Commonplaces: The Poetics of African Atlantic Postromantics by Seanna Sumalee Oakley (review)

Seanna Sumalee Oakley's book, The Poetics of African Atlantic Post-Romantics, offers an insightful study of how twentieth-century African and Caribbean writers reactivate the foundational narratives of romantic and modern utopian universalisms. Oakley's analyses hinge upon a nuanced comparison between the poetics associated with some of the most relevant African Atlantic contemporary writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and their nineteenth-century Romantic European counterparts. She compares them both in terms of their reiteration of Romantic utopian motifs and the subtle but crucial differences in their recourse to the notion of enlightened universality.

Oakley achieves this by moving her interpretive framework from that configured by enlightened universality to what Martinican writer Edouard Glissant's termed common place (lieux communs). The important thing to keep in mind is that this gesture carries the genealogy of universalism's own critiques spanning more than two hundred years—from Baruch Spinoza through Gilles Deleuze to Glissant himself. She argues that the work of African Atlantic post-Romantic authors is best understood if read from the constellation of meanings mobilized in Glissant's work, in particular the notion of "common place" and related terms (Relation, all-world, nomadism, etc.). This notion helps us see in African and Caribbean authors as diverse as Derek Walcott, Claudia Rankine, Werewere Liking, and Frankétienne a concrete yet protean, inclusive yet boundless, ultimately less violent experience of what truly is universal between cultures across time and space, not in spite but because of their heed to what remains irreducibly other in the worlds finding expression in their work.

More precisely, this paradigmatic shift enables Oakley to discern the recurrences of emancipatory motives amongst literary works from the European and Afro-Atlantic modernist traditions. Such recurrences point toward patterns of iteration of modern literary forms throughout space and time. Oakley's work is therefore particularly devoted to highlighting the contribution of "the illuminating elegance of rhetorical figuration and specially its contribution to ethics" (7). Since for Oakley "the signifying function of an aesthetic instance bears far less revolutionary power than the ontology of its syntax, which is constitutive repetition" (7), the originality of her work lies in illuminating the recurrence of such structural resonances among works far apart in space and time, through the tensional foregrounding of their historical and geographical specificity. The crucial point here is that this structural invariance of literary forms—the "ontology of its syntax"—works precisely because of the singularity by which its actual content gives it effective meaning. This effect she calls itineration: lieux-communs itinerate such tropes by securing the singularities upon which they in turn depend.

In the Introduction, she questions "the abyss of modernist and post-modernist cynicism" in critiques of the twentieth century's Afro-Caribbean radical and anti-colonial utopianisms, specifically the first's impeachment of the latter as mere re-editions of the kind of enlightened universalisms that prefigured their disastrous realizations (9). Oakley's argumentative thrust explicitly goes against the grain of Leo Bersani's dismissal of modernists' attribution of a utopian index to literary endeavors. In his essay "The Culture of Redemption: Proust and Melanie Klein," Bersani argues that, due to their engagement with a version of universality that actualizes a specifically European genealogy of the concept that privileges a nostalgic, recuperative function of art obtaining at the intersection between memory, truth and death, European modernists endorsed aesthetic practices that divested lived experience—the realm of radical otherness—of its preeminently singular character. Due to the artwork's abstraction into universal truth by a totalizing drive mainly concerned with an imaginary recuperation of a unitary self, the European Romantics and modernists could not live up to their utopian spirit, since this abstraction entailed ambiguously turning the artwork into a fetish of the self's survival.

By contrast, while decidedly subscribing the Promethean drive of European Romantics and its successors, African Atlantic literary conveyances of lieux communs do not...