Parades postcoloniales: la fabrication des identités dans le roman congolais (review)

Numerous studies have explored the validity and pertinence of the national approach to African literatures, and this is not the place to re-rehearse the central tenets of these contributions. Parades postcoloniales: la fabrication des identités dans le roman congolais examines five novels published by Congolese writers between 1979 and 1998 (Sylvain Bemba, Rêves portatifs, 1979; Sony Labou Tansi, La vie et demie, 1979; Henri Lopes, Sur l'autre rive, 1992; Daniel Biyaoula, L'impasse, 1996; and Alain Mabanckou, Bleu blanc rouge, 1998). Lydie Moudileno's insightful site-specific analysis challenges us to think about the various ways in which our contextualization of colonial, national, transnational, and transcolonial cultural, political, and social phenomena can be enhanced through the juxtaposition of texts produced in postcolonial, migrant, and postmigrant circumstances. Naturally, the findings and conclusions have important implications for the wider francophone African context.

Moudileno foregrounds the ways in which these novels exhibit a "jeux de la représentation" (9), a relationship between playfulness and experimentation. Indeed, the study draws on influential theoretical works by Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Godefroy Bidima, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Louis Marin, and Achille Mbe mbe to signal ways such an interdisciplinary framework can assist us in unpacking the works under investigation, particularly in terms of the key etymological terms announced in the title, namely, the role of "parades" and "fabrication," and accordingly how they may "highlight the capacity of fiction to both illustrate and underscore the process of [. . .] fabricating postcolonial identity in the African novel" (13–16), pointing to such practices as the "public display of power" (16), its orchestration and theatricality, and hence operate as a "defense strategy" (17) aimed at the "reversal of a dynamic of domination" (17). The "performance" or "performative" dimension is employed here to emphasize the implicit influence of socially constructed categories of reference and description as the influential work of Butler has convincingly demonstrated.

Bemba is an important writer who has not received the critical attention he deserves. Here, Moudileno shows how Bemba sought to highlight "the determining role played by the cinematographic image or imaginary in the construction of national identity" (24). Bemba reminds the reader of its colonial antecedent, and how in turn the visual has been reformulated to service the imperatives of nation-state formation and propagandist directives. "Through repetition," Moudileno argues, "the audience ends up internalizing both the ethics and worldview imposed by a film's imaginary" (37). In many ways, Bemba's insights on the potentialities and dangers associated with technological progress anticipate many contemporary concerns. Yet, his skepticism of film, what Moudileno describes as "the seduction of the visual by the visual" (56), is unusual, at odds even with developments in francophone sub-Saharan cultural history at a time when writers such as Ousmane Sembene were renouncing literature and embarking on careers as filmmakers precisely because of the latter's perceived potential for democratizing accessibility to audiences.

Sony Labou Tansi, in terms of critical attention, is diametrically opposed to Bemba. He has received tremendous attention and is widely considered one of the most exciting and innovative writers of his generation. Acknowledging this critical reception, Moudileno engages in an important reassessment of this reception by questioning the reductive manner in which his work has been linked to magic-realistic practices. Pointing to the recuperative and marketing benefits such affiliation to Latin American writers has provided, Moudileno argues that this restrictive category is a result of a unidimensional insistence on the tropicality of the writing (whereby a symbiotic connection is drawn between linguistic and structural innovation as a mechanism to address the disruption and disfiguration of the postcolony) that obfuscates another crucial component of his work. Returning to Sony Labou Tansi's first published novel, Moudileno performs a compelling reading of La vie et demie in which she reveals how "a magic-realist mode is abandoned half-way through the novel in favor of another kind of writing" (60), namely, science fiction...