As cultural globality continues to demand ever new responses and intersects, questions regarding the place of Africa and the responsibilities of the African writer persist. In many theoretical formulations, it is post-colonial cosmopolitanism and the alleged commonality of transnational culture that provide the ethical basis of a ‘global’ identity. On a literary stage, predominantly theorized and discussed in terms of its transnationality, competitive international markets highlight recurrent issues of canon formation and, accordingly, the value placed on African literary accomplishments. Debates around who and what might constitute African literature in this context point to the shifting epistemological ground that African authors and literary critics alike must negotiate. All four texts under review here reflect this shifting ground, each with different aims, approaches and areas of focus.
Postcolonial Eyes is a fitting addition to the excellent Liverpool University Press series ‘Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures’. This volume by Aedín Ní Loingsigh explores the ways in which francophone African writers have contributed to and negotiated textualizations of travel and cultural encounter. Written accessibly, without sacrificing its considerable theoretical sophistication, Postcolonial Eyes includes scrutiny of the travel literature genre, in order to ‘untie travel writing from its Western moorings and open up a space for African representations’ (p. 3). This successfully illustrates increased global mobility over a chronology that ranges from 1937 to 1995, highlighting ‘the ways in which particular socio-historical contexts shape attitudes to intercontinental travel in an African context’ (p. 28).
Loingsigh engages generously with an impressive range of groundbreaking post-colonial and other travel theorizations, extending their discursive boundaries where necessary to refocus their relevance for francophone Africa. Negotiating her range of under-read texts with a deft touch, she uses these insights to insist on the re-evaluation of accepted theoretical positioning via a dialogue with the African travel texts of her focus. In individual chapters these are: Ousman Socé's Mirages de Paris; Aké Loba's Kocoumbo, l’étudiant noir; L'Africain de Grœnland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie; and Calixthe Beyala's literary diptych, Le petit prince de Belleville and Maman a un amant; Bernard Dadié also has two texts under consideration, Un Nègre à Paris and Patron de New York, the latter of which is studied alongside Lamine Diakhaté's Chalys d'Harlem in a chapter entitled ‘Atlantic travels’.
Using travel as a focus enables Loingsigh to prise open a particular, Western mode of seeing. She points to the availability of processes of modernity as they appear in early texts' representations of unspoilt, African idylls, whilst also foregrounding these processes in other textual spots where we are not necessarily accustomed or directed to seeing them. Indeed, one of the core strengths of the text is the way in which the theoretical approaches and the clarity of the close readings of the texts at hand reveal the processes by which debilitating racist discourses are ‘othered’ when observed through the eyes of the African traveller. Highlighting ‘tentative’ and ‘unexpected’ openings (p. 29) in this way enables Loingsigh to ‘expose the blind spots of travel criticism's metaphorical language’ (p. 175). She discusses the strength of Paris's centripetal pull but she also shows the geographical diversity of francophone transatlantic travel narratives, and includes welcome reflections regarding the place of Africa from transitional and modern spaces within Africa, such as those made during stopovers in Dakar.
This is also the lens by which Loingsigh's critical travels move widely through the genre, revealing the potential of African writing to ‘other’ the genre itself. Central to her refreshing treatment is the use of Charles Forsdick's term ‘travel literature’, as preferable to that of travel writing. Loingsigh recognizes that ‘travel literature’ allows for ‘the value of genre as an important organizing and meaning-making principle whilst at the same time positing resistance to any restrictions the term might suggest’ (p. 19). Postcolonial Eyes thereby ranges over privileged and elite modes of travel, as well as the positions of those whose travel is circumscribed by economic privation.
