Un processus postcolonial : la genèse de la domination kényane dans les courses de fond vue par la presse sportive spécialisée française

FR. Les médias se font régulièrement l’échos des exploits, sinon des dérives, des athlètes kényan·e·s qui dominent les épreuves de course de fond les plus prestigieuses à travers le monde. Désormais coutumière de cette hégémonie, la presse sportive française commence à l’interroger dès les années 1960, tandis que l’athlétisme est-africain s’affirme au plus haut niveau international, manifestant sa volonté de comprendre et d’expliquer le « phénomène kényan ». L’objet de cet article est de montrer que l’éclosion au plus haut niveau international de l’athlétisme kényan dans la période post-coloniale est appréhendée par les journalistes français selon une rhétorique s’insérant dans un processus postcolonial. S’inscrivant dans le champ des postcolonial studies, cette étude vise à identifier et expliquer les transformations des modalités discursives selon lesquelles les journalistes français couvrent les succès kényans. Bien que le Kenya soit une ancienne colonie britannique, les textes étudiés reflétent la domination culturelle caractéristique de la période coloniale que les journalistes opposent à la domination sportive des athlètes kényan·e·s. Trois revues spécialisées dans l’athlétisme paraissant dans les années 1960, choisies tant par leur réputation que par l’éclectisme de leurs lignes éditoriales, sont analysées : l’Athlétisme, organe de presse officiel de la Fédération française d’athlétisme, Le Miroir de l’athlétisme, revue déclinée du journal Miroir sprint, proche du parti communiste français, et l’Équipe athlétisme magazine, associée au journal l’Équipe. Portant sur l’ensemble du discours, tant son contenu que ses stratégies énonciatives, l’analyse effectuée met en avant le recours par les journalistes français aux modèles rhétoriques utilisés par leurs homologues britanniques à la fin de la période coloniale. Identifiés par John Bale, ces modèles rhétoriques (la surveillance, l’appropriation, la négation et l’idéalisation) s’affirment progressivement à travers quatre étapes chronologiques de 1960 à 2000. La France n’ayant jamais colonisé le Kenya, cette démarche propose donc d’élargir la question postcoloniale aux interactions culturelles entre des pays dépourvus de liens coloniaux. *** EN. Media regularly report on the high performances, as well as the missteps, of Kenyan athletes occupying top places in the most prestigious international long-distance running competitions. If the French sports press has become accustomed to this podium hegemony, a desire to understand and explain the “Kenyan phenomenon” arose in the 1960’s, when East African athletics was gradually asserting itself at the highest levels of competition. The article aims to demonstrate that the narrative developed by French journalists on Kenyan athletics in the decades following African independences is part of rhetorical processes intertwined with postcolonial mechanisms. Embedded in the field of postcolonial studies, the research aims to identify and explain the evolution of discursive modalities used by French journalists to cover Kenyan sporting successes. Despite Kenya being a former British colony, specific characteristics appear in the analyzed text corpus and highlight how French journalists perpetuate cultural domination mechanisms, which sit in contrast with the sporting preeminence of Kenyan athletes. Three magazines published in the 1960s and specialized in the field of athletics were selected for the research, based on their reputation and the eclecticism of their editorial lines: L'Athlétisme, published by the French Athletics Federation ; Le Miroir de l'athlétisme, a magazine based on the Miroir sprint, known to be close to the French Communist Party ; and l'Équipe athlétisme magazine, a spin-off edition from the newspaper l'Équipe. The analysis of the discourse, from both content and enunciative strategies perspectives, highlights how French journalists resort to rhetorical models used by their British counterparts during the same period. Identified by John Bale, the models include surveillance, appropriation, negation and idealization, and appear chronologically in the press in four stages, from 1960 to 2000. Since Kenya was never under French colonial rule, the article suggests to broaden the postcolonial discussion to cultural interactions between countries without colonial ties. *** PT. Os meios de comunicação informam regularmente sobre as façanhas, senão os desvios, dos atletas quenianos que dominam os eventos de corrida de longa distância de maior prestígio em todo o mundo. Já habituada a esta hegemonia, a imprensa desportiva francesa passou a questioná-la nos anos 1960, enquanto o atletismo da África Oriental se afirmava ao mais alto nível internacional, demonstrando o seu desejo de compreender e explicar o “fenômeno queniano”. O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar que a emergência do atletismo queniano no mais alto nível internacional no período pós-colonial é entendida pelos jornalistas franceses como uma parte retórica de um processo pós-colonial. Inserido no campo dos estudos pós-coloniais, este estudo visa identificar e explicar as transformações das modalidades discursivas segundo as quais os jornalistas franceses cobrem os sucessos quenianos. Embora o Quênia seja uma ex-colônia britânica, os textos estudados refletem a dominação cultural característica do período colonial que os jornalistas opõem à dominação esportiva dos atletas quenianos. Três revistas especializadas em atletismo surgidas na década de 1960, escolhidas tanto por sua reputação quanto pelo ecletismo de suas linhas editoriais, são analisadas: Athletics, órgão oficial de imprensa da Federação Francesa de Atletismo, Le Miroir de athletics, resenha da revista Miroir sprint, próxima ao Partido Comunista Francês, e a revista de atletismo Équipe, associada ao jornal L'Équipe. Abrangendo todo o discurso, tanto o seu conteúdo como as suas estratégias enunciativas, a análise realizada destaca a utilização pelos jornalistas franceses dos modelos retóricos utilizados pelos seus congêneres britânicos no final do período colonial. Identificados por John Bale, esses modelos retóricos (vigilância, apropriação, negação e idealização) afirmam-se gradativamente por meio de quatro estágios cronológicos de 1960 a 2000. Como a França nunca colonizou o Quênia, esta abordagem propõe, portanto, estender a questão pós-colonial às interações culturais entre países desprovidos de laços coloniais. ***

