‘Postcolonial resilience? Débrouillardise in African Texts’ seeks to establish a comparative study of representations of ‘resilience’ in sub-Saharan African texts (1980s-present). The project is funded by an Arts and Humanities research grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The concept underpinning the project is ‘débrouillardise’, a kind of streetwise resourcefulness the meaning and value of which I explore through analysis of its representation in francophone fiction and non-literary texts. Related to this is an examination of its usefulness as a means of responding to crisis and adversity more broadly; something which has fresh significance in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The name of this blog, ‘Changing Resilience’, aligns my project with that of Dilip M Menon. In his forthcoming edited collection, Menon gathers 20 keywords in multiple languages to equip us with critical terms for thinking the world. Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South is a radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. The volume’s essays explore concepts from 16 languages to generate a multilingual conceptual vocabulary to enrich work in the humanities and social sciences.
My own project has language at its centre. Firstly, the question mark after the title term ‘resilience’ underscores that this is an interrogation of that term. Critiques of resilience discourse have been developed in the fields of Social Work and International Relations, but this debate has not yet been addressed in the fields of literary and postcolonial studies within which my work sits. Secondly, I introduce the French-language term ‘débrouillardise’, which I consider as (something like) a situated, creative expertise that informs a way of being in the world. My work takes this concept and seeks to sketch out its parameters with examples from a range of African texts. Thirdly, my project questions the translatability of these terms, working at the interface of French and English, and looking at other disciplines for instances of where ‘resilience’ frequently appears. Lastly, I seek to expand the vocabularies around resilience, by gathering related terms seeing how they might help build our understanding of living with ‘crisis’.