The acquisition of cultural capital is therefore significant; containers of carriage are identified throughout as sites of particular capital flows, shifting from the ship through to the airplane and finally into the reading of the confined spaces of gendered migrant domesticity as sites from and through which travel is variously figured. Close attention to the ways in which travel is persistently gendered nuances her approach, again giving us directions and ways through that we may not be expecting: this point applies particularly in the context of Calixthe Beyala's works. Another term on which Loingsigh's analysis relies throughout is an extension of Cheryl J. Fish's ‘field of usefulness’ (p. 26), a theory taken from the experiences of colonial women travellers that Loingsigh adapts for the African writer of travel literature, used to strong effect in the context of the nascent post-colonial nation and the figure of the returner.
Fish's concept is tied both to Joszef Böröcz's link between travel and labour, and to ‘the communal benefits of travel and journeys stressed in African orature’ (p. 26). This creates a minor frustration for the reader as the discussion of travel through African orature is as tantalizing as it is short. Loingsigh makes a concession here, however, pointing to it in her Afterword as one in a series of critical directions for future research. Through the considerable clarity and range demonstrated by her framing material and approach, Loingsigh explores a wide range of both colonial and post-colonial travel narratives from a variety of contemporary critical perspectives, without levelling or relativizing the specificities of various travel practices. The resulting analysis acknowledges sub-Saharan francophone travel literature on its own terms. Loingsigh cuts through a framework that recognizes meaning production in African literature only through a lens of Western progress and modernity – its historical value, contribution to the development of intellectual movements, sociological importance or ‘illustration of abstract and ahistorical theories of a cosmopolitan hybridity and interstitiality’ (p. 2) – instead placing this literature as a mode of African self-positioning that defines itself in relation to its own authority. This reading strategy marks an important intervention in the field, elaborating successfully ‘on what might be gained by including African textualizations of travel within important theoretical configurations, particularly postcolonial theory’ (pp. 2–3). This makes Loingsigh's text valuable for all African literary studies at various levels, its key points approachable by those familiar with textualizations of travel and the francophone region as well as to those coming to African literature more generally and for the first time.
Also highly accessible, Oyekan Owomoyela's reference text The Columbia Guide to West African Literature begins with an overview of post-1945 anglophone West African literature. Owomoyela includes the delimitation of identity and the subject, and the emergence and transformation of literary culture in the historical and political contexts of each of the countries under discussion. The countries covered are Cameroon, The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Part Two provides an alphabetical list of major writers with brief, informative descriptions of their key achievements and concerns, and the dominant aesthetic and formal structures of their works. The volume is also successfully organized so that the reader can cross-reference information: as well as the authors indexed in Part Two, texts are listed in individual entries; Part Three furthers this with a separate list of writers and their selected works, sub-categorized by genre; there is also a detailed index at the volume's close.
Owomoyela concentrates primarily on texts and authors that have attracted international attention to African literary production, that ‘have a good chance of being accessible to the American reader’ (p. 3). It is worth noting the care that Owomoyela takes to explain the conditions that dictate this coverage and any resulting imbalances or discrepancies. In the process, he is able to acknowledge contributions of other key critics that cover West African literature beyond this canonical focus. Despite the contingencies evident in this coverage, Owomoyela's careful approach reminds the reader of the central and fraught concerns surrounding origins, ownership and sovereignty in textual production from the region as a whole. Owomoyela seeks to discuss the literature ‘collectively’ (p. 2) rather than as discrete traditional productions of each country. Historical overviews remain sensitive to shared experience and the influence of events and historical processes across borders.
There is a key analysis of the influence of publishers and the creation of a readership for African literature, and the ‘foreign consumer's determining influence’ on African writings (p. 23). Although sometimes rather more oblique than direct, this is one of a number of counters to a tendency to conflate the meaning production of African literatures and a Western, explicitly American, means of viewing them. There is a perceptive, more locally focused discussion in the entry entitled ‘Postcolonialism’, for example. The section that deals with gender is informative in its discussion of early and unrecognized women writers and the importance of feminist writings and criticism to West African literature, a particular concern that is reflected through all four texts under review.
