Yearning for (Dis)Connections

Hassan Yosimbom

Description

In a nuanced consideration of the Cameroonian experience, Yearning for (Dis) Connections makes critical interventions into debates about coexistence, citizenship, identity formation and performance, democracy and modernity in Cameroon. The essays in the book ranges across Francophone and Anglophone Cameroons to provide a challenging assessment of the common ways of writing and thinking for and of and about the Cameroonian world. The book criticises the blinders of Cameroon's Francophonecentred leadership, analysing its failure to heed Anglophone Cameroon's ontological and epistemological critiques of Cameroon's ongoing exclusions masked by pretences of a Francophone universalism. Yosimbom uses the works of Nyamnjoh, Ndi, Besong and Takwi to explore how Cameroonian worlds are on the move of and for identity negotiations. He also explores how the uneven development of those Cameroonian worlds has been creating growing gaps within and among regions while at the same time Francophonising Anglophones and Anglophonising Francophones through four-fold processes of complementarities, continuity and discontinuity, diachrony and synchrony. The book demonstrates that persistent Francophone hegemony and resurgent Anglophone nationalism often fail to realise that all Cameroonians have been shuffled like a pack of cards; that cultures are formed through complex dialogues and interactions with other cultures; that the boundaries of cultures are fluid, porous and contested; that identities are multiple and layered in complex, pluralist democratic societies; and that there is need for public recognition of cultural and identity specificities in ways that do not deny their fluidity, nimbleness and incompleteness.

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Langaa RPCIG
• Date de parution: 30 septembre 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789956553433
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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Yearning for (Dis)Connections: Fictions and Frictions of Coexistence in Postcolonial Cameroon Hassan M. Yosimbom L a ng a a R esea rch & P u blishing CIG Mankon, Bamenda

Publisher: LangaaRPCIG Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region Cameroon [e-mail] www.langaa-rpcig.net Distributed in and outside N. America by African Books Collective [e-mail] www.africanbookscollective.com

ISBN-10: 9956-553-77-8

ISBN-13: 978-9956-553-77-8 ©Hassan M. Yosimbom 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher

About the Author Hassan Mbiydzenyuy Yosimbom holds a BA in English with a Minor in Linguistics (1996) and an MA in Comparative Literature (2000) both from the University of Buea, Cameroon; and a PhD in African Literature (2016) from the University of Yaoundé 1, Cameroon. He was a 2019 ARUA-Mellon Fellow at the Centre for Urban Management Studies (CUMS), University of Ghana, Legon where he researched “Mobility and Sociality in Africa’s Emerging Urban”; a 2021 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for African Studies (CAS), University of Cape Town, where he investigated “Entanglements, Mobility and Improvisation: Culture and Arts in Contemporary African Urbanism and its Hinterlands” and a 2022 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town where he explored “African Intellectual Biographies”. His research interests include multiple- layered identity formations and performances, mobility, postcolonial studies and cosmopolitanism. He is also keen on researching Latin American epistemological foundations such as transmodernity, coloniality, decoloniality, and pluriversality and how they could be used to de-/re-construct postcolonial African societies. Some of his recent publications include: “Uncoupling spectres of coloniality in postcolonial Cameroon: literary explorations,”Cultural Dynamics (2022); “Poetic Explorations in Bill F. Ndi’sWorth Their Weight in Thorns: (De)Constructing Hegemonic National Integration and Debating Francophonecentric National Governance,”CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture(2021); “Francis B. Nyamnjoh’sThe Disillusioned African: Rigidizing Cosmopolitan Borders, Binarizing Cosmopolitan Opportunities,”Comparative Literature: East & West (2021) and “The tyranny of normative hedonism in postcolonial Cameroon: literary explorations,”Journal of the African Literature Association(2021). In 2021, he co-editedBeing and Becoming African as a Permanent Work in Progress: Inspiration from Chinua Achebe’s Proverbs with Francis B. Nyamnjoh and Patrick Owusu.

