Dedication

We dedicate this special issue to Alain Ricard, who died while we were finalizing the manuscript. His own involvement with the languages and literatures of Africa was a great inspiration behind our venture. He acted as one of the peer reviewers of this issue and until the end followed its progress with keen interest. For him, language and text were always one and he held the original text in any language in highest regard. He pleaded passionately for the wider recognition of African-language texts in scholarly debates, wanted them read, edited, translated, published, and criticized. His work will remain an inspiration beyond this special issue, which seeks to follow his example in making African texts speak.

September 2016, Flora Veit-Wild and Clarissa Vierke

Alain Ricard (1945–2016) will long be remembered by readers of Research in African Literatures, and most gratefully by the editorial team of the journal, as his contributions to and collaborations with RAL spanned more than forty years, beginning with book reviews and bibliographies in the very first numbers of the journal in the early 1970s up to a final book review that was printed in the fall of 2016. Along the way he authored articles, guest-edited special issues, reviewed submissions, and provided guidance and direction as a member of RAL’s editorial board. Alain Ricard was friend and colleague of all of RAL’s editors, from Bernth Lindfors and Dick Bjornson, to Abiola Irele and John Conteh-Morgan, to Kwaku Larbi Korang. I was particularly blessed throughout my years as managing editor to be able to correspond with Alain on editorial and scholarly matters as well as to enjoy his visits with the RAL editors during his travels to the United States. While managing editor, I was privileged to be able to translate a good many of his pieces sent to RAL. I was then and now conscious of his easy, affable mentoring of the young graduate students who sought out the world-renowned scholar and the great scope of his personal and professional interests and advice that he shared with them. Alain Ricard was recognized as the foremost scholar of African literatures in France and indeed one of the international experts, a founding father in many ways, of the study of literatures and languages of Africa; his legacy is confirmed by the position that African studies holds in the Academy and in the growing recognition of the significance of African cultures on the world stage, now upheld by former students and colleagues whose understanding of the broad field he enriched immensely.

While his academic address was for so many of his years the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and specifically the unit entitled Les Afriques dans le Monde, he traveled widely throughout the world and seemed at home wherever he was. His studies, research, and teaching took him to all parts of Africa, giving him a formidable breadth of experience that he brought to us through his writings, many of which have been translated into English. He was instrumental in many of the ventures that have taken African studies to the world stage, including Politique Africaine, APELA, ASA, and LLACAN. He was a prolific and well-regarded writer on topics as wide-ranging as the perceived dichotomy between the oral and the written, and written and performed theater, bringing his anthropological, political focus to bear. Those writings are witness to his interest in the social and the political, from his work on Wole Soyinka as a citizen poet to his studies of concert party theater, language policy, and writing in African languages, Swahili, to his engagement with film, and so much more, all informed by his distinctive understanding of fieldwork and the concept of “l’in-discipline,” discussed in a recent piece where he referred to himself as a “chiffonnier” ‘rag collector,’ pointing to the scores and scores of books in his library, many of which he had never read and would never read, some because they were written in African languages he had not (yet) learned to read. That display of universal curiosity and generous and noble attitude of open embrace of others is representative...