Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French Book

List of Illustrations
Preface
Part One: Introduction
1. "Telle figure que l'on veut": Deriving a Discourse
A Discourse with Tails
Names for a Distance
Orientalism and Africa
Ambivalence in Antiquity
Blameless Ones and Headless Ones
The "Idea" of Blackness
Aniaba and Zaga-Christ
Nigri Idolatrae
French Priority and French Desire
"Africa," Dream and Discourse
Part Two: Africanist Poetics
2. Baudelaire in the Nineteenth Century: Black and White in Color
Introduction
Les Curiosités esthétiques
The Salon of 1845
The Salon of 1846
Writing on the Void
Baudelaire and Gobineau
Black Irreflection
Creole Creativity
The Creole Lady
But Not Satisfied
"La Belle Dorothée"
The Swan, the Slave, and the Rhetoric of Nostalgia
Equality and Hierarchy
3. "Je est un nègre," or Rimbaud's Africanist Adventures
Introduction
The Poetry
"Mauvais Song"
"Démocratie"
Rimbaud "chez les nègres"
The Myth of Writing
The Myth of the Slave Trade
Rimbaud and Myth
Part Three: Africanist Narrative
4. The Discoursing Heart: Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Africa and the Novel
Narrating Backwards
"Heart" and "Darkness": Condensing and Lying
"Those Savages"
Conrad and Rimbaud
Heart of Darkness and the French
5. No One's Novel: Sade's Aline et Valcour
Framing Disruption
The Body Dis-organized
Libertinism and the Figure of Africa
6. Céline the Obscure
The Endless Night
InBambola-Bragamance
7. Dis-figuring Narrative: Plagiarism and Dismemberment in Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de Violence
The African and the Novel
Plagiarism, Legally
Identity of the Text
The Purloined Quotation Marks
Lettre à la France nègre
Narration in Le Devoir de violence
Ouologuem and Libertinism
8. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index