The focus in Part One is broadened by Part Two, ‘West African Literature A–Z’. There are useful entries regarding influential organizations and associations in the region, such as the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA); entries that clarify the specificities of literary critical terms in the West African context; definitions that delineate prestigious prizes and awards and their influence on literary production in the region; as well as an impressive range of scholars and scholarly work indicated by suggestions for further investigation. Individual writer profiles cover established and emerging authors. An indication of the range can be discerned from a brief selection here, including Mbella Sonne Dipoko, Cyprian Ekwensi, Buchi Emecheta, Harry Garuba, B. Kojo Laing, Flora Nwapa, Helen Oyeyemi and Amos Tutuola; the full complement certainly reaches beyond the canonical forefathers that are initially discussed.
As a whole, the text highlights the specificity of the individual entries and the social commitments of various authors through a chronology that confidently illustrates the diversity of the region's literary production and its continued impact on the global literary market. The guide is an excellent resource, successfully navigating the multiple political, ethnic and economic currents that post-1945 West African writers have had to traverse.
The concentrated geographical focus of Owomoyela's reference text is replaced in Arlene A. Elder's Narrative Shape-Shifting: Myth, Humor and History in the Fiction of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing and Yvonne Vera by her discussion of fluidity in the complementary oral and literary performances she finds in her chosen authors’ texts. These very different writers, from various national backgrounds (Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe respectively), are initially linked by Elder's identification of them in her brief introduction as aṣẹ. From a single definition coined by Margaret Thompson Drewal, Elder uses this Yoruba term to describe the generative power of performers to create new and unique meanings from competing strands, or ‘style wars’ (cited on p. 1).
What draws these writers together under the ‘narrative shape-shifting’ rubric of the study's title, then, is that in their common ‘dual-tradition’ positions they strive to ‘employ aspects of their ancient oral traditions in very contemporary texts’ (p. 4). With this metaphor of competition holding together the combined modes of orature and textuality, Elder advances her thesis that the shape-shifting formal structures of the narratives under consideration produce an inventive political complementarity, and that these authors utilize these insights to put forward the opportunity for ordinary people to create just societies from countries in political and social transition (p. 1).
Elder first turns to Ben Okri's abiku trilogy, described as ‘oraliterature’, comprised of The Famished Road (1991), Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998). In a by now familiar critical approach to Okri's work, she begins by emphasizing Okri's ‘personal and artistic hybridity’ (pp. 7–9), then moving into textual analysis and the shifting possibilities and frustrations of the use of oral traditions. Elder agrees with cited, established criticism initially, exploring the ways in which Okri's attempt to incorporate the oral and the textual may fail, as the extended episodic structure creates a self-referential stasis and ultimately alienates the reader. She goes on, though, to attempt to recuperate Okri's narrative aims and politics in an extraordinary move by claiming that Okri ‘is not writing novels at all, but creating ‘mytho-poetic’ narratives that look like novels’ (p. 13).
Having made this critical shift, Elder demonstrates the jarring potentials inherent in the positive and the destructive aspects of storytelling, particularly exemplified by the abiku and Trickster role, citing the political potentialities of the monstrous, unknowable outcomes of transformations and shape-shifting through the character of Madame Koto. Through this, Okri's work is successfully read as a spiritual engagement that fulfils the functions of orature by providing collective community solidarity and new heroes, ‘neo-mythologies’ and ‘neo-epics’ for a neo-colonial Nigeria. What is less clear is how Elder's provocative definition of Okri's writing may sit in the field, especially given the impressive range of work that discusses orality and that looks at the discursive boundaries problematically placed around intellectual categorizations of ‘the oral’ as distinct from ‘the textual’ in African texts.
That said, Elder's analysis of narrative shifting works extremely well when she focuses on Okri's textual strategies, as in her illustration of the narrative movements between moments of naturalism that focus on the ultra-realistic and mundane, and the presence of dream, myth and fantastic narrative form. Her stress on these shifts between formal structures and generic boundaries emphasizes the narratives' transcendent possibilities: a past, present and future Nigeria exist simultaneously on the narrative plane and temporalities are not tied to any specific narrative mode.
