Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature (review)

Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature is the most recent release in the excellent series Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures published at Liverpool University Press and that already includes several titles by distinguished scholars such as Celia Britton, Nicki Hitchcott, Jane Hiddleston, Debra Kelly, Bill Marshall, Maeve McCusker and Martin Munro. Postcolonial Eyes highlights the multiple ways in which the works of African writers have explored the circulation and mobility of African subjects in an increasingly globalized world and combines close textual readings of literary works produced during the colonial and postcolonial era with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus engaged with travel, tourism, postcolonial, francophone, cultural, gender, and historical studies that will therefore be of considerable appeal to students and scholars working in these research areas/fields.

"Critical research in travel writing," Aedín Ní Loingsigh argues, "has done much over the past two and half decades to decolonize the genre and to confront its tainted legacy. In particular, greater awareness of the historical, political and cultural factors influencing the textual representations of different cultures and places has revealed travel writing's role in supporting the phantasmic dynamics of Europe's perception of its 'others' and in upholding the asymmetrical power relations of Europe's colonial project" (1). However, as becomes increasingly clear from the analysis in Postcolonial Eyes, "Nowhere is such decontextualization of travel more evident … than in the critical neglect of representations of travel by African writers and the failure to develop coherent theoretical framework within which to analyze the connections between ethnicity and textualizations of travel" (2). These are indeed courageous assertions, and the strength of the study resides precisely in its capacity to both acknowledge and engage with existing scholarship—the groundbreaking work for example of scholars such as Paul Gilroy, Graham Huggan, Mary Louise Pratt, Charles Forsdick, and Christopher L. Miller—while nevertheless advancing the parameters of the discipline in new and exciting ways, offering challenging re-readings of familiar texts and juxtaposing these with lesser-known and under-explored texts. First and perhaps foremost in this framework is the questioning of the limitations of "travel writing" as a critical category and the privileging of "travel literature", which, citing Charles Forsdick, "depends more on a sense of dynamic genericity that presents the material to which the label relates in terms of intergeneric uncertainty or transgeneric voguing between different forms. 'Travel literature' accordingly voids the prescription attached to fixed notions of genre, and exists as an often unpredictable category in which is assembled a variety of texts" (19). To this end, the works of authors as diverse and innovative as Ousmane Socé, Aké Louba, Bernard Dadié and Calixthe Beyala exhibit "a distinctive body of African travel literature … bearing witness both to the historical diversity of travel practices and the myriad of perspectives on other peoples and places" (173).

Aedín Ní Loingsigh is careful to emphasize that these questions have not so much been ignored by critics and specialists of African literature, but rather that "the agency of non-Western subjects" (2) has not been afforded adequate recognition for "the ways in which they participate in, and reconfigure, Eurocentric modes of travelling, seeing and narrating" (2). Thus, Postcolonial Eyes attempts "to elaborate on what might be gained by including African textualizations of travel within important contemporary theoretical configurations, particularly postcolonial theory" (2–3), and thus by situating this specificity within a broader category in order to "untie travel writing from its Western moorings and open up a space for African representations" (3). Naturally, such a methodological imperative entails "learning to read it alongside and against Western narratives of travel, examining where it adopts, rejects, develops and subverts generic conventions and also how it proposes not just an important perspective on Western cultures but also a new and more dynamic view of Africa and Africans" (175).

Compelling symbiotic connections between Africa and France (and therefore Europe) are to be found in most considerations of the cultural and social practices coupled with these geopolitical entities given...