Postcolonial Francophone Autobiographies: From Africa to the Antilles by Edgard Sankara (review)

Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé begins her autobiography Tales from the Heart with a striking portrayal of the young narrator’s parents’ deep-seated admiration of France and rejection of their Antillean linguistic and cultural heritage. Designed around her brother’s declaration that their parents are “alienated souls” and the narrator’s subsequent interrogation of her dual French and Creole cultural background, this inaugural scene sets the stage for Condé’s journey of self-discovery that shuttles between her individual experiences and the cultural, political, and social conditions that shape her sense of self (14). Her book thus exemplifies recent postcolonial autobiographical work centering on the ongoing and often ambivalent connection between France and its former colonies. With their exploration of multiple cultural traditions and deployment of narrative strategies that borrow, subvert, and denaturalize autobiographical conventions and identity, postcolonial autobiographies foreground the aesthetic and epistemological entanglements between the colonial and postcolonial worlds. Edgard Sankara fruitfully mines this ambiguity in Postcolonial Francophone Autobiographies: From Africa to the Antilles to present original insight into the genre’s place at the intersection of cultural and literary studies.

Postcolonial Francophone Autobiographies offers separate chapters on the autobiographical work of Malian Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Congolese Valentin Mudimbé, Guinean Kesso Barry, Martinicans Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, and Guadeloupean Maryse Condé, and is built around three overarching goals. His primary concern is to show how reception theory demonstrates the influence of audience on writers as well as postcolonial autobiography’s “hybrid position” and the ways in which the genre historically engages a “plurality of audiences” (10). His second objective is to examine how the African and Antillean authors of his study showcase different approaches to autobiography, a rapport that is informed, Sankara suggests, by personal as well as cultural and political relationships to the former colonial power. These relations establish the text’s comparative postcolonial framework, since they foreground the unique history of colonization of each region, the process of decolonization that occurred, and how the specific ties between France and the former African colonies and French Overseas Departments determine the reception of each author in his or her place of origin as well as the French metropole. Finally, Sankara presents his book as a bridge between the Anglo-dominated field of postcolonial criticism and Francophone studies and situates his theoretical framework within the socio-historical context at the time of the texts’ publication. He meets these goals through “personal, sociopolitical, and economical” readings that draw from biographical information, archival research focused on book reviews in major newspapers and cultural venues, interviews, and publication announcements (5). Most strikingly, though, these theoretical inquiries coalesce in the introduction’s concluding remarks, which cast the book as “a warning that exotic postcolonial Francophone autobiographers, when promoted to foreign readers, risk becoming foreign to their own people” (20).

As this cautionary assessment suggests, Sankara writes from a philosophical position that sees autobiography as an inherently political genre “because what is being represented is also political” (11). This stance aligns well with recent scholarship on the ethical dimensions of life-writing and testimony, and creates the conditions for Sankara’s use of Phillipe Lejeune’s pacte autobiographique as a primary theoretical source for bridging reception and autobiographical theory. In addition to Lejeune, Sankara draws from an impressive array of scholarship within the domains of reception theory, Francophone literature, and postcolonial studies, giving the text a strong interdisciplinary foundation that clearly serves his aim of reading postcolonial autobiography through the lens of reception theory. Despite the academically ambitious scope of his project, Sankara writes with a precision that enlightens scholars of the genre without alienating novice readers of the field. The introduction is indeed emblematic of Sankara’s productive use of multiple theoretical concepts such as métissage, acculturation, and authenticity, because it provides a concise breakdown of key strands of thought across the disciplines within clearly delineated sections. Sankara reproduces this highly organized structure in his readings of the six authors; sections addressing the political...