Cilas Kemedjio

Cilas Kemedjio

Professor of Black Studies

Professor of Francophone and French Studies

Interim Chair, Department of Black Studies

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. JSTORwww.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. Éruditdoi: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. JSTORdoi: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 Connectdoi:10.1386/ijfs.11.3.345_1.