Review: Postcolonial Criticism in an African(ist) Frame Author(s): Gaurav Desai Reviewed work(s): Literary Theory and African Literature

by Josef Gugler ; Hans-Jrgen Lsebrink ; Jrgen Martin "Return" in Post-Colonial Writing: A Cultural Labyrinth by Vera Mihailovich-Dickman The Ballastic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions by Judie Newman Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts: Theory and Criticism by Gita R ... Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 211-218 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3820546 Accessed: 01/12/2008 00:03
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Postcolonial Criticism in an African(ist) Frame

Gaurav Desai

BOOKS DISCUSSED
Josef Gugler, Hans-Jirgen Lusebrink and Literary Theory and African Literature.

1994. 172 pp Jiirgen Martin,eds. Hamburg:BeitragezurAfrikaforschung, ed. Cross/Cultures12. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 173 pp. 202 pp.

in "Return" Post-ColonialWriting:A Cultural Labyrinth.Vera Mihailovich-Dickman, The Ballastic Bard: PostcolonialFictions. Judie Newman. London: Arnold, 1995. Gita Rajan Discourseand ChangingCulturalContexts: Postcolonial Theoryand Criticism.

eds. Westport: and RadhikaMohanram, Greenwood,1995. 323 pp.

y invoking a reading of Postcolonial criticism in an African(ist) frame, I hope to remind ourselves of the efforts of NgugTwa Thiong'o and his allies at the University of Nairobi who, in the late sixties, attempted a rethinking of the humanities curriculum, and most particularly of its investment in British literature and culture. In that call for the "Abolition of the English Department," NgugT, along with Henry OwuorAnyumba and Taban Lo Liyong, suggested that the postcolonial African university must first establish a counter-curriculum of African languages and literatures and then return to a study of European (not just British) and other world literatures from an African perspective (see Ngigi). Whatever it was later made out to be by other observers, this was not an uncritical nativism obsessed with a racial or cultural purity, but rather a critical accounting of the relevance of the institution of literature in the context of the newly independent nation. Indeed, one could argue that herein lay a potential test of canonicity in which a literary work could be measured not by the supposed "test of time" but rather by its spatial traversibility. Would the likes of Conrad and Naipaul-both writers whom we love to hate-be a part of this newly configured syllabus? Or would they, instead, have little of relevance to offer to the Kenyan, East African, African perspective that the authors of the proposal advocated? It is with a similar methodological imperative that I approach the texts that are present, this time with the recognition that the texts in question are critical as opposed to literary and with the added stipulation that their origins are not exclusively metropolitan. What do these texts of modern postcolonial criticism written by those whose interests vary from South Asia to Canada and Sub-Saharan Africa to Australia have to say to those of us who fashion ourselves as African(ists)? How well, to use a metaphor now commonplace in cultural studies, do these texts travel?To the writers of the various essays collected in these four books I must say: forgive me for the

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necessary violence that such a project entails. For in resolutely reading your offerings from within this African(ist) perspective and with a particular bent on "symptomatic" readings, I have on occasion had to foreground those points that you would not yourselves have foregrounded, and to ignore those points (sometimes entire articles) that did not seem to invite much dialogue from within this context. I can only hope that other readings from other spaces will do greater justice to some of these aspects of your texts. Notice first that the invocation of the term "African(ist)" to designate "us"-the readers and writers of a journal like Research in African Literatures-is bound to annoy those for whom Africa and African is the purer space of which Africanist and Africanism is the corruption. If I appeal, then, to this common ground, or indeed to the necessity of forging this community between the African and the (non-African) Africanist, it is not to erase the historically hierarchical nature of this relationship. We need to be reminded continually of this systemic inequality, even when it tends to be masked by what Biodun Jeyifo would call a "culturalist"appeal to community, and it is precisely the need for such foregrounding that recently resulted in the formation of a Black Scholars Caucus at the African Studies Association. But to equate a systemic inequality for an epistemological difference on essentialist grounds seems to me, again inJeyifo's terms, a "misrecognition" of the nature of our activities. I offer the term "African(ist)," then, not so much as an escape from this ultimately false opposition between the "African"who knows through sheer "experience" and the "bookish""Africanist" who learns by reading, not being, but rather as a register of this tension which is experienced in our community. For which African among us can truly claim that (s)he was never provoked to a scholarly response by a written treatise or a film on Africa, and conversely, how many (non-African) Africanists can truly claim that their "experiential" relationships with Africa, however mediated and however problematic they might seem (research trips, safaris, volunteer work ) had no effect on their scholarly choices? To ask such questions is to find oneself in the company of a number of scholars associated with the colloquium on "Theoretical Approaches to African Literature" held in Bayreuth in June 1990. The papers from the conference collected in the volume Literary Theoryand African Literature include an important piece by Biodun Jeyifo who suggests that "the contemporary understanding of theory not only renders it as an exclusively Western phenomenon of a very specialized activity but also implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) inscribes the view that theory does not exist, cannot exist outside of this High Canonical Western orbit" (18). Lest we think that such an understanding is only associated with an ethnocentrism of a dominant West, Jeyifo attributes it equally to what he labels "strong nativism" among African(ist) critics themselves. Thus while anthologies of literary theory in the metropoles "contain exclusively Western entries, Western theorists and theoretical movements and schools" (18), the only response forthcoming from nativists, argues Jeyifo, is either acceptance of such an exclusion or a weak culturalist defense of alterity.Neither, suggestsJeyifo, is

