Sartre's Legacy in Postcolonial Theory; or, Who's Afraid of Non-Western Historiography and Cultural Studies?

Despite a guilty conscience about depending upon Western-derived analytical matrices, postcolonial theory continues to exhibit a lack of interest in non-Western cultures' articulations of meaning and value, for its dominant conceptual frameworks remain tethered to assumptions embedded in the anticolonial theorizing of Jean-Paul Sartre and his associates. Taking anticolonialism to be simply the "negation" of colonial oppression and ideas, postcolonial theory replicates existentialist ethical discourse in ways that ensure that it will be unable to engage contemporary research tracing how indigenous acculturation shapes anticolonial ethics and politics. By contrast, Levinas offers ways of revising postcolonial theory so as to allow non-Western historiography to inform postcolonial literary criticism--as may be illustrated by readings of Camara Laye's L'Enfant noir (1953), Ferdinand Oyono's Une Vie de Boy (1956), and Ahmadou Kourauma's Les Soleils des independences (1968).