Phyllis Taoua

Interests

Research

Decolonization and Protest MovementsIntellectual HistoryContemporary African Literature and CinemaTwentieth-Century French Literature and Cinema

Teaching

African CinemaAfrican LiteratureTheory and CriticismGlobal AfricaContemporary FrancePan-African Protest Movements

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Taoua, P. (2018). African Freedom. How Africa Responded to Independence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108551700
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  The push for independence in African nations was ultimately an incomplete process, with the people often left to wrestle with a partial, imperfect legacy. Rather than settle for liberation in name alone, the people engaged in an ongoing struggle for meaningful freedom. Phyllis Taoua shows how the idea of freedom in Africa today evolved from this complex history. With a pan-African, interdisciplinary approach, she synthesizes the most significant issues into a clear, compelling narrative. Tracing the evolution of a conversation about freedom since the 1960s, she defines three types and shows how they are interdependent. Taoua investigates their importance in key areas of narrative interest: the intimate self, gender identity, the nation, global capital, and the spiritual realm. Allowing us to hear the voices of African artists and activists, this compelling study makes sense of their struggle and the broad importance of the idea of freedom in contemporary African culture.

Chapters

• Taoua, P. (2009). The postcolonial condition. In The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel(pp 209-226). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521855600.013
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  The notion of the postcolonial gained currency as a category of experience in the Western academy during the 1980s, roughly two decades after decolonization in Africa, in the wake of Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978). Said’s impressive survey of Western representations of the Orient inspired critics and theorists across many fields because of the way he linked up the politics of institutions and discursive formations with the cultural use of power and knowledge. This English literature professor of Palestinian origin helped initiate a paradigmatic shift away from criticism narrowly focused on texts and their formal aspects to the study of literature in its multiple contexts. This broadening of the critic’s scope to allow for a consideration of the dynamics of empire was consolidated over the next decade with a number of collaborative efforts of which The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin stands out as a noteworthy example. Rhetorical features of postcolonial discourse such as mimicry and hybridity proposed in The Empire Writes Back were subsequently expanded and refined by critics such as Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994). Bhabha and the authors of The Empire Writes Back were also professors of English, which signals how important English departments were in shaping the emergence of postcolonial studies, but it is also useful to remember that French post-structuralism provided much of the theoretical basis from which they developed their common project.

