Thresholds: A ‘Complete’ Table of the Borrowings in Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence, and Why They Matter

"Thresholds of Meaning explores a range of complex historical and social questions pertaining to cultural production, consecration, dissemination, reception, and retrieval. Together, these questions promise to nourish engaging conversations around contemporary debates, while also improving our capacity to evaluate how knowledge will continue to be recorded and transmitted in new and unforeseen ways along the connected pathways of twenty-first century existence." Dominic Thomas, Madeleine Letessier Professor of French, UCLA

"This is a brilliant scholarly illustration of literary intersexuality and Creolization. Christopher Miller’s book, “Thresholds…” goes beyond the defense of Le devoir de violence against charges of plagiarism, to draw the reader’s attention to a more fruitful engagement with Ouologuem’s textual cannibalism of World Literatures as the inauguration, in 1968, of the movement of anti-origin and anti-authenticity by modern African writers. This is what’s new and exciting in both the works of Ouologuem and Miller." Professor Manthia Diawara, NYU

"Against the accusations of plagiarism that tried to bury it, no one better than Christopher Miller has revealed Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to violence, for what it is: a literary phenomenon that we have never finished probing. At a time when the work has been reissued, it remained to track down precisely all the passages in which the Malian writer demonstrated his genius for demarcation. This has now been done now, wonderfully, in Christopher Miller's Thresholds." Professor Souleymane Bashir Diagne, Columbia University