Of Irony and Empire: Islam, the West, and the Transcultural Invention of Africa (review)

This is one of the rare studies of African literature to bridge the gap between North African and Sub-Saharan literature, two worlds that rarely meet in the minds of most specialists in the field of African literature. Rice crosses the Sahara by including one of the classics of African literature in French, Cheikh Hamidou Kane's récit, L'aventure ambiguë (Paris: Juillard, 1962; in English as Ambiguous Adventure, London: Heinemann, 1973), along with other works from Algeria, Tunisia, and Sudan.

In her analysis, irony emerges in a variety of ways in the encounter between the West and Islam, a religion common to both North Africans and a vast stratum of diverse peoples ranging from the Sahara southward into the Sahel and beyond, and from Senegal eastward to Sudan.

Rice's approach is to focus on the differences in the "social imaginaries" that emerge between Europe and Africa. The term comes from Charles Taylor, the innovative scholar of religion who has invented many neologisms to formulate and convey the subtlety of his theories. The encounter of two different ways of viewing culture, more a collective understanding of the world than an individual worldview, creates ironies not only in literature but also in the experience of African soldiers who fought for France in World Wars I and II, the subject of an excellent chapter.

The author brings to her study of these topics, especially the semi-autobiographical narrative by Kane, a knowledge of Islam that goes beyond what we have seen in previous studies. The concept of social imaginaries helps the reader to understand more fully the depth of the differences between the European colonizers and the diverse African peoples represented in this study—either as characters in fiction or as soldiers.

Although irony and Islam are the themes that bring the chapters together, the book is marked by two striking features: an unusual structure that threatens its unity at many points, and wide variation in the extent of the analyses. For example, Rice devotes nearly one third of the book to theoretical considerations, starting with a forty-four-page prologue and ending with a twenty-page epilogue. For some readers, this work may seem rather over-theorized, or, more accurately, overly dependent on Western theorists. One finds many references to the usual suspects, Foucault, Derrida, et al., but aside from Said and some North African critics, those from sub-Saharan Africa whose work might be germane to this study are notably absent. One searches in vain for a nod to V. Y. Mudimbe, whose seminal study The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988) might seem to announce the subtitle here, The Transcultural Invention of Africa.

As for the analyses, the quite thorough treatment of Ambiguous Adventure by Kane, whose homeland, Senegal, is most distant from Rice's experience, is fifty-four pages long. In the chapter on North African writers, whose traditions are much more familiar to Rice, three authors are squeezed into forty-nine pages: Salih from Sudan, Tlili from Tunisia, where the author has done research, and Mokkedem, an Algerian whose works have been the subject of previous articles by the author. Tlili merits only ten pages in this triad from North Africa. These variations give the impression, no doubt wrong, that the analyses are rather discrete, composed in isolation, and then linked together by the subjects of irony and Islam.

If the examination of Kane's novel is the strongest of all the chapters, specialists in sub-Saharan African literature will quibble over some minor flaws stemming from what appears to be a lack of familiarity with Senegal and the Sahel. In an effort to link all the authors to the Sahara, Rice interprets the term "red sand" in the English translation of L'aventure ambiguë as "The Sahara." Senegal has red sand, and in some places, there...