Imagining Insiders: Africa and the Question of Belonging (review)

Imagining Insiders: Africa and the Question of Belonging, by Mineke Schipper. London: Cassell, 1999. 256 pp. ISBN 0-304-70492-2 paper; 0-304-70168-8 cloth.

Imagining Insiders: Africa and the Question of Belonging reads at three levels: it is autobiographical, retrospective, and prospective.

Writing autobiography does not take necessarily the form of a first-person narrative. For many of us, as scholars and researchers, autobiography is often inscribed in our scholarly work itself: it tells something about our intellectual preoccupations, engagement in culture and society, attitude toward cultures, and sometimes, even ideological orientation. Mineke Schipper's book reflects all these elements, and her professional life is marked by her commitment and engagement with African culture, literature, and writers and women in society as well. It tell, as a subtext, about her joys, rewards, and frustrations as a scholar of African literatures and culture.

From a retrospective standpoint, Schipper's book brings back indeed familiar topics such as Negritude, feminism, as well as the questions of Otherness and representation (ch. 1-2-3); Africa, black America, Negritude and black consciousness (ch. 4-5); gender, race and representation (ch. 6-7). The author closes the book with two chapters (8-9) in which she discusses more explicitly the insider/outsider question and suggests a "culture of interdiscursivity" as the way in which to approach all cultures, and in which the binary insider-versus-outsider ought to be not mutually exclusive, but rather inclusive. Twenty pages of a well-documented bibliography indicate the author's theoretical reference. I missed, though, the footnotes, the back-and-forth dialogue, the sottovoce conversation, and explanation it could provide. ¹ The interviews with writers in 1974, 1978, 1983, 1991, 1987 are perhaps too remote in time; often the interest of such interviews is in their actuality.

I am still not sure if the issue of insider-outsider should be a relevant question to be raised in an academic setting, in which the word university is constructed with the same root as in universal. I am not sure either if such a question is a product of the American academic, social and power organization, where ethnicity and "race matters," as Cornel West puts it: people are mainly identified and classified according to race and ethnicity. If the question is relevant, then Schipper's book is essential for the questioning and the interrogations it carries--among which, the question of the othering gaze. We have been used to the dominant discourse of the West othering Africa and the non-West. The raising of African voices, or the listening to these voices (they were there, but unheard) reverses the subject position and decenters the West. Schipper brings this issue through the analysis of some African novels. Hyphenated identities such as African-American translate the dual position of belonging and not belonging at the same time, and it could be summarized by W. E. B. DuBois's "double consciousness." As for feminism, Schipper briefly revisits the debate about the relationship between gender and race, simultaneously inclusive (gender) and exclusive (race). What constitutes in fact the central topic of the book is only conveyed as anecdotes. The question is: Who should teach African literatures and cultures? As a response, the last chapter promotes an interdiscursive process that allows for a dialogic encounter of both positions as insider and outsider, rather than their mutual radical exclusion.

It is true that cultural arrogance sometimes seems to grant the right to everything. For having read two or three African novels, one becomes an expert of African literature. On the other hand, being an African does not by itself make an expert of Africa. At a more fundamental level, the major question to be addressed is the question of experience versus hermeneutics: the ideal has to be seen in a strong combination of both. Any serious scholar combines the two, and at different degrees. The promotion of insider-outsider...