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an appropriate response to this "lopsided and asymmetrical relationship" and he proposes instead a "systemic"critique of center-periphery contradictions based on a model of World Systems theory. While "theories and theorists implicitly carry the seeds of their own transmutations" (23) and thus have the potential to pave the way for a newly relevant moment, their radicalism (the term Jeyifo uses is "decolonization") is nevertheless "too vague" and "too ambiguously positioned" (23) in relation to the central moment of this epoch-decolonization. A proper theorization of the global flows of theory, Jeyifo seems to suggest, would pay attention to such mistravels of theory and in so doing unmask the "different trajectories" and "different agendas" (28) that separate metropolitan theories from "decolonized" ones. While this version of the essay is a little too schematic for a detailed critique (a critique that may well focus on Jeyifo's impatience with "culturalism" and his unquestioned faith in World Systems theory), one sincerely hopes that a revised version will soon appear perhaps in a collection of the author's essays. For along with his recent pieces on the gendering of Things Fall Apart and the contribution to the special issue on critical theory published by RAL not too long ago (21.1 [1990]), Jeyifo is undoubtedly securing his voice as one to be reckoned with both in the African(ist) academy and in the wider field of postcolonial theory. With the rise of "postcolonial theory" (a movement that ironically Jeyifo forgets to include in his rather long list of the paradigms of the "Center,"see p. 26) it seems that it may not be too long before Jeyifo may well find his own theoretical offeringsin anthologies of contemporary theory despite himself-canonized produced in the "Center."Were this to happen, by my account at least, it would be a triumphant event indeed. IfJeyifo's essay emerges as an important contribution to the political economy of literary theory, it finds an equally worthy companion in Karin Barber's piece on Yoruba oral poetry. Here the move is reversed-moving from the particular to the general, informed by an ethnographic sensibility as attuned to nuances as a literary one, Barber constructs a theory of the cultural production of Yoruba oriki. Focusing on the polyvocal and dialogic nature of oriki performances, Barber foregrounds the role of such songs in the simultaneous affirmation and critique of the social order. While these are typically read as conservative utterances, Barber shows instead how the multiple layers of meaning in an oriki poem often invite a reading of them as modes of resistance as well. The "I"of the oriki, suggests Barber, is always a shifting "I"and thus "there is no overall design, no dominant 'authorial voice' in relation to which other voices are calibrated, no framework within which the disparate elements are assigned a determinate place. These features are what keep open the possibility of alternatives. While affirming 'the way things are', oriki statements contain the seeds of their own opposite" (108). The deconstructive moment in Barber's analysis is never actually announced as such and while this leads to a refreshing essay in which one witnesses the careful working out of a theoretical position, by the same token one also witnesses a certain tendency to reinvent the wheel. The

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issues of textual ambiguity and authorial intentionality as well as the politics of shifting identities are of course within the terrain of existing literary and cultural theory. To be sure, what Barber does with these issues in the context of oriki is original and exciting, but there seems to be little attempt made to establish any links with these pre-existing discourses. The result is an essay that has more to say to scholars interested in oriki as a performance genre than to scholars interested in the paradigmatic forms of African(ist) theory per se. I raise this not to fault the essay itself, which remains one of the strongest contributions to the collection, but rather to indicate that there is often a gap between what a book title such as "Literary Theory and African Literature" promises and what the individual essays offer. Thus, for instance, Eileen Julien's reciprocal reading of Gide's and is L'Immoraliste Oyono's Houseboy again a very fine reading and indeed but besides being this, and besides advancing the pedagogically exemplary, important claim that European writings too must be read contextually, it is unclear as to what it has to say about the reciprocal exchanges between Literary Theory and African Literatures. To ask such a question is tantamount to asking what it is that the collection sees itself as doing and unfortunately the editorial introduction by Josef Gugler does not adequately provide the answers. We know from this introduction that Gugler believes that one can appropriately speak of African literature in the singular (that is, as a comprehensive tradition with shared characteristics); we know that there has been a debate over the relation of "theory" to African literature and particularly over the issue of Eurocentric versus Afrocentric theories; we know that many critics including Simon Gikandi and Biodun Jeyifo have decried the undertheorized nature of African literary studies; we also know that Gugler likes to differentiate between "explanation" ("the effort to enhance the reader's appreciation of the text" (4)), "critique" (of a humanistic or ethical kind), and "interpretation" (of a biographical, sociopolitical kind). But more than this we do not know. We do not know, for instance, what the objective of the seminar in theory that Gugler andJiirgen Martini co-taught was, nor do we know the rationale behind such a collection as this. If we were to judge by the placement and order of the essays then we might conclude that the original aim was indeed a metacritical one-with Jeyifo's piece following the introduction, followed by a piece entitled "Theory and Moral Commitment in the Study of African Literature" by Richard Bjornson (which presents an unfortunately stereotypical misreading of the politics of deconstructive critique), followed in turn by a strong piece in French by Georges Ngal on the critical work of E. Mveng andJ.-P. Makouta-Mboukou. These metacritical essays are then followed by more specific readings of literary and cultural texts, at times exemplary as in the case of Barber and Julien, at others not. But if such a move speaks to the conceptual interests of the editors, it is left to inference and the overwhelming sense at the end of a reading of this book is one of having walked amidst some impressive trees without quite getting a feel for the forest.