Journals/Publications

• Taoua, P. C. (2023). Of writing and freedom in Sony Labou Tansi’s novel Life and a Half. Journal of the African Literature Association, 17(1), 1-23. doi:10.1080/21674736.2023.2178718
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  This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that was both formally innovative and conceptually challenging. As a point of departure, I consider Tansi’s statements about his vocation as a writer and the interpretive questions they raise. One such question is why the novel’s critical reception has tended to focus on its representation of dictatorship, while not engaging as productively with its existential dimensions. To get at these issues, this essay explores the integral relationship between writing and freedom. I structure the argument around an interpretation of three aliases for the writer, Martial, Chaïdana, and Layisho, who are fictional projections of the author in the novel. My critical approach to the text is informed by the published archive of Tansi’s extra-literary writing, my own fieldwork in Congo-Brazzaville, and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Kongo people and their culture from art history to political anthropology. My re-reading of this classic novel argues that the archive and Kongo culture are valuable resources for understanding the writer’s creative repertoire, which allows us to expand our interpretive framework for explicating aesthetic choices and their meanings in the text. Freedom as a concept broadens our critical parameters and brings a range of interrelated experiences into focus in the same interpretive frame, helping us to elucidate distinctions between them. By showing how Sony Labou Tansi elevates writing as a weapon of resistance with a spiritual dimension drawing on Kongo ritual and culture, we are better able to appreciate the extent of his capacious longing for freedom at home.
• Taoua, P. C., & Musila, G. A. (2023). Of freedom and literature in Africa and the diaspora. Journal of the African Literature Association, 17(Issue 1). doi:10.1080/21674736.2023.2187950
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  This introduction to a special issue on freedom presents a set of original essays that reflect critically on the idea of freedom in relation to specific literary texts from Africa and the African diaspora. Read together, the essays presented in this introduction make up a rich tapestry, offering a set of reflections that map out the complex geo-histories of freedoms in Africa and an array of creative representations of this generative idea across the continent and in the diaspora. This diversity of texts and contexts allows for a wide-ranging critical exploration of a variety of genres, languages, cultures and historical periods. Areas of common ground across the ten essays include literature as a form of protest, creative ways of resisting repression, sidestepping to get around constraints, efforts to build networks of solidarity within and across communities and exploring what it means to be human within these reclaimed spaces.
• Taoua, P. (2022). Cultivating a Community of Viewers in Africa: How Sissako Frames Spectatorship and Performance in His Films. Black Camera, 13(Issue 2). doi:10.2979/blackcamera.13.2.02
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  Critical discussion of Abderrahmane Sissako's major films, Life on Earth (1998), Waiting for Happiness (2002), Bamako (2006), and Timbuktu (2014), explores issues related to spectatorship, live performance, and intertextuality. In particular, this essay looks at how this filmmaker frames spectatorship within his film narratives to bring the process of image-making up for reconsideration. These self-reflexive moments are examined in relation to film as an art form, issues of genre, and the history of cinema. The essay also looks at how live performances are embedded alongside scenarios of audiovisual spectatorship to draw our attention to the formation of audiences in different African settings, and to suggest an analogy between live and recorded performances. Some attention is also given to intertextuality and how Sissako references classic films by Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambety to cultivate an awareness of film history in his viewers. By drawing on and developing insights from contributions by Karin Barber, Tsitsi Jaji, and Akin Adesokan the essay seeks to define the importance of these meta-cinematic elements in the film narratives of one of the most impactful filmmakers of his generation.
• Taoua, P. (2019). From African Cinema to World Cinema: The Question of Spectatorship in Sissako's Filmmaking. n/a, 20.
• Taoua, P. (2020). L’Ethnologie détournée: Carl Einstein, Michel Leiris et la revue ‘Documents’. Par Sébastien Côté. French Studies, 74(3), 485-486. doi:10.1093/fs/knaa081
• Taoua, P. (2019). African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence: by Phyllis Taoua, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2018, 330 pp, USD 29.99 (Paperback), ISBN: 9781108446167. Journal of the African Literature Association, 13(3), 357-359. doi:10.1080/21674736.2019.1677320
• Taoua, P. (2019). In Praise of Cultural Comparisons: Abiola Irele's Contributions as a Cosmopolitan, Multi-Lingual Africanist. Journal of African Literature Association, 17.
• Taoua, P. (2019). In praise of cultural comparisons: Abiola Irele’s contributions as a cosmopolitan, multi-lingual Africanist. Journal of the African Literature Association, 14(1), 90-102. doi:10.1080/21674736.2019.1674019
• Taoua, P. (2019). Making Sense of the DRC's struggle for democracy. The Conversation, 900 words.
• Taoua, P. (2019). What the DRC's flawed election means for emerging democratic culture in Africa. The Conversation, 900 words.
• Taoua, P. (2018). Cameroon's Anglophone Crisis Threatens national unity. The time for change is now.. The Conversation, 900 words.
• Taoua, P. (2016). Appartenance et aliénation dans l'écriture de Mongo Beti après son retour au Cameroun. Etudes littéraires africaines, 42, 20. doi:https://doi.org/10.7202/1039402ar
• Taoua, P. (2016). Mongo Beti. L'exilé de retour et l'épreuve du réel. Etudes littéraires africaines, 42.
• Taoua, P., & Miller, T. (2016). Of Objects, Exhibit Spaces and Markets: Meschac Gaba's Museum of Contemporary African Art. Transition, 188-200.
• Taoua, P. (2015). Abderrahmane Sissako's TIMBUKTU and Its Controversial Reception. African Studies Review, 58(2), 270-278.
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  Review essay on the film and its controversial reception including an Academy Award nomination, snub at FESPACO, and 7 Césars in France.
• Taoua, P. (2015). The Effects of Censorship on the Emergence of Anti-Colonial Protest in France. South Central Review, 32(1), 42-54.
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  Published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Taoua, P. (2003). The anti-colonial archive: France and Africa's unfinished business. Sub-Stance, 32(3). doi:10.1353/sub.2003.0066
• Clarck-Taoua, P. (2002). In search of new skin: Michel Leiris's L'Afrique fantôme. Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, 42(3). doi:10.4000/etudesafricaines.153
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  Michel Leiris set sail for Africa a disillusioned Surrealist, in search of new skin. He fled his metropolitan worries, bringing with him a vanguard primitivism that clouded his perception of Africa, its peoples and cultures. Unable to shake his dreams of Breton and longing for well-dressed women, he turned to self-examination and writing. As archivist and secretary of the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, his journal L'Afrique fantôme offers a window on to the developing field of ethnography, its methods and institutions, as well as the ethics of object collecting. Plundering villages for items to display in Parisian museums became a pseudo-erotic enterprise for the frustrated Leiris, who delighted in the thrill of his knife-wielding power. What he finds in the African bush, to his dismay, is the persistence of his Frenchness rather than himself as primitive Other. Leiris's participation in this historical fieldwork expedition was, however, just the beginning of a life-long engagement with Africa and a process of incorporating elements from the colonies into French cultural practices and institutions.

