This article examines the adaptation from book to film of a recent Senegalese tale of clandestine migration by boat. Abasse Ndione’s Mbëkë mi (2008) foregrounds the motivations for migration for Senegalese youth and provokes readers’ sympathy for its migrating characters. It uses a heteroglossic lexicon which is nevertheless anchored in the French language on which the author must rely in order to publish his message. Moussa Touré’s film La Pirogue, by contrast, although sponsored by agents promoting francophonie, includes French and African languages in equal measure. This article examines the ethnic, religious and linguistic differences that the film points up as it represents contemporary migration.
This introduces the special issue on mobility across media in various areas of the Francophone world. Articles treat the notion of mobility as understood in film, literature, visual art and advertising and explore how genres as well as national traditions intersect. They explore a range of representations of mobility, such as the mobility between people, between genres, between languages, between artistic forms and between texts across historical periods. We show that the terminology regarding movement is constantly mobile itself, having undergone significant slippage in recent decades. Overall, this volume does not seek to arrest, but to add to, the understanding of the diverse modes of mobility present in the contemporary world.
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