Michael Syrotinski – författare

Francophone writing is often concerned with questions of subjectivity and narrative agency, and its is this focus Michael Syrotinski, the author, takes as his point of departure in this volume. Using the works of V.Y. Mudimbe as a major theoretical reference, Syrotinski sets up a number of dialogues between francophone Africa literature, African philosophy, literary theory, postcolonial studies, cinema, cultural studies and history to arrive at the notion of a ""performative reinscription of subjectivity"". This text covers a wide range of francophone African writers, each of whom is read within a broader theoretical context related to African subjectivity: Mudimbe and the philosophical subject; Aoua Keita and autobiography; Bernard Dadie and ethnographic irony; Ousmane Sembene and Tierno Monenembo and the cinematic imagination; Veronique Tadjo and Werewere Liking and the female writing subject; and Sony Labou Tansi and the ""spectral"" subject. In this interdisciplinary weaving together of contemporary theory and literature, the focus on the francophone African subject allows for a richer application of the texture and rhetoric of the language of the texts themselves. What emerges from this study is the subject understood not as a single homogenized entity but as a plural celebration of singular francophone African subjectivites.

The ground-breaking and monumental encyclopedia of philosophical terms read through the history of their translation, Vocabulaire Européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Robert/Le Seuil, 2004), finally appeared in English translation in 2014 with Princeton University Press as the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, eds. Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood. Translations of the Vocabulaire are now under way in several other major languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Romanian, Italian, Ukrainian and Russian. This special issue of Paragraph will be the first sustained critical reflection following the publication of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, and includes contributions by those who were most closely involved in the editing of this volume, by two of the translators (Mehlman, Syrotinski), as well as others whose work has been significantly inflected or influenced by the questions raised by the Dictionary.

As postcolonial studies shifts to a more comparative approach one of the most intriguing developments has been within the Francophone world. A number of genealogical lines of influence are now being drawn connecting the work of the three figures most associated with the emergence of postcolonial theory – Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak – to an earlier generation of French (predominantly ‘poststructuralist’) theorists. Within this emerging narrative of intellectual influences, the importance of the thought of Jacques Derrida, and the status of deconstruction generally, has been acknowledged, but has not until now been adequately accounted for. In Deconstruction and the Postcolonial, Michael Syrotinski teases out the underlying conceptual tensions and theoretical stakes of what he terms a ‘deconstructive postcolonialism’, and argues that postcolonial studies stands to gain ground in terms of its political forcefulness and philosophical rigour by turning back to, and not away from, deconstruction.