The prosthetic, the dubbed, the metrolingual: the politics and poetics of language in francophone and anglophone world literature

This thesis examines how and why the imperial languages of French and English are recast in World Literature, by comparatively assessing how postcolonial authors from French and British ex-colonies, non-metropoles, and the metropolitan margins have re-appropriated the languages that they were once oppressed in and through. Exploring the perception and employment of these once colonial languages in diverging societies profoundly marked by colonisation, this thesis uses literature to put into question colonial ideologies such as linguistic authority, belonging, and ownership, ultimately showcasing the empowering and emancipatory potentiality of language when mobilised by those who were once marginalised by it.<br><br>In interrogating the language manipulation that animates novels from six different regions, this thesis assesses how language is mobilised and politicised in fiction from diverging linguistic, socio-political, and geographical realms.

The six contexts studied in this project are those found in the spaces of the Caribbean (Martinique and Jamaica), North and Sub-Saharan Africa (Algeria and Zimbabwe), and internal metropolitan ‘peripheries’ (the banlieues of Paris and Derry, Northern Ireland). The points of commonality and tension between these diverging literary realms are unearthed through close, comparative readings of the literature of authors originating from and working within these spaces, with Chapter 1 focusing primarily on Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco (1992) and Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women (2009), Chapter 2 centring around Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête (2014) and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), and Chapter 3 comparing Faïza Guène’s Kiffe kiffe demain (2004) with Frances Molloy’s No Mate for the Magpie (1985).