Presentations

• Taoua, P. (2018, Fall). African Freedom: Languages, Contexts, History. University of London / African Studies Centre / SOAS. University of London: African Studies Centre at SOAS.
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  Public lecture in English at University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies. Invited lecture. Presentation on the languages of freedom in Africa, including audio-visual archive project documenting freedom in African languages.
• Taoua, P. (2018, Fall). La liberté en Afrique: histoire d'une idée. Institut des Afriques at Université de Bordeaux. Université de Bordeaux: IDAF / U of Bordeaux / Public University of Bordeaux.
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  Invited public lecture in French at the University of Bordeaux, speaking about my book AFRICAN FREEDOM.
• Taoua, P. (2018, Fall). Penser la liberté africaine et les disciplines. Université de Bordeaux LAM / Les Afriques dans le Monde Seminar. Université de Bordeaux: LAM / Les Afriques dans le Monde.
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  Invited lecture in fall seminar series. In French. Presentation on freedom and different disciplines (history, philosophy, economics) for the study of this idea in Africa. Open to public.
• Taoua, P. (2018, May). In Praise of Cultural Comparisons: An Itinerary of Abiola Irele’s Career as a Cosmopolitan, Polyvalent, Multi-lingual Intellectual. African Literature Association. Washington, DC: African Literature Association.
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  “In Praise of Cultural Comparisons: An Itinerary of Abiola Irele’s Career as a Cosmopolitan, Polyvalent, Multi-lingual Intellectual,” African Literature Association (2018-Washington, D.C.) Invited presentation in a series of sessions devoted to memory and career of Abiola Irele. Organized by Tejumola Olaniyan.
• Taoua, P. (2018, November). Abiola Irele: Contributions to Literature and African Studies. African Studies Association. Atlanta, GA: African Studies Association.
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  “Abiola Irele: Contributions to Literature and African Studies,” Round table, African Studies Association (2018-Atlanta, GA) with Tejumola Olaniyan, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Ato Quayson. Board Sponsored.
• Taoua, P. (2018, fall). La liberté et l'oeuvre de Sony Labou Tansi. Université de Paris VIII séminaire département de philosophie. Université de Paris VIII: Université de Paris VIII.
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  Invited lecture at Université de Paris VIII in French on the idea of freedom in Sony Labou Tansi's work and in history of ideas.
• Taoua, P. (2017, January). Decolonial Paradigms, Future Freedoms. Modern Languages Association Annual Convention. Philadelphia, PA: MLA.
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  As a member of the executive committee for the African languages, literatures and cultures post-1990 forum, I co-convened the session with Cilas Kemedjio in collaboration with the francophone forum. I was one of four participants on the round table.
• Taoua, P. (2016, January). Neoliberalism and the African Novel. Modern Languages Association Annual Convention. Austin, TX: MLA.
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  As a member of the executive committee for African Languages, Literatures and Cultures Post-1990, I wrote the call for papers, selected the presenters and chaired the session.
• Taoua, P. (2016, March). Meaningful Freedom and Social Justice in the Writing of André Brink and Assia Djebar. American Comparative Literature Association. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
• Taoua, P. (2015, July). Patrice Lumumba in the Archive of the Gatekeeper State. European Conference of African Studies. Paris, France: Sorbonne/ECAS.
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  Conference paper/presentation.
• Taoua, P. (2015, May). “The Past of the Present, New Ideas in African Cinema: Sissako’s Timbuktu, Teno’s Une Feuille dans le vent and Bekolo’s Mudimbe,”. African Literature Association. Bayreuth, Germany: African Literature Association/Bayreuth African Studies Programme.
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  Conference paper/participation.
• Taoua, P. (2015, November). Round Table on Sissako's TIMBUKTU. African Studies Association. San Diego, CA: African Studies Association.
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  Round table participant.
• Taoua, P., & Cazenave, O. (2015, May). New Currents in African Cinema. African Literature Association. Bayreuth, Germany: African Literature Association/Bayreuth African Studies Programme.
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  Co-chaired panel "New Currents in African Cinema."
• Taoua, P. (2014, September). Notes on the Nation: From National Liberation to the Gatekeeper State. African Studies Center, Lecture Series, University of Cape Town. Cape Town, South Africa: African Studies Center.
• Taoua, P. (2014, September). “Appartenance et aliénation dans l’écriture de Mongo Beti après son retour au Cameroun”. Congrès de l’Affsa, “Confluences: rencontres transocéaniques”. University Cape Town, South Africa: Association of French Studies in Southern Africa.

