Conference Abstracts
15. Dellal, Mohamed: Faculty of Letters Oujda:
"The PostcolonialMyopic Discourse; or Postcolonial Governance
and the Discourse of Silence"
African postcolonial urban centres have become contact
zones where too many new subject positions have taken root. Like
all melting posts they are a space likely to help fuse (hybridize)
new ethnicities, new cultures and social classes even. This fusion
is a process, usually, completed at vertiginous speeds taking short
decisions makers, and accumulating thus problems that develop into
grievances. Unable to provide legislation to cope, equitably, with
these problems, the decision makers resort to silencing opponents
(potential sources of trouble) or putting a blind eye to the growing
problems of these subjects. At best, and when some good will is
shown, the handling of these problems is mediatized for ideological
purposes. The purpose of the present paper is to present examples
of such myopic attitudes as show in the African writings and media
productions. This narrative of Politics of silence has, indeed,
been dealt in writings such as Soyinka’s The Interpreters,
Armah’s The Beautyful Ones, Achebe’s Anthills, Awrid’s
Trebulations1, Emecheta’s Double Yoke and too many other works.
TV programs have also tried to offer space for the plight of ignored
and silences voices2. Yet some of these spaces have been used out
of political opportunism. Cases of rural territories that have either
been ignored or appropriated and used as Trojen horses in battles
essentially geared towards voicing the plights of urban subjects,
are common ground.
Unmapping the Imperial Centre:
1 My translation of his only novel in Arabic, Al
Hadith wa Sajan.
2 Reference is made here to a 2m.tv program on rural women. 2000.
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