Introduction

It is now almost 40 years since Roland Barthes, in a subsequently much-quoted phrase, proclaimed the death of the author. Today it is clear that, as Mark Twain remarked in a different context, reports of the author's death were greatly exaggerated. The author is alive and well and vigorously competing with numerous other players—literary mentors, oral informants, publishers, editors, ghost-writers, journalists, critics, academics, and ordinary readers—for ownership of the text. Each of those actors contributes in different ways to the meaning of the text and asserts some degree of control over it. As Mikhail Bakhtin so powerfully demonstrated, all literary texts are constructed in part by borrowing from or re-appropriating pre-existing discourses. Building on Bakhtin's work, theoreticians such as Julia Kristeva have foregrounded the importance of intertextuality in the construction of literary meaning. In turn, Jacques Derrida's theory of deconstruction underscores the tenuous relationship and contradictions between the writer's consciousness and projects, the various intertextual influences that invariably inform the process of creativity, and the complicated questions of textual ownership to which these relationships give rise.

What happens when the author of a text borrows from another source? Where does reproduction end and invention begin? What burden of acknowledgement is due? Where is the dividing line between borrowing and stealing? To whom does the finished product belong? In what ways do pseudonyms or anonymity alter the ownership of text? To what extent are writers manipulated or expropriated by the publishing industry? Such questions, challenging in themselves, are all the more pressing and complex when they are posed in the politically charged, culturally hybrid spaces of (post)colonialism. They are explored in this special number of Research in African Literatures in a collection of articles based on papers delivered at an international conference on "Textual Ownership in Francophone African Writing" hosted by the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University on 22–23 October 2004.

In broad terms, three main groups of issues relating to textual ownership may be usefully distinguished: (1) pretextual issues, concerning materials that precede a given text and are in some sense drawn upon in that text; (2) a second group of issues relating to the signing or formal "authorship" of the text; and (3) post-textual issues, arising after the completion of the text, embracing everything from publishers' promotional materials and critical studies to the reception of the text by ordinary readers. These three categories overlap in various ways partly with each other and also with other categories such as the intertextual, the paratextual, etc., but they are not completely identical to these.

If we consider in more detail the first of these three categories, namely the pretextual, two main subsets of issues may be distinguished. The first of these concerns borrowings from other discourses, which constitute one of the main forms of intertextuality. It is commonplace for African writers to draw on oral sources that circulate without any personal ownership. Indeed, it is increasingly rare for an African author not to incorporate oral elements such as folktales, legends, proverbs, and songs into a written text. At what stage in working with these oral sources, making them part of a written text, does a writer turn them into something that is distinctively his or her own? Or again, if a writer takes the personal testimony of an individual oral informant, recounting his or own life, as distinct from some collective cultural tradition, to whom does the text belong: the oral informant or the writer? Where is the dividing line between borrowing and stealing? Is it more acceptable to "borrow" an oral text than a written one? Different facets of these questions are explored in contributions to this volume by Jean-Marc Moura and Roger Little. There have recently been some interesting cases of oral informants claiming a greater share of the rights to the finished product than the writers or publishers with whom they worked have been willing to grant. Issues of this kind are implicit in Ousmane Sembene's novel Le docker noir and are explored in...