Antoinette Tidjani Alou is a Jamaican-Nigerien academic, film-maker and writer, whose work focuses on the constructions ofSahelian identity in written and oral literature, as well as women in Sahelian identities. She published a novelOn m'appelle Nina in 2016 and a collection of poems with a memoirTina shot me between the eyes and other stories in 2017. She is a lecturer in Comparative Literature and in 2016 was appointed Coordinator of the Arts and Culture Department atAbdou Moumouni University inNiger.
Antoinette Tidjani Alou was born inJamaica and her secondary education took place at Convent of Mercy Academy 'Aplaha' in Kingston.[1] She studied at theUniversity of the West Indies in Kingston where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree. She continued her studies and was awarded a doctorate at theUniversity Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux 3.[2] She defended her thesis in 1991 on the dramatic works ofPaul Claudel.[3]
Tidjani Alou began teaching French and comparative literature atAbdou Moumouni University inNiamey in 1994.[2] She is a lecturer in Comparative Literature and in 2016 was appointed Coordinator of the Arts and Culture Department.[4] Her research focuses on the constructions ofSahelian identity in written and oral literature, as well as the political constructions of identity.[2] She is also an expert on depictions of the mytho-historical figure ofSarraounia.[5][6]
In 2006, she was appointed president of theInternational Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA), a position she held for eight years.[7][2] She has worked on the Women Writing Africa Project and is a member of the research groupLiterature, Gender and Development: Nigerien Visions and Perspectives.[8][9]
Between her childhood in Jamaica, her university education in France, and her professional life in Niger, Tidjani Alou has adapted to different cultures.[10] She published her first novel,On m'appelle Nina in 2016 withPrésence Africaine. Thisautofiction retraces the journey of a woman, Vilhelminma, who leaves Jamaica to settle for love in Niger.[11] The character finds herself confronted with a society that refuses to open up to her, considers her as a foreigner - a “white black”.[12] She also deals with the variations of pain, trauma and bereavement, as the character has to deal with the death of her 16-year-old child.[13] It drew comparisons with the works ofMaryse Conde.[14]
The following year, she publishedTina shot me between the eyes and other stories, a collection of poems and a memoir, with the Senegalese publisherAmalion.[15] In it she explores how the self is shaped and transformed by our relationships.[10] She is also a freelance translator and screenwriter. She collaborated with the Cameroonian filmmakerJean-Marie Teno in 2010 to write for the filmToutes voiles dehors.[16]
Alou, Antoinette Tidjani. "Myths of a New World in Édouard Glissant's novels La Lézarde and Le Quatrième siècle."Tydskrif vir letterkunde 44.2 (2007): 163-187.[19]
Alou, Antoinette Tidjani. "Niger and Sarraounia: One Hundred Years of Forgetting Female Leadership."Research in African Literatures, vol. 40 no. 1, 2009, p. 42-56.[20]
Alou, Antoinette Tidjani, Arinpe Gbekelolu Adejumo, and Asonzeh Ukah.Africans and the politics of popular culture. Vol. 42. University Rochester Press, 2009.[21]
Tidjani Alou, Antoinette. "Ancestors from the East, Spirits from the West. Surviving and Reconfiguring the Exogenous Violence of Global Encounters in the Sahel."Journal des africanistes 80-1/2 (2010): 75-92.[22]
Tidjani-Alou, Antoinette. “‘Back to Africa, Miss Mattie?’: Autobiographical Notes from Global Africa on Apprehending Texts and Subtexts of Popular Culture.”The Global South, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, pp. 139–53.[23]
Alou, Antoinette Tidjani, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan.Epistemology, fieldwork, and anthropology. Springer, 2016.[24]
Alou, Antoinette Tidjani. "Reel Resistance: the Cinema of Jean-Marie Teno."Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 57.2 (2020): 113-114.[25]
Alou, Antoinette Tidjani. "Sarraounia, love, and the postcolony."Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 59.3 (2022): 27-34.[26]
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