Cilas Kemedjio
Professor of French
PhD, Ohio State University
- Office Location
- 406 Lattimore
- Telephone
- (585) 275--425
Office Hours: By appointment
Research Overview
Research Interests
- Francophone Caribbean and African literary and cultural studies
- postcolonial theory
- transnational black studies
- humanitarianism
Courses Offered (subject to change)
- AAS 380: African and African-American Studies Senior Seminar (Fall 2018)
- FREN 202: Introduction to Literature in French (Spring 2016)
- FREN 204: Contemporary French Culture (Fall 2015)
- FREN 228: Humanitarianism and Its Discontents (Fall 2019)
- FREN 239: Representing African-Americans in the African Imagination (Fall 2018)
- FREN 243: Mutilated Bodies: From Traditions to Cutting-Edge Technologies (Spring 2019)
- FREN 247: Black Paris (Spring 2018)
- FREN 250: Black Paris - 2 credits (Spring 2018)
- FREN 271: Introduction to Francophone Literature (Fall 2019)
- FREN 272: Madness and Postcolonial Literature (Spring 2013)
- FREN 274: Caribbean Novel and Theory (Spring 2014)
- FREN 286: Growing Up in French (Fall 2014)
- CLTR 200: Biographies of Emancipation in The Black World (Fall 2020)
Selected Publications
Books and Monographs
- The Humanitarian Misunderstanding: Remembering Globalization. In progress.
- With Cecelia Lynch, editors. Critical Investigations into Humanitarian Interventions in Africa. In progress.
- Editor, introduction, annotations, and analysis. Mémoires des années de braise: La grève estudiantine de 1990 expliquée/Remember the Flame: White Papers from the 1990 Yaoundé University Strikes. Éditions Terroirs, 2013.
- Mongo Beti - Le combattant fatigué. Une biographie intellectuelle. LIT, 2013. Littératures et cultures francophones hors d'Europe 7.
- De la Négritude à la Créolité. Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé et la malédiction de la théorie. LIT, 1999. Littératures des peuples noirs 1.
Articles and Book Chapters
- “Migration, Literary Imagination, and Mirages in the Francophone Text: Pahts to Anthropological Mutilation” in Olakunle George, Ed. A Companion to African Literatures, January 2021, (pp.333-349)
- “Black Studies and The Ideology of Relevance” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal of Visual Cutlure, November 2020.
- “The Anglophone question: between a “regime-made disaster” and the ethnic politics of a fragmented nation,Journal of the African Literature Association (2020),14:2,198-215,DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2020.1717121
- “Abiola Irele and the anti-Négritude generation: “In Praise of Alienation”,Journal of the African Literature Association (2020),14:1,43-57,DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2019.1674016
- ‘Anthropological mutilation’ and the reordering of Cameroonian literature , TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 53 (1) • 2016, 86-108, DO - 10.4314/tvl.v53il.5
- “La ‘mutilation anthropologique’ et le réalignement de la littérature camerounaise” Cilas Kemedjio. Tydskr Letterk, 2016];53(1): 66-85. https://letterkunde.africa/article/view/1174
- “Mémoire des esclaves: le dernier chantier d’Édouard Glissant”. Revue des Sciences Humaines, Volume 309 (2013), pp. 203-221.
- "The Suspect Nation: Globalization and the Postcolonial Imaginary." Translated by Alexis Pernsteiner. Francophone Sub-Saharan African Literature in Global Contexts. Spec. issue of Yale French Studies, no. 120, 2011, pp. 111-26. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41337121.
- "Le malentendu humanitaire: une approche de Guelwaar d'Ousmane Sembène." Ousmane Sembène. Spec. issue of Études littéraires africaines, no. 30, 2010, pp. 46-57. Érudit, doi:10.7202/1027346ar.
- "Aimé Césaire's Letter to Maurice Thorez: The Practice of Decolonization." Aimé Césaire, 1913-2008: Poet, Politician, Cultural Statesman. Spec. issue of Research in African Literatures, vol. 41, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 87-108. JSTOR, doi:10.2979/ral.2010.41.1.87.
- "Of Aid and the African Renaissance: A Discussion from Ngugi wa Thiongo's Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, Ngugi wa Thiongo's The Wizard of the Crow, and Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There Is Another Way for Africa." Translated by Ruthmarie H. Mitsch. Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa (CIHA) Blog, 14 Apr. 2010, www.cihablog.com/debating-aid-and-the-african-renaissance/.
- "Imaginaires de la departementalisation: les indpendances en miroir." International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, Nov. 2008, pp. 345-64. Ingenta Connect, doi:10.1386/ijfs.11.3.345_1.