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Reviewed by:
  • Africa, Europe and (Post)colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora
  • Kathleen Gyssels
Africa, Europe and (Post)colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora Ed. Susan Arndt and Marek Spitczok von Brisinski Bayreuth African Studies 77. Bayreuth: Bayreuth Africa Studies, 2006. ISBN 3-927510-93-9 cloth

This collection of articles on a vast group of African writers expressing themselves in French, English, and German is a welcome study of different aspects of how the very diverse body of African literature, produced both inside and outside the continent, is evolving and, more precisely, replies and even contradicts "discourses" coming from the West. It is the result of a conference held in Berlin in May 2002 on the topic "Versions and Subversions in African Literature." After a welcome and very substantial introduction by editor Susan Arndt, four different sections are structured around the main axes of the different papers. In her 79-page introduction, Arndt surveys the contributions and analyzes the variety of words used in the past as well as in the present to speak about African writers: diaspora and its origin, exile, internal and external, "ethnie," "Stamme," "people of colour," "Hauptlinge" (strangely enough, "métis" is not discussed here) is surely interesting, but this extended introduction suffers (as do the papers) from many mistakes in the titles and references, especially those in French. A sloppy layout and a neglected revision (Le soleil des Indépendances is just one of the many titles, together with Peau noire, masques blancs and many others) make the reading disagreeable.

"Part One: Colonialism and White Myths: Film and Literature" deals with other genres and cinema. A first article is on a much neglected area, Belgian colonial films, and another one on Africa as represented in German film (articles by Patrice Nganang and Martin Baer). Two other articles deal with "sickness" and stereo-types of the "other," the savage African. In "Plato's Fault? Clichés, Stereotypes and Other Prejudices in European Literary Discourses," Jean-Raoul Austin de Drouillard asks "why Europeans venerate so deeply their culture?" (125) and answers the question by turning to works of fiction that precisely downplayed the veneration of European values, namely, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Tournier's Friday, which are "both eminent examples of Eurocentrism" (134).

Part two is entitled "Discourses on Racism and Race: Theory and Literature" and offers four articles. Sylvère Mbondobari illustrates the impact of World War II in what he calls three "African texts" (159), while using the works of Martinican Aimé Césaire and Senegalese Senghor and Herni-Richard Manga Mado. Not only cannot Le discours sur le colonialisme be considered an African text, but the third writer we could have expected as soon as the names of Césaire and Senghor are evoked is Damas, the Guyanese cofounder of Négritude. While "Senghor and Césaire were inspired by their own experiences in the 1930 s in Paris, by the intellectual atmosphere in France and especially by the experience of many Africans in the battlefields of Europe" (160), it must be recalled that only Senghor himself had faced imprisonment.

Part three is the most substantial one. "Representation of Exile, Migration and Diaspora in African Literature" unites eight articles of uneven length and [End Page 216] value. Some overanalyze fiction such as Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'aventure ambiguë, which is studied here, while many new novels await close analysis in the examination of the problematic relationship between here and there, then and now, since the experience of uprootedness and dislocation is without doubt one of the salient thematics disclosed in various recent fiction.

A very good decision of the editors is to have included areas that are often left out when African literature is discussed: not only South African authors of Asian origin, but also postapartheid and anti-apartheid themes (Frank) are dealt with.

Kathleen Gyssels
University of Antwerp
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