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If the Bayreuth collection is interested in African (ist) issues per se, Vera Mihailovich-Dickman's "Return" Post-Colonial in A Writing: CulturalLabyrinth is a global production both in its subject matter as well as in its cadre of contributors. The bookjacket announces that the notion of"return" ".. . draws from cultural memory, invokes revenants,digs up forgotten history, quests for roots. Just as it creates a dialogue with the past, textual or 'real,' it negotiates turning points and perpetuates reversals. It reclaims territory, tradition and language in its yearning for 'home."' By focusing on writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Edward Kamau Braithwaite,Jean D'Costa, Bessie Head, Matsemela Manaka, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Patrick White, Es'kia Mphahlele, and Wole Soyinka, the "essays,stories and poetry in this collection," claims the blurb, "challenge patterns of 'conditioned' reading and call for a multilayered polylogue with reality." Readers intending to pick up a copy of the book should know that the collection reads more like a special issue of a literary journal (such as say KenyonReviewor Massachusetts Review) than like a typical work of literary criticism. The "polylogue" that the editor intends has much in common with the genre of the literaryjournal, and read in this spirit, the occasional missing of the beat will not affect the reader's experience of the larger melody. Read selectively, the collection is bound to present a satisfactory reading experience. Some may be drawn to the narratives of Tim Baker or Frank Moorehouse's story "The Drover's Wife." Poetry enthusiasts may well appreciate E. A. Markham's poem "A Little Bit of Our Past." Those interested in the genre of the literary essay may wish to tackle Wilson Harris's "LivingAbsences and Presences." And yet others may be drawn to the literary criticism that comprises a fair amount of the volume. There is probably something for everyone here, even though I doubt that there is anything here that is for everyone. As someone interested in the trajectory of African(ist) criticism, for instance, I am not really sure that the collection really goes beyond the "conditioned" readings of which it is so critical. This is not to be disparaging of the efforts of a good many scholars who, through meticulous research, biographical and otherwise, make available a significant amount of important material to the larger scholarly community. But such research has always been our strength and is not necessarily a break with our critical past. Or again, in the more interpretive mode, when one sees titles such as "'Return' in Australian Fiction" and "Reversaland Return in Fiction by Bessie Head and Ama Ata Aidoo," one wonders whether we are witnessing, as Werner Sollors has suggested, a returnto thematic criticism or whether instead we have never really left it behind. As an example of a postcolonial literary criticism and an invitation to its pedagogical articulations one would not find fault with Judie Newman's TheBallasticBard:Postcolonial Fictions.When I first received this book with a request for a review, I was hesitant, not because I knew anything about the book or the author, but because experience has taught me that reading a critical reading of a text that one isn't currently working on can often prove to be a terribly boring enterprise. Whatever the status of close readings in the academy, few critics (Henry Louis Gates and Sara Suleri come to mind)

