Le concept de metissage culturel dans l’aventure ambiguë de cheikh hamidou kane et l’initie d’olympe bhely-quenum
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Date
2009-08-05
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Abstract
In this dissertation, we examine the concept of cultural interdependence: the emergence and significance of “cultural hybridity”, a concept referred to in French as métissage culturel. It is the production of novel cultural forms and practices through the merging of previously separate cultural antecedents. Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’aventure ambiguë (1962) and Olympe Bhêly-Quénum’s L’Initié (1979) serve as a matrix for this study. The focus is on the interrelationships between the traditional African culture and what is popularly known as modernity. By this, we mean the harmonious blend of cultural values of the two worlds in the African context as means of empowering Africans. It is a dialogical relationship that we try to establish between the two cultures under whose influence Africans have been since the colonial era.
Having explored the principal conceptual issues in the domain of cultural hybridization, we base the analysis of the two texts on the premiss that interrelationships are necessary factors for cultural transformation. Whereas L’aventure ambiguë illustrates the case of marginalization of indigenous culture of the Diallobé people of Senegal by the colonizer’s school, Olympe Bhêly- Quénum’s L’Initié focuses on the protagonist’s creativeness in enriching his native culture and at the same time consciously harnessing useful modern cultural values, knowledge and skills for the benefit of his people. We, therefore, conclude that the inability to overcome constraints of cultural purity constitutes a danger to cultural dynamism. This innovative but conflicting idea of culture provides the right antidote to overcoming the immobilizing effect of otherness i.e. going beyond the borders of one's cultural space in order to discover the other