Nationalists and Nomads (review)

Nationalists and Nomads by Christopher L. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. 258. $46.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

The collection of six essays which constitute this study takes its title from what Christopher L. Miller describes as a troubling "conundrum in some contemporary criticism." In his introduction, "History and Hybridity," he describes the conundrum thus: "the world is divided between, on the one hand, those who divide the world and, on the other hand, those who don't. Nationalists and nomads. The two sides are incommensurable, since one side does not allow for sides at all. This is a riddle of difference, and I think it is central to contemporary postcolonial studies" (6).

This "riddle" also appears to be central to Miller's scholarly enterprise, since chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6 in this volume were written for various journals in earlier versions. For this volume, all were revised and, in addition, chapter 2, "Hallucinations of France and Africa," was extensively augmented. Added to these revised essays are two new chapters: chapter 1, examining "Involution and Revolution: African Paris in the 1920s," and chapter 3, entitled "Revolution and Involution in Images," expanding the analysis in chapter 2 of the International Colonial Exposition of 1931 and a related novel, Ousmane Socé Diop's Mirages de Paris (1937).

Miller's goals, as he moves from the colonial to the postcolonial era, are multiple: to expand the historiography of francophone colonial literature, thereby correcting our understanding of its origins; to clarify the distinctions between the colonial and the modern whose points of view have been blurred in recent years by the critical focus on the postcolonial and the postmodern; to revalorize such colonial era works as Dipo's Mirages de Paris; and to engage in the debates centered on the curriculum of colonial and postcolonial literature as well as the debates surrounding the contemporary ideologies of criticism.

The meticulous scholarship that characterizes this volume is immediately evident in the opening chapter that convincingly challenges the benchmark of 1932 as the beginning of black francophone literature. This is the date of publication in France of Légitime défense, the Antillean student condemnation of Martinican assimilationist literature. The choice of this text as a harbinger of the birth of Negritude was made by Lilyan Kesteloot in her pioneering study, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude, written in the late fifties (trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy [1961; Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974]). Her judgment of authors and texts was based on ideological and aesthetic criteria that Miller finds insufficient. He rejects the support of 1932 as a turning point as well from literary historian Martin Steins, based on the latter's reading of African publications such as La race nègre. Miller invokes other scholars, such as Guy Ossito Midiohouan, whose more realistic criteria—"education, intellectual and cultural life, publishing, and intended readership"—place "the origin of francophone African literature not in France with Negritude but in Senegal with [Ahmadou Mapaté] Diagne's Les Trois Volontés de Malic (1920)" (13), a pro-colonial text, but the first fictional text in French by an African (see L'idéologie dans la littérature négro-africaine d'expression franÀ'Àaise [Paris: L'Harmattan, 1986]). This approach is clearly more consonant with Miller's concept of involution and revolution, the title of his first chapter, which deals with strategies of "identity and culture engaged in by colonized Africans" (10) in the 1920s.

In examining these strategies, Miller also puts them into an historical context, namely the effects of World War I, which brought African combatants of varied ethnic backgrounds together and made them aware of the dette de sang (the debt of blood) owed them by the French. In addition, he cites the radicalizing role of the Communist party. The documentation, reinforcing the re-evaluation of the 1920s as the decade of the birth of black francophone literature, is indeed impressive. Miller brings to light previously obscure colonial texts of imperialist, national justification...