Reviews

• Taoua, P. (2016. Rethinking African Cultural Production by Frieda Ekotto and Kenneth Harrow(pp 192-93). Paris, France.
• Taoua, P. (2016. The Shameful State by Sony Labou Tansi (Translated by Dominic Thomas)(p. 38). Johannesburg, South Africa.
• Taoua, P. (2016. Wole Soyinka by Alain Ricard, Oxford Bibliographies in African Studies (Oxford UP 2016)(p. 233). Paris, France.
• Taoua, P. (2015. A Leaf in the Wind by Jean-Marie Teno for African Studies Review(pp tba). African Studies Review.
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  Film review.
• Taoua, P. (2015. Mudimbé’s Words and Things by Jean-Pierre Bekolo for African Studies Review(pp tba). African Studies Review.
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  Film review.
• Taoua, P. (2015. Review of Traduction et apartheid by Alain Ricard for The Savannah Review(pp tba). Nigeria.

Others

• Taoua, P. (2018, January). Twenty-First Century African Writers. Critical reflections on the emergence of twenty-first century African literature in relation to dynamics and definitions of world literature. Modern Languages Association Annual Convention.
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  Convened session as chair of EC, “Twenty-First Century African Writers. Critical reflections on the emergence of twenty-first century African literature in relation to dynamics and definitions of world literature.” Modern Languages Association (2018-New York, NY)Sponsored by Executive Committee of Forum on African Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Post-1990, MLA. I was chair 2018.
• Taoua, P. (2017, November). Theorizing the Meaning of Freedom in Africa and the Diaspora. African Studies Association.
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  Convened session, “Theorizing the Meaning of Freedom in Africa and the Diaspora,” African Studies Association, (2017-Chicago, IL)
• Taoua, P. (2016, February). Why Niger's Presidential Election Matters. The WorldPost.
• Taoua, P. (2016, January). Why Should We Care About Democracy In Africa? What the Recent Election in Burkina Faso Can Teach Us. Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phyllis-taoua/why-should-we-care-about_b_8913486.html#comments
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  Op-Ed published as a Tucson Public Voices fellow.
• Taoua, P. (2016, January). Why Should We Care About Democracy In Africa? What the Recent Election in Burkina Faso Can Teach Us. The WorldPost.
• Taoua, P. (2016, May). How the US can help Africa fight terrorism by supporting local activists. The Conversation.
• Taoua, P. (2016, September). Three Reasons Trump is Succeeding and What Progressives Can Do. TruthOut.
• Taoua, P., & Abugbilla, F. (2016, March). What does Ghana have to celebrate in its 59th year of independence?. The Conversation.
• Taoua, P., & Bekolo, J. (2016, April). Phyllis Taoua's Conversation with Jean-Pierre Bekolo. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAwdgyWEoxM
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  Phyllis Taoua's videotaped conversation with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo at the University of Arizona, April 4, 2016.
• Taoua, P. (2015, December). Trump Is Even More Extreme Than France's Far-Right Marine Le Pen. TruthOut.
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  Op-Ed published as a Tucson Public Voices fellow.