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Africa Today 49.1 (2002) 103-107



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Desai, Gaurav. 2001. Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 197 pp.

Gaurav Desai proposes to reevaluate the archive of Africanist discourse from a literary critic’s perspective, in order to destabilize the divide between colonial and postcolonial, which “leads us to falsely equate the colonial moment with the oral and the postcolonial moment with the written.” In the process, he hopes to broaden and historicize the shallow, repetitive “postcolonial” literary curriculum by studying Africans who wrote during colonialism. These are good objectives. How many more articles on Things Fall Apart or Nervous Conditions should the world be obliged to absorb? And the term postcolonial has already been drubbed by writers like Shohat [End Page 103] and McClintock; many of us feel it has been imposed by administrators and funders, rather than adopted out of intellectual conviction.

Desai’s final chapter, “Colonial Self-Fashioning,” an extended and complex reading of 1930s Tiv historian Akiga Sai, delivers on the introduction’s promises, placing an African writer of the colonial period among “historically sensitive, politically astute manipulators of knowledge in an unequal colonial order.” However, the two chapters between the introduction and “Colonial Self-Fashioning” seem to me beset with mounting intellectual, historical, and stylistic troubles that threaten the overall project.

Chapter I, “‘Race’ Rationality and the Pedagogical Imperative,” reprises colonial arguments about African mental capacities and educability almost exclusively from the white side. Desai’s principles—that “social practices exceed social theories,” and that oppressive ideologies may contain within them the possibility of emancipation—are sound; in fact, they seem like obvious truisms. Thus, Desai argues that Piaget-influenced theories of Africans’ “arrested development,” which look simply racist now, might have been seen in their original context as progressive, compared with the biological determinism of the scientific racism then prevailing. Such theories, Desai insists, “read the ‘arrested development’ of the African native as a link between Europe and Africa and not as a separation.”

Perhaps, but such conclusions do not seem sufficiently useful to warrant spending over forty pages in the company of such worthies as H. L. Gordon, author of a treatise on African feeble-mindedness; J. C. Carothers, advocate of African “frontal lobe deficiency”; or Charles Templeman Loram, author of The Education of the South African Native. A lengthy footnote tells us that “Loram’s influence was felt by actors who fashioned themselves as relatively progressive on the South African scene.” Wonderful to think of everybody out there just “fashioning” away!

After a while in such company, Desai loses the quotation marks and starts referring to such entities as “the native mind” as though they really existed. In the end, he is so anxious to recover something from all of this “Africanist discourse” that he offers “the negritude movement in Africa” as a prime example of how racist philosophy could be embraced and transformed for liberatory purposes. However, it is still hotly contested whether Senghor’s effects, either as negritude theoretician or the governing president of Senegal, were in fact “liberatory,” and Desai’s example can be read as proving the opposite of what he intends. When Desai states, later in the “Coda,” that “I have attempted to place in a central rather than marginal role the work of African subjects,” one has to underline attempted because, in the first chapter, he has not come close to doing so, and Chapter II will have Malinowski at its center, followed by a few pages on Jomo Kenyatta.

Chapter II, called “Dangerous Liaisons? Frustrated Radicals, Master Professionals” (apparently criticizing in some way the Dangerous Liaisons collection edited by Anne McClintock), is the most problematic section of the book. Under the dubious heading “Guilt by Association—the History of a Debate,” Desai summarizes the critiques of anthropology made in the [End Page 104] 1960s and 1970s, with extra attention to a special forum in the winter 1968 issue of Current Anthropology. At the start, he places the question safely in the past by framing...

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