Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment

Introduction: The Burden of Commitment

1 i n t roduc t ion The Burden of Commitment To those calling for a politically committed writer, I propose an engaging man. sony labou tansi, La vie et demie I am not opposed to the principle of social conflict, to civil war or to a bloody revolution. In theory, I am quite favorable to it. In practice, I remain favorable to it. Under the condition that I remain uninvolved. bessora, Et si Dieu me demande, dites-Lui que je dors The very existence of “Engagement,” which can loosely be translated from the original French as political involvement of the intellectual class, has come to seem passé. This is true not only in France, widely viewed as the home of the engagé intellectual, with Emile Zola’s “J’accuse” of January 3, 1898, the foundational document, but also in Europe and the United States. The belief in the transformative ability of literature and in the higher (visionary) power of the writer and of the intellectual has given way to a less idealistic, less dogmatic, and more complex stance. Critical evaluation of francophone African literature has followed this shift, and few critics today would lend unequivocal credence to Lilyan Kesteloot’s 19721 assertion in Intellectual Origins of the African Revolution that “literary works can accelerate the development of social and political crises” (11). Working across genres but focusing on the novel, this book takes up the question of renewed forms of commitment in contemporary francophone African literature. It also focuses on new ways of understanding African literature and its voices, such as the diversification of the processes of identification with and belonging to Africa, the different modes of resistance to the old notions of writing as art, the remapping of the theme of African youth and its future, and finally Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment 2 the impact of an increasing conservatism on Europe’s urban environment , especially in the context of immigration. By looking at engagée literature from yesterday (when the African writer was implicitly seen as imparted with a mission) to today (when authors usually aspire to be acknowledged primarily for their works as writers), this book addresses the current processes of canonization in contemporary francophone African literature. We argue that aesthetic as well as political issues are now at the forefront of debates about the African literary canon as writers and critics increasingly acknowledge the ideology of form. As we write this book, in the post-9/11 and post-Katrina era, postcolonial theory, one of the predominant analytical tools in literature, is also at a juncture, cast in doubt for its alleged entrenchment in the Euro-American university system, its excessive attention to Western cultural production and practices, and its ambivalent politics. As noted by David Jefferess, Julie McGonegal, and Sabine Milz in “The Politics of Postcoloniality,” in Postcolonial Text (2006), “Postcolonial theory has provided a valuable critique of the discourses that underwrote the colonial project and that continue to inform neo-liberal imaginings of a unified world (market), including ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’” (2). It has also proposed useful analyses of the legacy of imperialism. Yet, those analyses have often been based on a rejection of preexisting humanist and materialist theories. Although the influence of Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been undeniable, postmodernist attacks on “grand narratives,” of which Marxism is one, have challenged materialist readings and still-framed Engagement as a simple binary. Postcolonial studies engage a wide variety of fields of inquiry: postcolonial theory, of course, but also diaspora, ethnic, migration, and globalization studies. Under pressure from scholars in these fields, postcolonial studies are pushed to acknowledge that a “productive understanding of, and resistance to, global processes of oppression must work on the level of both the material and the symbolic” (Jefferess , McGonegal, and Milz, The Politics of Postcoloniality, 8). They are drawn away from the “self-fashioning without a subject” model that Terry Eagleton warned against in Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003): “A faith in plurality, plasticity, dismantling, destabilizing , the power of endless self-invention—all this, while undoubtedly radical in some contexts, also smacks of a distinctively Western culture and an advanced capitalist world. . . . In a later stage of capi- Introduction 3 talist production, we are now confronted with the singular spectacle of self-fashioning without a subject. An openness to cultural ‘otherness ’ comes pre-wrapped...