Dedication To my late Father, Alhadji Isa Yosimbom, for all the conversations we used to have from the 1990s till his demise in 2020, many of them related to the topic of this book when I had not even dreamed of ever writing it.

Acknowledgement Coupling a first volume from one’s own essays is a fraught undertaking. The more inclusive and comprehensive one tries to be, the greater the risk that the whole exercise will end up a large loose baggy monster and vice versa. I have benefited enormously from the support of Professor Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Professor Bill F. Ndi and Dr. Nana Genevoix who have relentlessly pushed me out my comfort zone, fired my imagination and contributed to my thinking and writing. Professors Nyamnjoh and Ndi have also generously provided novelistic and poetic raw materials for my critical excursions. My Fellowships at the Centre for Urban Management Studies (CUMS), University of Ghana (2019), the Centre for African Studies (CAS), University of Cape Town (2021) and the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, tremendously helped me in putting together some of the essays. The moral support I received from my family and friends has been unfathomable. Like an unshakable pillar, Habibti Mbulle Rabbatul Bait stood by me urging me to soar up to the iroko tree of critical creativity.

Table of Contents Introduction: How Cultural Encounters Engender Defining Differences, Discovering Similarities and Forming and Performing Multiple-layered Identities.......................................................1 Chapter 1: Francophone and Anglophone Cultures in Multi-logue in Mathew Takwi’s Messing Manners ................17. Chapter 2: Language Blending and Language Mixing in Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s Oeuvre...............................47 Chapter 3: Unmasking Francophone Cameroon’s Epistemicide in Bate Besong’s Disgrace .................................85 Chapter 4: (De)Constructing Hegemonic Integration and Francophonecentric Governance in Bill F. Ndi’s Poetry ..............................................................113 Chapter 5: Africanising and Globalising Chinua Achebe’s Igbo (Narrative) Proverbs ...........................145 Chapter 6: Deuniversalizing Francophone Pedigrees and Pluriversalizing Anglophone Contagions in Bill F. Ndi’s Poetry ..............................................................171 Chapter 7: Mapping Postcolonial Paratextuality in Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s Mind Searching .............................201 References: ...................................................................................231

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Introduction How Cultural Encounters Engender Defining Differences, Discovering Similarities and Forming and Performing Multiple-layered Identities The essays assembled in this collection attest to a yearning for (dis)connections as well as the fictions and frictions that such yearning engenders as part of Francophone-Anglophone coexistence in postcolonial Cameroon. These essays about issues of identity attempt to capture the contours of the current debate as I reflect on multiculturalism as policy, ideology and message. The essays are equally concerned with the often unpredictable ways in which Cameroon literature and Francophone and Anglophone cultures are influenced by the complexities and complications of multiple layered identity formations and performances. They also examine the ways in which Francophone and Anglophone identities are explored, mapped, defined and challenged in poetry and prose where boundaries are often overlapping, contested and re-mapped. Furthermore, they consider how Francophone and Anglophone differences, conflicts and change are felt and expressed through Francophone hegemony and Anglophone subalternity. They further investigate how such categories as class, language, gender, ethnicity and multiculturalism have come about and discuss how these categories co-exist and their relationship to the individual Francophones and Anglophones and particular situations such as the Anglophone Crisis that has been raging since 2016. Above all, the essays argue that despite the murkiness of the present and the mysteriousness of the future, another Cameroon Anglophone world is possible but that would “require an epistemic rebellion that enables [Anglophone Cameroonians] to gain self-confidence, enabling them to re-imagine another world free from Western tutelage and [Francophone] dictators that enjoy Western protection. A new imagination that liberates both the [colonizing Francophone] and the colonized [Anglophone] simultaneously is needed” (Ndlovu- Gathsheni 263).Consequently, “This will mean levelling of the [national] hierarchies created by colonial modernity as well as fundamentalism created by [Francophone and Anglophone] nationalisms [that sometimes border on fundamentalisms].

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