The Preservation of the Sources for English Medieval History in the Sixteenth Century

Chapter 8 opens with two events which took place in the summer of 1568: the commission to Archbishop Matthew Parker to identify and record manuscripts dispersed from monastic libraries, especially books with a bearing on English history, and the publication of William Lambarde’s APXAIONOMIA, his edition of Old English law, much of it in parallel text, Old English and Latin. The chapter then reverts to the dissolution itself, and who can be shown to have saved which particular books. It pays particular attention to the activities of John Leland, John Bale, and certain bibliophilic royal commissioners, most notably Sir John Prise. Although initial official interest in English history concentrated on the period of the conversion and before, collectors saved the great works of the twelfth century, and it was these that Prise envisaged in his will should be edited and printed. The chapter then considers the circle around Parker, most particularly John Joscelyn, and the use they made of the medieval English histories in their polemical works on ecclesiastical history. Parker’s editions of Matthew Paris were the first works of medieval English historiography to be printed, probably on account of Matthew’s anti-papal instincts. In counterpoint with all this concern for the sources, the chapter also addresses the Italian Polydore Vergil’s recently published and influential attempt to write up English medieval history, for the period in question largely on the basis of the great histories of the early twelfth century.

A Note on the Curious Case of John Bale in Spain

A slender folder at the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid contains parts of a story about how John Bale’s Illustrium majoris Britanniae scriptorum … summarium (1548) ended up in sixteenth century Spain. Inquisition documents from 1583 reveal how the book got to Toledo from Lyon and how the Holy Office came to know about it. By briefly telling this story, this short note hopes to pique interest in the documents and to suggest ways in which the archives in which they reside can support further research on censorship and the early-modern book trade.

Talking Books

This chapter explores the printed books of the sixteenth century as ‘talking books’; it also explores how the voice is implicated in the printing process. It focuses on the work of two print-aware authors, John Bale and William Baldwin, who worked with the most influential ‘talking book’ in England in the 1540s: Erasmus’s Paraphrases. It explores Bale’s attentiveness to the physical voice of Anne Askew in his editions of her Examinations (1546, 1547), arguing that he uses print to turn the written form of her oral testimony into a script for oral readers. It attends to Baldwin’s representation of the voices of illiterate working men, medieval magistrates, and an array of untrustworthy characters, including some noisy cats, to create careful ‘listeners’ who are aware of the manipulative authorial voice that lies behind literary voices on the page as well as the risks of affective ‘mishearing’.