Despite a lack of purchase on the way out of the impasse of the use of the episodic, she demonstrates how Okri's use of orature insists on communal values for a Nigeria ‘moving inevitably and chaotically’ into a modern age, with a sustained close engagement across the trilogy. This kind of narrative move, responding to ‘the heterogeneity and rapid pace of contemporary life’ (p. 76), is something she sees shared in the highly original works of Ghanaian author and poet B. Kojo Laing. Rather than myth, the dominant mode with Laing is humour, through which Elder reads a hybridized, collective wisdom that reflects a faceless technologized global economy. Her analysis of Laing brings out his exuberant linguistic and typological innovation. Addressing ‘complaints about his obscurity and verbal trickery for trickery's sake’ (p. 3), she reads Laing's disruptive ‘Tricksterish fun’ as suiting his narratives’ political purpose. Comedy subverts simplistic dualisms and cuts through issues of ‘deliberate non-fluency’.
If Laing's Search Sweet Country (1986) combines this linguistic hybridity and humour in ways that enable Elder to discuss her own thematic concerns, namely the redefinition of images of womanhood and the place of individual responsibility in future hope, it is Elder's contention that, for her, Laing's strategy collapses under the sheer weight of its multiple stylistic narrative modes into inappropriate ‘slapstick’ (p. 92) by the time of the dystopian Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992). Despite this, as his syncretic style romps through recent Ghanaian history, she identifies throughout Laing's fictions ‘a place of moral purchase in a quickly evolving global world’ (p. 2). This is a particularly successful analysis of the place of the global in the local and a welcome move towards a reversal of the conventionally privileged placing of ‘the global’ in this order.
Elder then turns to the novels of Yvonne Vera, Nehanda (1993) and The Stone Virgins (2002) to illustrate Vera's reaffirmation of Shona culture and spiritualism. Her ‘re-memories of “oral history” over recorded textual narratives’ (p. 96) are offered as intentional revisions of gendered and racist history. There is a perceptive exploration of how the novelist manipulates the relationship of ‘mythic “truth” to historical “truth”’ (p. 104) and the relationship between ontology and epistemology. Vera transforms both history and storytelling, refocusing concerns onto the individual and the Zimbabwean through the functions of orature. This literary-historical record from an African perspective is concentrated through Elder's highly persuasive eco-feminist reading, through which she charts a development in Vera from Nehanda, her first published novel, a ‘feminist impulse to educate women about the powerful female leader in their social and political re-memory’, to the ending of The Stone Virgins, her last published novel, which has moved, according to Elder, into visions of an inclusive global communalism.
Throughout, Elder embraces her own critical stance and position whilst placing the texts under consideration at the centre of her analysis. This seeks to let Okri's, Laing's, and Vera's texts ‘teach [her] the appropriate approaches to their work’ (p. 5). Simultaneously, we see the development of Elder's thesis about the shape-shifting production in the literary visions of all three authors and their embrace of polysemic modes to address the place of Africa in a changing world. Given the evidence of similar stylistic syncretism in other African literature, in which ‘politics and … formal structures are complementary and mutually explanatory’ (p. 48), this is both a considerable strength and a weakness. The brevity of Elder's introduction and conclusion does leave room enough to provide thoroughly engaged and perceptive close readings of each author's texts; narrative modes and critical terms run no risk of overdetermination, but Elder's concern with her own critical ‘shape-shifting’, her own critical aṣẹ, runs the risk of leaving these readings somewhat stranded, at the expense of wider contexts. However, placing the texts themselves at the forefront and reading them through Yoruba terms means that there is no doubt as to the centre from which Elder's analyses proceed: the texts, with their African nations at their heart, read the globalized world.