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can really pull off the act with elegant, interesting, well-written analyses that speak to even those readers who may not be interested in or intimately familiar with the particular texts. I am pleased to say that Newman's work here was not only consistently a pleasure to read, but that it also had the effect of encouraging me to rethink my teaching of postcolonial literatures. In particular I was taken by the reader-centered model of reading that Newman proposes in which the traditional chronology of literary history is their postcolonial disrupted and prior texts are read afterrather than before rewritings. Thus, writes Newman, "a reading of WideSargassoSea first, and as a frame for Jane Eyre,is not only possible, but even highly desirable"(6). The pedagogical imperative presented here is derived not by some purely whimsical fancy but rather by a carefully worked out and persuasively demonstrated theory of an "achronological and anachronistic" intertextuality. Such cross-textual attention means that the thematics that one might conventionally ascribe to any given text are always susceptible to slippage. And after all, since the very notions of the aesthetic and the literary (at least in the West) are so heavily invested in issues such as multiplicity of meaneven the ings, metaphors of "depth,"and of course the workings of "irony," reader most unsympathetic to the literary "value"of postcolonial literatures will have to accept defeat. With Newman's book, we need look no further for a text useful as a tool in our war against reluctant curriculum committees that may express doubts about the "worthiness"of such texts. If the price to be paid for this achievement is the tendency in the book to sometimes overstate the case, then this is a price we must be willing to pay. I, for instance, was personally intrigued by Newman's attempt to read Buchi Emecheta's Rapeof Shaviin the context of the feminist and socialist work of George Bernard Shaw. But while many of the comparisons and allusions that Newman presents were persuasive, I ultimately chose notto foreground them for my undergraduate session on the novel this semester. In this particular case, with this particular novel, I thought that they would prove more distracting than engaging. But that is not to say that such is the case with all the readings. The chapters on Coetzee and Rhys may well make excellent required reading in other undergraduate courses. One last thing that remains to be noted more as a curiosity than as a criticism is a secondary thematic and thesis that develops in the book. This thesis has to do with the Gothic tradition and it is most forcefully articulated in the opening of the chapter on Ruth PrawerJhabvala: "It will not have escaped the reader that, in some sense, all the texts considered up to this point have been horror stories of one sort or another. Gothic motifs are exceptionally prevalent in postcolonial fiction, even from very different locations" (69). While this by no means is offered as a complete claim for a postcolonial aesthetic, it seems odd that Newman does not ever notice that the majority of her examples are women (Naipaul and Coetzee are the only male writers studied). Furthermore, with the exception of Buchi Emecheta whose Rape of Shavi can be considered Gothic only by a long stretch of the imagination, a great majority of the women writers presented here are, albeit problematically, coded by their societies as "white."This, of course, is not a "problem" (after all male critics have for long ignored women writers

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or included one or two in their work as tokens), but it should have received at least some attention as an "issue."What effect might such a choice of writers have on an attempt to postulate a theory of the "postcolonial" or indeed of the "postcolonial Gothic"? In writing this review, I think it would be fair to say that the greatest returns I received were from the collection Postcolonial Discourse and edited by Gita Rajan and Changing Cultural Contexts:Theoryand Criticism, Radhika Mohanram. It is not surprising that this book received the greatest number of marginal notes and comments on my part since every essay in it is provocative, challenging, inspiring, and often irritating in its own way. While I cannot dojustice here to the entire collection, I would note that the editors do an excellentjob in their introduction, discussing such important postcolonial experiences as exile, hybrid identities, and nationhood. They also provide a concise map of what is to come in the collection in the individual essays-a genre of writing in its own right and one often difficult to master. African(ist)s will find Marcia Landy's essay on Sembene Ousmane's Le Campde Thiaroye be one of the most nuanced essays on the to filmmaker. If they see in this essay what I see, they will agree that in the conjunction of an African aesthetic and historically Eurocentric theory one need not be reduced to the other. Again, Radhika Mohanram's essay on the films of Hanif Kureishi may prove essential reading to those of us who are interested not only in Black British Cultural Studies but also in rethinking the implications of heteronormative sexuality in colonial and postcolonial discourse. The Fanonians among us will gladly add Patrick Taylor's critical reading of Fanon and his implications for Barbadian historiography to the rich critical literature that continues to emerge on this seminal thinker. And Christopher Wise's essay on Negritude with its vindictive tone towards Christopher Miller and respectful citation of Amiri Baraka is certainly bound to please some and irk others. Postcolonial Discourseand Changing Cultural Contexts undoubtedly an is collection for African(ist)s even when the specific essays do not important address texts from Africa per se. The essays and interviews collected here well and I would even go so far as to say that on occasion the sheer "travel" of suggestion offered here exceeds that of collections that are specifpower ically African (ist). To say this of course is to invoke a whole range of issues on the propriety of the "postcolonial"as a category and the possibilities and limitations of exchanges within such contexts. But whatever position one ultimately takes on those issues, the truth of the matter is that such exchanges are already taking place and there seems no way of stopping them. Indeed the choice between an area studies focus such as "African" studies or "Asian"studies and a spatiotemporal one such as "postcolonial" studies seems to be becoming an increasingly redundant one. But while this is an institutional context that we must soon learn to negotiate, it may also be important to retain our multiple skills of reading not only (International) Postcolonial Criticism in an African(ist) Frame, but also, conversely, African (ist) Criticism in an International Frame.

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WORK CITED
Ngiug wa Thiong'o. "On the Abolition of the English Department." Homecoming. Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1973. 145-50.