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  • SAS Core Learning: AHp, WCr, WCd
  • Language Taught In: Taught in English
  • Instructor: Badji, Baba
  • Credits: 3

Offered: Spring (no prerequisites)

Course Description: French is the fifth most spoken language in the world, with an estimated 300 million speakers in 106 countries and territories. French is the only language aside from English to be spoken on five continents (statistics from the OIF). In the wake of decolonization and the rapid spread of globalization, the French language has been adopted, adapted, and transformed in various locales and with widespread cultural implications. This course imagines exploring Francophone cultures through the specific case studies of Senegal and Algeria, and Francophone worldwide. We will search and examine the Francophone narrative in literature, poetry, and film of these regions and in doing so, gain a more nuanced and complex understanding of exile, global French, and Francophone cultures. In this course we will empathetically study a range of works that will provide a window onto contemporary issues of French cultural and national identity. We will delve into the role of race, ethnicity, belonging, exile and identity in global French and Francophone societies. Students will gain understanding of French (post)colonial history, current French political struggles, through text, image, video, and films.

Course Objectives: This course will allow students to grasp the meaning of Francophone, Exile and Global French in concrete situations seen in Senegal and Algeria within a global context. In this course, students will comprehend a basis in Francophone narrative, postcolonial studies & race, literary history, cultural studies, and translation studies and re-count it in their own world. Students will acquire the skills needed to read, write critically & creatively about film, literature, and poetry from a cultural and historical perspective in their own words. This course will help students to evaluate a more nuanced understanding of Francophone populations and other (exile/displaced peoples) and their connection to French language and culture.

Course Satisfies Learning Goals:
ANALYZE works of modern art produced in France and the attempts of French writers to account for them.
COMPOSE and REVISE essays about these artworks informed by past attempts to make sense of them.

Schedule of Undergraduate Courses