Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Institute of Asian and African Studies

Project Discription

Title: Generic innovations, intermedial aesthetics and the circulation of African literatures: Togo in a comparative perspective

The project takes the rich Togolese literary/cultural production as a starting point for further comparative research and is based on research questions that unfold on three levels:

1. On the level of writing (écriture)

How are intermedial references and/or the use of new media formats as aesthetic devices employed in literary writing and embedded in the ‘traditional’ medium of the book?

In how far do the aesthetic strategies of remediation and intermedial writing offer opportunities for the innovation or even subversion of established genres such as romance, crime fiction, Bildungsroman, the postcolonial realist-socio-critical novel?

On which level(s) – form, content, structure, ideology – does innovation/subversion occur?

2. On the level of the sociology of literature

How is Togolese literature, mainly published in Lomé and Paris, packaged, marketed, distributed and consumed today and what does this tell us with regards to the writers-publisher-audience relationships?

How does the sociology of overlapping literary fields: national/transnational/ local/diasporic, francophone/West African feed into the dynamics of the writers’ positionality and posture? 

3. On the level of comparison

In how far are Togolese examples of genre innovation and use of aesthetic intermedial strategies in dialogue with developments in other African cultural scenes?  

How can cross-readings of Togolese texts with texts from other African contexts and across language divides offer insight into larger intra- and transcontinental dynamics?

Obviously, the three levels are intertwined and will not be dealt with separately, but through an integral approach.