Àddina: Non-objective representation of "the world" in Boubacar Boris Diop's Doomi Golo (2003)
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 13/09/2022

Speaker:
Alena Rettová, Professor of African and Afrophone Philosophies at the University of Bayreuth, Germanyy

Summary:
The "obsessive metaphors" (Ngom 2013) of mirroring and of aping, employed in Boubacar Boris Diop's novel Doomi Golo (2003), lend themselves to a reading as allusions to "mimicry" (Bhabha 1994), as conceptualized in postcolonial theory. However, as the lecture argues, the novel builds upon a complex understanding of "the world" in Sufi Islam, an understanding that leads to a dramatically different interpretation of the metaphors. This link to Sufism is established through subtle intertextual references that are only present in the Wolof original of the novel; they are altogether absent from Diop's own French translation of it as Les Petits de la guenon (2009), which is also the basis of the English translation by Vera Wülfing-Leckie and El Hadji Moustapha Diop, Doomi Golo – The Hidden Notebooks (2016). The different ways of reading the metaphors correspond to different philosophical understandings of the novel. While in French or English, the novel makes a political statement about a postcolonial African society, the novel articulates in Wolof a metaphysical understanding of "the world". It develops this philosophical concept not by making it the object of a theoretical description, but in the oblique manner of using "the world" as the setting, i.e. by employing a narrative technique. "The world" only ever comes into focus in the introductory passage of the novel. It is through its continued presence as setting that it assumes a central role in the semiotic universe of the novel: it is the very axis of meaning and meaning-making. Reading the novel in a European language, then, is a culturally and philosophically dislocated one as meanings are assembled around a different axis. The lecture concludes by a generalizing observation concerning the possibility to represent "non-objective realities" (Hejdánek 1997), such as freedom, truth, the self, or the world, through narrative techniques in literary texts. 

About the Speaker:
Alena Rettová is Professor of African and Afrophone Philosophies at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, where she leads an ERC-funded project on “Philosophy and Genre: Creating a Textual Basis for African Philosophy”. Her books include African Philosophy: History, Trends, Problems (2001), Afrophone Philosophies: Reality and Challenge (2007), and Chanter l’existence: La poésie de Sando Marteau et ses horizons philosophiques (2013). Recently, she has co-edited, with Benedetta Lanfranchi and Miriam Pahl, Critical Conversations in African Philosophy: Asixoxe - Let's Talk (2021).