Frederic Bruly Bouabre: La Methodologie De La Nouvelle Ecriture Africaine (French Edition) [Paperback]

Frederic Bruly Bouabre (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2, 2004

This first volume on the unique alphabet developed by artist Fradaric Bruly Bouabra reproduces the original notebook pages on which he developed his lexicon. Realized over a three-day period in 1984, the original manuscript was written in an agenda given out by the Toyota corporation in 1983--hence the front and back cover of this artist's book.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Onestar Press (February 2, 2004)
• Language: French
• ISBN-10: 2915359024
• ISBN-13: 978-2915359022
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,614,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars site of resistance - at least for some of us., June 24, 2006

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Jackie Chan "Alberto" (Mars) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Frederic Bruly Bouabre: La Methodologie De La Nouvelle Ecriture Africaine (French Edition) (Paperback)

This book comprises 2 works by the artist. L'Alphabet and La Methodologie. L'Alphabet is a didactic document intended to teach Bete speakers how to read French, La Methodologie is the application of the orthography of L'Alphabet, derived from a loosley 'paradigmatic' code set up in a sequential juxtaposition of pictograph to French syllable (graphemic unit) that follows the Latin alphabet, to a meditation on Bete ethics, metaphysics etc. very generally rendered. The work is very important as an example of African cultural/linguistic resistance to French by a man who used to work for the French Colonial gov't in the Ivory Coast, and who saw the language of his people being neglected by educational policy. Bruly-Bouabre uses pictographs as an interstice between vocal and written French, moreover pictographs that are genetically derived from elements of the Bete lifeworld environment or visual culture. These include paired down images of toucan's heads, stick men, devil's heads, etc. He therefore uses these ideographic imaginaries, these 'connotative signifiers' to use what is ultimately a Eurocentric term, as means to invoke, fetishistically, unseen forces in his environment to act for people to learn to read. Ultimately, in my view, he recolonises the French language through Bete, or could be argued to be demonstrating how French is part of the Bete lifeworld, thus empowering readers beyond a simple process of learning to read a foreign language, allowing them the power to name and thereby colonise a language with which they have been colonised. Bruly-Bouabre is an artist, a linguist, a fetishist, community leader, a teacher, and also none of these singularly in any given work. Western theoretical frameworks can shed light on aspects of his work individually, one might talk about the functioning of Derrida's notion of 'iterability' in these works for example, but are unable to unlock the essence of performativity in his work as a coelescence of different forces. One might have a go at discussing Bruly-Bouabre in Deleuzian terms as a plane of immanence, an interplay of a-signying elements, sign as affect, etc... but Deleuze's place in the cannon of contemporary art theory is firmly established in European Film and literature. These concepts remain tied to a description of the dynamics of a European imagination. 'Minoritarian literature' is a European concept. Part of the problem is that African thought is marginalised in our academies, and many African intellectuals have dismissed the appeal of Bruly-Bouabre in Europe especially, claiming that he represents some quaint distanced African colonial, an exotic, an orientalism . This is overlooking the importance of this work as marking the cultural limits of theoretical, conceptual frameworks for the analysis of art I believe. An important work.