In the wake of their colonial conquests, the colonial powers not only appropriated territories and cultural property: they also collected words. More precisely, missionaries, administrators, ethnologists and linguists transformed oral utterances —whose nature and function varied greatly in their original context—into written texts, which were soon grouped under the label of “oral literature”.

This threefold transfer — from oral to written form, from one language to another, and from one cultural context to another — and the conditions of colonial asymmetry under which it took place inevitably led to distortions. The sources of the texts were sometimes erased, and their meaning was altered or lost. Many anthologies of African, Oceanian, and other folktalescontinue to be published today without any consideration of their provenance.Some of these texts, however, have had remarkable trajectories, especially when they came into the hands of avant-garde poets such as Tristan Tzara, Blaise Cendrars, or Jerome Rothenberg, or of writers who were themselves from (formerly) colonized territories, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor or Patrick Chamoiseau.

This issue, informed by the principles of provenance research conducted on museum objects, brings together Francophone and German scholarship. It presents case studies from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, to explore the questions raised by these texts — namely, what forms of appropriation are at play in these transfers, and can they be subverted?
 

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