La Mesure de l'autre: Afrique subsaharienne et roman ethnographique de Belgique et de France (1918-1940) (review)

Recent years have seen increasing academic opposition, often from anglophone researchers, to a reliance on the 'one size fits all' postcolonial paradigm which developed in response to the experience of the British Empire. Nations' differing experiences of empire have been interrogated within the expanding field of francophone postcolonial studies, while edited volumes, such as A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), have demonstrated a welcome awareness of geographical contingency. As he states in his introduction, Fraiture's essai (as the monograph characterizes itself) is a deliberate intervention into this growing field of research; accordingly, it is informed by the well-known arguments of anglophone cultural theorists, notably Clifford and Said. However, for all the familiarity of this point of departure, with the opening page self-reflexively evoking the 'événements de 2005' in France and the 'loi du 23 février' (p. 13), Fraiture's analysis provides a refreshingly original approach to literary novels produced during the apogee of French and Belgian colonialisms. With a dual focus on Belgian and French ethnographic novels representing Sub-Saharan Africa, the monograph displays a critical sensitivity to national contingencies and memories while also investigating common points of epistemology between these two powers —neighbours on both the European and African continents. Arguing that 'les modernités ethnographique et littéraire naissent d'une impulsion analogue' (p. 240), Fraiture establishes the significance of the interwar period as a turning point in representations of the autre, as littérateurs moved from the xenophobic exoticism of the nineteenth century to the anticolonialism of the post-war period. While the characterization of Drum's œuvre as a 'nouvelle poétique "Indigéniste", parce qu'elle accorde la priorité au substrat culturel autochtone' (p. 163) is somewhat problematic, particularly in light of the subsequent admission that the author was 'plus colonialiste que véritablement ethnologue' and 'se mobilise avant tout pour une réécriture du nous colonial' (p. 193), the monograph successfully explores the dialogue between the literary production of francophone métropoles and growing ethnographic knowledge of Africa. Concluding that for both pro-colonial novelists and critics of empire, be they Belgian or French, the authenticity of the eyewitness account was of primary importance (p. 243), the author raises important questions about the relationship between the literary legacy of nineteenth-century realism and the methodologies adopted by twentieth-century ethnographers.