Africa and Its Significant Others (review)

Structurally Africa and Its Significant Others evinces an ambitious agenda. The Introduction establishes the profound implications of Africa's 40 years of intercultural entanglement by questioning, among others, discourses on postcolonialism and globalization that often fail to "conceive of Africa as a real economical, political and cultural space, with its specific interests." Thereafter, the book is divided into four sections, framed as four interventions, to use a dated idiom, into the subject of Africa's relation with its significant others, in this case Europe and the Americas. The focus of sections one, three, and four merits emphasis.

Section one, for example, deals with new ways of reading and producing African literary texts that foreground the materiality of the text. The result is four clear and concise essays ranging from a creative use of Levinas's philosophical insights to meditate on self and other, through the theme of work in Emecheta and the literary uses of female genital mutilation, to new modes of autobiographical writing. Section three, with three engaging and well written investigations by Anne Adams, Babacar M'Baye, and Kathleen Gyssels, stages a meeting between Africa and its diaspora. This section forms a tighter fit than section one, not just because most of the writers deal with the black experience. Rather, unlike section one, which deals with the broad, loose, and conflicted domain of modes of literary interpretation, the essays in section three are all responsive to a certain core of thematic elaboration (pan-Africanism, racial identity, black particularity, transnational identification), the motive force of black discourse for over a century. Section four completes the study with Mieke Bal's fascinating essay on intercultural literary study.

The study has a series of well-executed essays that posit important revisions in the articulation of Africa's relationship with the West. For example,Zabul's essay on autobiography is particularly impressive in the ways it grants agency to supposedly voiceless subalterns. This is a welcome departure in a discursive universe often obsessed with hybridity and floating signifiers. Also compelling is how Elizabeth Bekers's essay deepens our awareness of the historical trajectory of the literary discourse on female genital excision by showing its placement within discrete cultural contexts as well as its somehow complex treatment as a political weapon especially in colonialism. Andthe African literary paradigm that the section on literature recovers goes beyond the determination African writing has received within dominant Eurocentric discourse and problematic African critical models, though it takes off from the latter.

Likewise, the section on the African diaspora is commendable on several grounds, least of which being its demonstrable virtue of taking the engagement with Africa seriously, unlike most negritudists before them. The commitment to Africa still makes considerable sense not because it affords us the opportunity to decenter whiteness, embody a different experiential order, or opt out of the black/white binary, but because it helps us to work through issues of identity and other affiliations wrought by slavery, colonialism, and capitalism.

Equally important is Bal's compelling study, which hones our understanding of the rhetorical and philosophical implications of confronting cultural borders by challenging us to move beyond our placement within specific contexts. The chapter is central to the concerns of Africa and Its Significant Others, primarily because it provides the theoretical grounding for such issues as identification and interdependence, which the book seeks to reexamine.

On the whole, Africa and its Significant Others adds an invaluable new dimension to the scholarship on the relationship between Africa and the West. As the editors rightly argue, previous studies of modes of black identification have often focused too narrowly on arguments that sought to represent Europe as "partly" African or Africa as "embracing" Arabia. Africa and its Significant Others ably corrects this lack by complicating notions of blackness or identification, as it underscores the productive tensions Africa's entanglement with Europe and the Americas generates.

That said, the book cannot be seen as an even and unqualified success. For example...