Gendered Self-Fashioning: Adelaide Casely Hayford's Black Atlantic

Astriking aspect of some of the recent scholarship in African literary and cultural studies has been an archival as well as critical interest in the lives and times of Africans who were subject to colonialism. This interest has not only been spawned by a desire to outline a deeper literary history of the African continent than has often been assumed by its academic "postcolonialist" consumers, but it has also arisen out of a genuine concern for the ways in which Africa and African agency, in particular, have been represented in the colonial and indeed, often, the postcolonial archive. So, for instance, the lay version of the story of African literary production would continue to see the beginnings of a written literary tradition in Africa with the publication of Achebe's Things Fall Apart or, at best, in the earlier writings of Amos Tutuola and his Palm Wine Drinkard. Everything before this, so the story assumes, was "oral tradition." To be sure, this version of the story has never been the official story of the discipline, but it continues to be part not only of the popular consciousness but also often of the professional unconscious. And it is for this reason that titles of scholarly articles, such as Albert Gerard's "1500 Years of Creative Writing in Black Africa" published in Research in African Literatures in 1981, still come across as a little provocative, a little jarring.

In that article, Gerard states categorically, "In historical fact, important segments of subsaharan Africa had been introduced to writing and to written literature long before the first white man—whether explorer or philanthropist—reached her shores" (147). He continues to outline the growth of a written African literary tradition in the Ge'ez language of Ethiopia, in the Arabic of the East African coast, and in eighteenth-century Swahili. Before concluding with the generation of postcolonial writers with whom we are most familiar, he pays significant attention to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of missionary presses in colonial Africa. These presses, primarily interested in producing translations of the Bible in the indigenous languages of Africa, found it necessary at first to develop an orthography for many of the languages. This work was done not by a single missionary in isolation but with the collaboration and assistance of the indigenous people, often converts to the Christian religion. Themselves acquiring the skills of literacy in these missionary contexts, some of these converts began to write the histories of their own peoples or to write other creative work often with Christian overtones.

It is the work of such Africans, writing under colonialism and often—though not always—under the patrimony of a missionary society, that has gathered increasing attention on the part of contemporary critics. So, for instance, in her recently published book, Rereading the Imperial Romance, Laura Chrisman devotes two chapters to the novels of the Tswana writer Sol Plaatje. Likewise, in Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel, Eleni Coundouriotis discusses Paul Hazoume's 1937 Doguicimi, a novel that, because of its often eager support of French colonialism, must, to an ahistorical postcolonialism, seem like anathema. Christopher Miller, in his Nationalists and Nomads, also attempts to rethink the parameters of, in his case, the francophone literary tradition by extending it to include the much ignored work of a variety of writers writing in Africa in the 1920s.

In addition to these explicitly literary undertakings, there have also been attempts to read texts that may not in conventional terms be categorized as "literary" but are nevertheless proving crucial to a more nuanced picture of the colonial predicament of African subjects. In Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, Ato Quayson makes an explicit plea for the inclusion of Samuel Johnson's History of the Yorubas as a seminal text in the reading of the Nigerian literary tradition. And in his masterful Maps of Englishness, Simon Gikandi opens up the theoretical...