Noudou Successfully Defends Dissertation
Anik Noudou, a doctoral student in our French Language & Literature program, successfully defended her doctoral dissertation this past Monday. Noudou’s dissertation is titled, A Question of Gaze: The Representation of Women in Fracophone African Novels & Films Forty Years After Mariama Bâ. From the dissertation abstract:
“The portrayal of women in Francophone African literature and cinema has significantly evolved since the 1979 publication of Mariama Bâ’s Une Si Longue Lettre, one of the most influential texts to lay an early foundation for women through her deep critique of oppressing forces such as patriarchy. Drawing on a corpus of ten novels and ten films produced from 1980 to 2020, I examine how theses texts and films place women at the forefront of their narratives.
My analysis explores how the new wave of literary and filmic approaches depicts women within the intricate framework of gender, culture and politics. In the process, they highlight the possible pitfalls of addressing African women’s challenges through the lens of Western feminism. In four chapters, this research seeks to understand how the selected films and texts utilize the female gaze to create gender and body epresentations that align with feminist ideologies.”