HWS News
20 September 2019 • Faculty Resistance and the Warrior Queen
In her most recent work, Catherine Gallouët, Professor of French and Francophone Studies and the John Milton Potter Professor of the Humanities, looks at African resistance to colonialism and its lingering effects.
Gallouët recently reviewed a new biography of Queen Njinga, the 17th century ruler of Ndongo (now Angola) who resisted colonizing forces and left a legacy that still resonates throughout the African diaspora.
In Njinga of Angola: Africa's Warrior Queen, Gallouët writes, "the biographer places the queen in the same rank as Elizabeth I of England and Catherine I of Russia, whose ambivalent reputations are singularly similar to hers. [Njingas] influence extends beyond Africa, in the diaspora, especially in Brazil where [she] is the object of a cult."
In her article on La Vie des Ides (The Life of Ideas) the College de France website that describes itself as an intellectual cooperative, place of debate and workshop of knowledge Gallouët describes the books efforts to reconstruct Njingas life in the greatest detail, and to confront it with these major issues that represent the history of Africa, gender, power, resistance to colonization, and soon. "Ultimately," she writes, "the book exposes the fate of this exceptional woman, a figurehead of resistance to foreign influence and colonization."
Meanwhile, in a book chapter published this year, Gallouët continues her exploration of resistance and other post-colonial themes. "The chapter highlights and questions the remarkable consistency among the speeches by African protagonists, recorded in a range of European texts, which amount to a strange configuration allowing authentic speech to surface despite the context of its production," Gallouët writes.
The chapter, "Les paradoxes des discours de dissidence dans la reprsentation des Africains des recits des Lumires," appears in the book Les Illusions de lautonymie. La parole rapporte de l'Autre dans la literature, edited by Marie-Franoise Marein, Brengre Moricheau-Airaud, Christine Copy and David Diop.
Gallouët is the author of several books and some 50 articles and book chapters examining culture, race and the French Enlightenment through the lens of 18thcentury French literature. Her research focuses on the author Pierre de Marivaux and the construction of race in 18thcentury European culture. She is currently working on the rhetoric of resistance in fictional African representations, the giraffe as the object of European naturalist discourse, and is editing a special issue of Topiques: Etudes satoriennes on Eating and drinking in narrative fiction.
Gallout organized the 2018 SATOR annual meeting (Socit d'Analyse de la Topique Romanesque) and the 2009 NEASECS annual meeting (North East American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies), both at HWS; she was also co-organizer of the 2014 Marivaux conference at the Universite Aix-Marseille, as well as the 2018 L'Afrique des savants europens (The Africa of European Scholars) (17th-20thcenturies) international conference at the Universit Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. She was the principal organizer of the international SATOR conference, held at HWS in 2018.
Recipient of the 2002 Faculty Prize for Excellence in Research and two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, Gallouët was awarded the 2014-15 John Readie and Florence B. Kinghorn Global Fellowship by her colleagues in recognition of her exemplary global citizenship on a continued basis. She is a member of the executive committee of the research groups GRREA(Groupe de Recherches sur les Reprsentations Europennes de l'Afrique et des Africains aux 17eet 18esicles,) and SATOR (Socit d'Analyse de la Topique Romanesque.)
Before joining the HWS faculty in 1986, Gallout earned her doctorate and masters from Rutgers University, her B.A. cum laude from Hope College and her Bacalaurate, with honors, from Acadmie de Grenoble. Several times chair of the French and Francophone Studies Department, she served as dean of William Smith College from 2014 to 2017.