It is the sustained critical thrust of Brenda Cooper's lively analysis in her A New Generation of African Writers that drives through each of the texts under consideration. Cooper develops her somewhat interrogative theoretical stance in introductory and concluding chapters that frame the following diasporic anglophone writers in individual chapters: Leila Aboulela and Jamal Mahjoub (from Sudan), Biyi Bandele (from Nigeria), Moses Isegawa (Uganda), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), who has two chapters devoted to her work. Central to Cooper's analysis is her identification of the new, common rhetorical strategy that the authors employ, each to register and negotiate their experiences of migrancy and migrant identities, the ‘healing words and the bridges and connections between their multiple languages, pasts, presents and futures’ (p. 36).
As African migrant writers, ‘as different as they are similar’ (p. 3), each obliged to write between formative cultural and social frameworks, they move in their fictions towards metonymy and materiality. Identifying this move, Cooper shows how their focus on the ‘things’ that accompany the varied journeying through the fictions – clothing, pots, ornaments, tables, chairs, food, perfume, scientific instruments, toys – figures them as items that occupy the space between cultures, everyday sites where a naturalization of cultural differences can begin, however incompletely. Simultaneously, after Bill Ashcroft (On Post-Colonial Futures, Continuum, 2001), she also discusses the way the untranslatable travels through the texts in the shape of ‘metonymic gaps’, which enables cultural difference to be ‘installed in the text in various ways’ (citing Ashcroft 2001: 75). Through these metonymic strategies, this new generation of writers is able to forge a written diasporic sensibility that begins to counter the yoke of imperialist stereotyping inherited through the English language, ‘the stubborn and surviving metaphors that have always falsely represented Africa’ (p. 6).
As with Elder, Cooper engages with resistance in the everyday. Her analysis productively discusses ‘the rich and concrete realities of material culture’ (p. 5) alongside abstract theorizations – the acquisition of cultural capital, the momentary disaggregation of metaphor and metonymy, the discursive counter-strategies of entering and occupying the place of the Lacanian Law of the S/symbolic, for example. This is highly successful and a welcome discussion of the potential of metonymy in this context, but it is a risky strategy, and it is perhaps because of this that metonymy starts to overperform its own function as a trope under what begins to read like a critical burden of proof. The level at which this critical engagement occurs means that this is a text most easily approached by a post-colonial and a literary scholar already familiar with its range of terminology.
These are but minor points in an impressive text in which impeccably researched critical theory is anchored by close, perceptive analyses of the fiction. A marked success of Cooper's strategy lies in the analysis of Bandele's The Street. Discussing points in the novel where words themselves become uncannily material and are then traded and sold, Cooper's thesis is exemplified as she very clearly illustrates the ways in which desire for concrete cultural anchors are realized through Bandele's innovative linguistic play, and how these metonymic ‘objects’ then enter into economic relations on the streets of London. This also provides an interesting complement to Elder's analysis of Laing and a pervasive transnational economy. Another particular strength lies in Cooper's reading of Abouleila's evocation of clothing, figured as a metonymic schema that writes on the body of the post-colonial woman. Here, Cooper also successfully draws together the possibilities that Abouleila's cross-cultural novel affords and her own focus, namely on rendering those possibilities through material realities that are infused by the spiritual and the sacred imaginary.
Figuring transition, representations of metamorphic transformations and shape-shifting of all kinds find their ways in, through and out of analytic and everyday narratives, and from multiple locations and geographies. Shifting, moving, travelling, concretizing, the texts under review negotiate multiple and hybrid counter-narratives from a wide range of African authors, addressing recurrent questions regarding African literature for contemporary times. Linking a range of registers through their discussions of, amongst other questions, language, gender, history, genre, and divisive topographies created by uneven distribution networks, each illustrates specifically located forms of resistance to processes that threaten cultural fixity or homogenization. Together, they also serve as an important reminder of the history and established pedigree, legacies and foundations of such modes of literary resistance in African writing, as well as the leading transformative developments indicated by African authors writing today. The most significant and timely shift to emerge from this common direction of critical research may well be that of post-colonial analysis, as its openings and possibilities are persistently relocated to the African perspective, indicating a rich field to draw on for future research.