Voices and Books in the English Renaissance

Two ideas lie at the heart of this study and its claim that we need a new history of reading: that voices in books can affect us deeply; that printed books can be brought to life with the voice. Voices and Books offers a new history of reading focused on the oral and voice-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader we have privileged in the last few decades, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice—and tone—from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others’ voices, as well as manage and exploit the voices of their readers. It offers fresh readings of the key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers: John Bale, Anne Askew, William Baldwin, Thomas Nashe. And it aims to rethink what a printed book can be, searching the printed page for vocal cues, and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process.

Anne Askew

Anne Askew was born of a notable Lincolnshire family and became a Protestant voice of radical reformation at the end of the reign of Henry VIII. According to Bale, Askew was compelled to marry Thomas Kyme as a substitute for her sister’s prior betrothal upon her untimely death. Askew sought a divorce after Kyme drove her from their home for her unorthodox beliefs. It is likely that her vocal criticisms of church policy regarding demonstrations of faith brought her to the attention of the bishops. She was first interrogated by Bishop Bonner and subsequently released before being re-captured. During her second imprisonment, Bishop Gardiner and Chancellor Wriothesley conducted the interrogation and torture, which historians generally attribute to the effort to prove the Protestant leanings of Henry VIII’s last queen. The unusual torture Askew endured as a gentlewoman has been understood to suggest her direct affiliation with the circle of Katherine Parr. In 1546, at age twenty-five, she was burned at the stake as a heretic. She became a significant martyr when John Bale and John Foxe published accounts of her interrogation, imprisonment, and torture. Askew is known almost exclusively from the two narratives she wrote of her interrogations: The first examinacyon (1546) discusses her beliefs and her efforts to frustrate her interrogators; The lattre examinacyon (1547) describes her re-arrest and the judicial torture she endured along with interrogation leading to her execution. John Bale first published her works along with commentary and framing, which supply much of the biographical information about Askew that remains available.

An English Bishop Afloat in an Irish See: John Bale, Bishop of Ossory, 1552–3

The Reformation in Ireland has traditionally been seen as an unmitigated failure. This article contributes to current scholarship that is challenging this perception by conceiving the sixteenth-century Irish Church as part of the English Church. It does so by examining the episcopal career of John Bale, bishop of Ossory, County Kilkenny, 1552–3. Bale wrote an account of his Irish experience, known as theVocacyon, soon after fleeing his diocese upon the accession of Queen Mary to the English throne and the subsequent restoration of Roman Catholicism. The article considers Bale's episcopal career as an expression of the relationship between Church and state in mid-Tudor England and Ireland. It will be shown that ecclesiastical reform in Ireland was complemented by political subjugation, and vice versa. Having been appointed by Edward VI, Bale upheld the royal supremacy as justification for implementing ecclesiastical reform. The combination of preaching the gospel and enforcing the 1552 Prayer Book was, for Bale, the best method of evangelism. The double effect was to win converts and align the Irish Church with the English form of worship. Hence English reformers exploited the political dominance of England to export their evangelical faith into Ireland.

Introduction

Reformers in England saw losses as well as gains in the Reformation. John Leland and John Bale recorded the contents of monastic libraries. Matthew Parker recovered manuscripts from the past. The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, comprised of lawyers, scholars, and country gentlemen, developed methods of ascertaining accurate information about the past. William Camden, the author of Annals of Elizabeth (1615, Latin) and Britannia (1586, Latin), wrote a new kind of history: dispassionate, based on reliable evidence, and concerned with changes in society. Fifty years after Camden’s lifetime, Thomas Fuller followed methods and approaches that the antiquaries and their successors employed, while developing ideas very much his own.

Immunities and Monasticism

Over the course of the sixteenth century, numerous playwrights composed plays about King John of England (r. 1199–1216). While representing the king’s failed attempt to assert national sovereignty over papal control, the plays explore an even more subtle problem: the legal threat that monastic immunity poses to papal and monarchical power. The chapter examines how plays written by John Bale, George Peele, and William Shakespeare used their representations of King John to attend, in a post-Reformation context, to the legal complexities of monasticism as a social practice. In articulating the difficulties that communal formations and monasticism as a social practice create for post-Reformation politics and law, sixteenth-century dramatists—this chapter argues—shape a new version of legal history.