West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (review)

I picked up Stephanie Newell's West African Literatures with some apprehension, thinking, as I glanced at the table of contents, that this would be another overview trying to cover too much material and as a result saying nothing of real interest. However, despite the title, this was not the case. Stephanie Newell has a real thesis, which she successfully incorporates into this general study.

To begin with a few limitations: most of West African Literatures draws upon Nigerian and Ghanaian literatures, with some nods to Francophone literatures. Despite its attempts to bridge this gap at various points, one often comes away with the feeling that a dozen or so Nigerians and a few Ghanaians are the major reference points for what constitutes West African literature.

There are fourteen chapters encompassed within 213 pages of text: the topics are introduced without detailed analyses or theorization. Drawing upon her expertise in popular genres, Newell is able to extend the usual overview of "high" literatures to a wide range of subjects, including not only popular and oral literatures, but also feminism, négritude, Islam, Marxism, avant-gardism, and Queer writing. In virtually every case, exemplary texts are evoked, and in almost every case they are discussed relatively briefly. The one notable exception is Things Fall Apart (Heinemann, 1958), which is elevated beyond canonical status to that of an ur-text that defined the literature to come. As a result, those texts that had been considered in the 1970s and 1980s as foundational Francophone literature—like Laye's L'Enfant noir (Plon, 1954), Beti's Mission terminée (Corêa, 1957), Oyono's Une Vie de boy (Juliard, 1956), or Kourouma's Les Soleils des indépendences (Montréal, 1968)—are largely ignored, while "lesser" writers are highlighted.

This might be troubling for an "old style" critic for whom cultural studies approaches are of secondary importance. But in this case, Newell succeeds admirably in overcoming the limits not only of conventional literary appreciations, but also of an unmanageably large subject. And she does this by skillfully evoking perhaps the issue of crucial importance for postcolonial African studies—the implications for the field of postcolonialism of a wide range of contested theoretical approaches.

She cleverly insinuates this issue by reading against the grain of négritude. Senghor's essentializing and racializing of African culture may have served a purpose during the colonial period, but such an approach had outlived its usefulness by the 1950s when anticolonial political literature stepped into the fray. By the time independence had been achieved and one-party states had become the norm, it was not uncommon to find conservative or even dictatorial rulers employing its rhetoric; as a mode of literary inspiration, it had become tired. However, Newell highlights the issues of "otherness" originally addressed by Senghor and company, and explores the ways in which négritude redefined the relationship between a European "self" and an African "other," postulating a possibility of deploying feeling as a bridge in such a way as to overcome the binary logic of dialectical thought and specularity.

This contrarian approach to an ideology originally grounded in validating the black identity in the face of white racism is extended in Newell's readings of those texts that emerged from the second generation of African women writers, and of the third generation of (mostly) male authors who refused to continue along the lines of Achebe's realist, pedagogical literature. In the concluding chapter she constructs an approach that bravely attempts to reconcile an avant-gardist set of values (which has much in common with and is reflected in postmodern writing) with an African commitment to social change and humanism. In short, she attempts a redefinition of postcolonialism, somewhat along the lines of Spivak's "planetarian" point of view, in which a number of seemingly contradictory imperatives are served: she refuses to validate nativism, binary logic, and essentialisms; and she accepts the dicta...