Tobias Warner

University of California, Davis, French, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Public Views

Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of Critical Theory at UC Davis.

Modern African literatures with a particular focus on Senegal.

Research and teaching interests include francophone literatures, postcolonial/decolonial theory, world literature, print cultures, translation, film, and comics.

Faculty page: https://frenchanditalian.ucdavis.edu/people/tobias-warner
Personal webpage: https://tobiasdwarner.com/

less

Peter Kalliney

Giles Scott-Smith

Leiden University College the Hague

Elizabeth M Holt

Bard College

Harm Langenkamp

Utrecht University

Thayse Lima

University of Maryland, College Park

Kianosh Kalantari

University of Mazandaran

Chris Rasmussen

Fairleigh Dickinson University

Nicolas Guilhot

European University Institute

Ian Wellens

MARCELO RIDENTI

Columbia University

InterestsView All (10)

Uploads

Papers by Tobias Warner

Cultural Attachés: African Literature, the CIA and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2024

Recent attempts to outline post-critical models of interpretation in literary studies have often ... more Recent attempts to outline post-critical models of interpretation in literary studies have often fixated on suspicion, paranoia, or unmasking as their foils. But in the early decades of decolonization, it made sense to be paranoid: writers and artists were justified in suspecting that they were being covertly observed, funded, or promoted by para-state actors knee-deep in the Cold War battlefield of culture. Scholars have long debated whether and how covert state sponsorship for the arts matters. In postcolonial studies especially there has been a revival of interest in the CIA’s activities as a cultural patron through its proxy foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Recent research on the CCF has tended to concentrate on what its clandestine sponsorship means for aesthetic autonomy – the notion that the artist has or ought to have some relative autonomy from meddling outside forces, a cherished value of both modernism and mid-century humanism. Focusing on the CCF’s support for African modernism, this essay suggests that we need to look beyond autonomy as our default paradigm for assessing Cold War cultural patronage. Instead of joining the debate over what the CCF did or did not do to African literature, this essay asks: what did they even think they were doing? Drawing on research in the CCF archives, this essay argues that a better way to understand the CCF’s approach is as a practice of attachment. The aim here is to re-describe Cold War cultural patronage – and, along the way, to ask what scholars of decolonization and the Cold War might stand to learn by engaging with ongoing debates about methodology in the broader field of literary studies.

Download

Warner Introduction CFC 48 1

Contemporary French Civilization , 2023

Introduction to special issue of CFC on decolonizing memory

Download

The Labor of the Living Dead

Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2022

This article develops the concept of the labor of the living dead through readings of recent Sene... more This article develops the concept of the labor of the living dead through readings of recent Senegalese films, novels, comics, and music videos in Wolof and French. The undead have been resurgent in cultural production for decades but these are not your average zombies: they do not inspire collective dread nor are they directed by opaque, outside forces. In Senegal, the focus has more often been on the work of the undead. This enigmatic concept speaks to the pervasive and potentially fatal mismatch between discourses of entrepreneurial self-realization and the crushing limitations and dangers imposed on many by their present circumstances. In representations of undead labor, projects of normative self-improvement devour and outlive the selves they are meant to improve, generating affects of shame and powerlessness and sparking violence toward more marginalized lives. Alongside these dynamics, though, the figure of undead work also seems to contain a grain of counter-hegemonic imagination, even affording visions of alternatives to existing configurations of labor and humanity. Central to this phenomenon is a tendency to exploit the polysemy of the Wolof term liggéey, which means work in a conventional sense but which also refers in certain contexts to witchcraft or gendered labor.

Download

Enduring Epidemic: Aesthetic Aftershocks of the 1914 Plague and the Segregation of Dakar

The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry

In 1914, an epidemic of bubonic plague ravaged colonial Dakar. The panicked French colonial admin... more In 1914, an epidemic of bubonic plague ravaged colonial Dakar. The panicked French colonial administration blamed the native population and evicted indigenous Africans from the city center before burning their homes. The Dakarois fought back through a general strike, political maneuvering, and, finally, by taking to the streets. Out of this year of disease, politics, racism, and resistance came the new, segregated neighborhood of Médina, which was created to house the displaced African population of Dakar. Over the twentieth century, as Dakar swelled into a metropolis around it, Médina was a unique space in the Senegalese capital—a hotbed of cultural creativity, a crossroads for waves of migrants, and a potent and enduring contrast with the nearby downtown, known as the Plateau. This article explores the ways in which the plague of 1914 reshaped Dakar and left a lasting impression on a century of Senegalese cultural production.

Download

Para-Literary Ethnography and Colonial Self-Writing: The Student Notebooks of the William Ponty School

Research in African Literatures, 2016

Ponty-the elite French colonial teacher-training college-completed their studies by writing ethno... more Ponty-the elite French colonial teacher-training college-completed their studies by writing ethnographic monographs on some aspect of their community of origin during their summer vacation. This corpus of nearly eight hundred monographs is collectively known as the "Cahiers Ponty" (Ponty notebooks). Ponty students were encouraged to "avoid false literary descriptions" but in practice many drew heavily on the tropes of novelistic prose-especially those of the bildungsroman. This essay examines the rhetorical and narrative strategies Ponty students employ to produce legible accounts of their own socialization as modern subjects, as well as the feedback from teachers that constrained their performances. I argue that the Ponty notebooks exemplify a distinct discipline-para-literary ethnography-that had a role in shaping the contours of colonial modernity and early francophone literature in West Africa.

Download

Enacting Postcolonial Translation: Voice, Color and Free Indirect Discourse in the Restored Version of Ousmane Sembène's La Noire de...

Translating the Postcolonial in Multilingual Contexts, 2017

Download

How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique

PMLA, 2016

Download

Books by Tobias Warner

The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal

Fordham University Press, 2019

From the back cover:: Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The... more From the back cover::
Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation as a dead end for narrow nationalism. This book returns to the language question from a fresh perspective. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter.

Focusing on the case of Senegal, Warner investigates the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, as well as educational projects and popular periodicals, the book traces the emergence of a politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development. Warner reads the francophone works of well-known authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked Wolof-language works with which they are in dialogue.

Refusing to see the turn to vernacular languages only as a form of nativism, The Tongue-Tied Imagination argues that the language question opens up a fundamental struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Warner reveals how language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they weave vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, Warner brilliantly rethinks the terms of world literature and charts a renewed practice of literary comparison.

Cultural Attachés: African Literature, the CIA and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2024

Download

Warner Introduction CFC 48 1

Contemporary French Civilization , 2023

Introduction to special issue of CFC on decolonizing memory

Download

The Labor of the Living Dead

Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2022

Download

Enduring Epidemic: Aesthetic Aftershocks of the 1914 Plague and the Segregation of Dakar

The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry