditation about how to reconsider both the meaning of African traditional artifacts and their inscription in the Western archive.Īlmost forty years later, in the field of contemporary African arts, one answer to this meditation has been the concept of restitution: first, in terms of the practical restitution of the traditional heritage kept in Western ethnological and art museums, but also in a metaphorical sense.
Taking up an interrupted tradition, not out of a desire for purity, which would testify only to the imaginations of dead ancestors, but in a way that reflects the conditions of today, a methodical assessment, the artist’s labour beginning, in effect, with the evaluation of the tools, means, and projects of art within a social context transformed by colonialism and by later currents, influences and fashions from abroad. In relation to contemporary African art, he introduced the notion of reprendre (literally, “to retake”) to mean both the act of Let me start by recalling an essay dating back to the early 1990s by the philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe. Finally, I propose the notion of “planetary literature” as a new way of understanding the interconnection between literatures taking care of the world.ġ Recast, Return, and the Opening Up to the World I show that world literature models based on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of negotiation between center and periphery thus have to be replaced by a concept of multilingual global history. Through multilingual examples, this paper aims to question the co-construction of linguistic and literary pluralism in Congo and to advocate for the necessity of a transdisciplinary and collaborative approach, to understand the common life of African vernacular and cosmopolitan languages. The idea that African cultural plurality was minimized during the colonial era has to be reconsidered because textual negotiations and exchanges (cosmopolitan and vernacular, written and oral) have been frequent during and after colonization, mostly in urban areas. Historically and economically, the Congo has been considered one of the most internationalized states of Africa.