World Languages and Cultures professor of French and Italian Anna Rocca publishes an article entitled “From the Margins of Society and Beyond Marginalization: Adrienne Yabouza and la littérature pour la jeunesse”
Having survived civil wars and ethnic cleansing in the Central African Republic, Adrienne Yabouza occupied marginal spaces as a Yakoma citizen, a woman, a widow, and a writer. In France, she risks again to be marginalized as a refugee, an Afrodiasporic, and a children’s literature writer. And yet, by means of children literature, Anna Rocca maintains, Yabouza transcends, redirects, and transforms the margins of endurance and suffering she personally experienced into stories that develop, articulate, and share her own highly personal sense of the world. Going beyond the prevailing social categories and binaries, Yabouza invites the reader to enter a space of interdependence that calls for a qualitative shift of life perspective.
In her stories, whether temporal or spatial, natural, human or animal, all living presences affect and are affected by each other. Space and time are inseparable and unbroken. Nature is the measure of human life; it marks time, provides nourishment, and establishes human limits and connections. Hope and relations, whether in the form of desire or will, are at the heart of all accounts. Seen in this way, margins and marginalization become for Yabouza a site of creativity and power, what bell hooks defines as a location that offers “the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds” (“Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness” 20).
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Anna Rocca
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