[Download] "Modernity and the Belgian Congo" by Tydskrif vir Letterkunde # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Modernity and the Belgian Congo
- Author : Tydskrif vir Letterkunde
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 89 KB
Description
Art nouveau and empire Belgian colonisers introduced the Congo to modernity as they attempted to convert the locals to Christianity, implement new modes of capitalist production and imposed the European idea of the nation-state. The term "modernity" is very contentious as it is neither chronologically nor conceptually clear-cut (Giddens 1990). What I would like to demonstrate in this article is that this context, modernity, also generated dialogues between Belgian and Congolese artists and, ultimately, shaped and inflected Belgian modernism or aesthetic sense. This article will focus on colonial fiction in its post-evolutionist phase and endeavour to show that this corpus resulted from the same epistemological rupture as Francophone writing although the latter developed differently from the late 1930s onwards. In his many essays on the discursive basis of European colonialism, Valentin Yves Mudimbe (1973: 17-18) has recurrently shown that throughout the nineteenth century the human sciences (for instance the nascent philology and anthropology) became gradually dependent on concepts and paradigms first developed in natural sciences. Mudimbe deplores this subservience and contends, for instance, that misapplications of Darwin's theory on the origin of species underpinned the emergence of a body of writings in which races, and hence cultures, tended to be appraised and classified along a line of progress that reflected above all an ambition on the part of its Western promoters to dominate the rest of the world. Mudimbe (1973: 17) argues that this classic positiviste-naturaliste or evolutionist model, started to subside in the first quarter of the twentieth century with the advent of a more relativist attitude to other races and cultures. This article will focus on the Congo in its literary and aesthetic relationship with Belgium during this post-evolutionist phase (1900-1940) and argue that, in spite of this epistemological shift, the new climate did not result in radical rejections of colonial paternalism.