Dialogic courage and “interpreting otherwise” in Camus’ existential phenomenology of absurdity: Sudanese/African women’s constructive engagement with totalitarian discourse structures

Abstract

ABSTRACTAlbert Camus’ philosophy of absurdity offers interpretive insights into the transformative and empowering potentials of communicative deformity and competency. Courage, as an interpretive otherwise, is engaged as an existential dialogic impulse for interrogating the “bad conscience” conventional understanding of communicative deformity and competency that routinized tradition breeds in human existence. Using examples of Sudanese women and a Ghanaian woman questioning the totalizing power of patriarchal bias, the essay addresses the communicative necessity of dialogic courage, an interrogative force that pokes holes in the totalitarian emphasis on tradition as the embodiment of communicative competence, coupled with the “canonized masculinized map” that blurs the boundaries between absolute freedom and authentic freedom. The dialogic, a communicative engagement, is an existential unfolding of courage.