Native Intellectuals in the Contact Zone: African Responses to Italian Colonialism in Tigrinya Literature

This essay examines the critical responses of two African texts, The Author's Journey (1895) and The Conscript (1927, 1950), to Italian colonialism in Eritrea, and unpacks the relations between writing and authorial representations of imperial power, home, and the colonial order as particularized in those narratives. Written by Tigrinya intellectuals, who shared colonial education and wrote about the imperial European project with indigenous reflexivity, the texts provide the rare opportunity of an early, indigenous-written critical "native point of view" on colonialism and its (after)effects. Based on those arguments, the article concludes by claiming that The Conscript is an African language postcolonial novel avant la lettre.