Author : Moustapha Faye (Université Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis, Sénégal)
Abstract
The shockwave of Rhodes Must Fall is sweeping across the world, sweeping away everything that resembles colonialist symbols in its path. All the great figures of history are being called to account, and woe betide those who circulated with a false license of sanctity! The surprises are disconcerting: notes scribbled during a certain youth catch up with Gandhi in Ghana; lines of correspondence shed new light on museum busts, highlighting monstrosities long disguised by some optical illusion. By proposing the prototypical case of Victor Hugo, we would like to focus on the upheavals that characterize his reception in Senegal. Until 2017, the writer was undoubtedly one of the most popular authors in the country—his poems are known in all strata of the Senegalese school system. On the other hand, a significant portion of the public believed him to be Muslim. But since that year, fragments of his pro-colonialist and racist texts have been circulating on social media, signaling what appears to be an inevitable divorce between a people and one of their favorite authors. In light of these racist writings, should we invoke the excuse of context at the risk of turning it into a panacea? Because of this discovery, which seems like a betrayal, would it be legitimate to degrade the writer to the rank of a racist to be pilloried by history? We will examine how the current reception of Hugo in Senegal follows a logic of decontextualization, that of social media and its updated interpretations.
Keywords: colonization, context, Hugo, internet, racism, reception, Senegal.
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