Go to AfricaBib home

Go to AfricaBib home Education in Africa Go to database home

bibliographic database
Line
Previous page New search

The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here

Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Para-literary ethnography and colonial self-writing: the student notebooks of the William Ponty School
Author:Warner, Tobias
Year:2016
Periodical:Research in African Literatures (ISSN 0034-5210)
Volume:47
Issue:1
Pages:1-20
Language:English
Geographic term:West Africa
Subjects:teacher education
colonial period
literature
social life
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v047/47.1.warner.pdf
Abstract:Beginning in 1933, West African students at the Ecole Normale William Ponty - the elite French colonial teacher-training college - completed their studies by writing ethnographic monographs on some aspect of their community of origin during their summer vacation. This corpus of nearly eight hundred monographs is collectively known as the 'Cahiers Ponty' (Ponty notebooks). Ponty students were encouraged to 'avoid false literary descriptions' but in practice many drew heavily on the tropes of novelistic prose - especially those of the bildungsroman. This essay examines the rhetorical and narrative strategies Ponty students employ to produce legible accounts of their own socialization as modern subjects, as well as the feedback from teachers that constrained their performances. I argue that the Ponty notebooks exemplify a distinct discipline - para-literary ethnography - that had a role in shaping the contours of colonial modernity and early francophone literature in West Africa. Bibliogr., notes, ref, sum. [Journal abstract]
Views
Cover