The Black Renaissance in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures (review)

In The Black Renaissance in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures, K. Martial Frindéthié traces the origins and development of a mythology of blackness, which he calls "griotism." This term, coined by Frindéthié, derives from the word "griot," meaning an elder poet and storyteller in a traditional West African community who constitutes the repository of the oral history of his people. Frindéthié identifies and analyzes "griotism" as a dangerous mode of thinking that has pervaded Francophone African and Caribbean literature from the emergence of Negritude to more contemporary writings, arguing for the persistence of a legacy that he characterizes as: ontological (biological differences as evidence of essential difference); theological (the black people as chosen people); and teleological (promise of a fulfilled common racial history).

The chapter-length introduction, "Post-Negritude and Literary Theory," provides a survey of the structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers who greatly influenced the development of Francophone African and Caribbean literature. Frindéthié begins by linking Ferdinand de Saussure's assertion that language should be studied as a closed system, a self-sufficient object of investigation (which became a model for social sciences such as anthropology and ethnology), to Gustave LeBon's division of human beings into superior and inferior races and the dangerous form of pseudo-political relativism that it engendered. He then charts the European exoticism that served as a precursor to Negritude, summarizes Derrida's critique of Saussurian linguistics in De la grammatologie, and presents Pierre Bourdieu as a deterministic sociologist intent on recuperating the diachronic dimension of language forgotten by Saussure.

Frindéthié's focus on theory in this first chapter establishes an important backdrop to his subsequent readings of Francophone literature in the following section of the book. Comprising four chapters, this first section demonstrates the influence of much of this theory on the work of Senghor and Césaire and traces the origins of griotism to the Negritude movement. In this first section, Frindéthié shows how Negritude selectively used the traditions of Hegel, Nietzsche, Frobenius, and Bergson to mount its attack on Western rationalism. His analysis of the influence of Nietzsche on the intellectuals who founded the Haitian Indigenist Movement (an antecedent to Negritude), and specifically his concept of the Overman in elaborating the notion of a black Messiah, constitutes a significant contribution to the field of Negritude studies. Frindéthié's explication of the influence of Hegel, Bergson, and Frobenius, although slightly less original, consolidates the important point that Negritude's critique of European rationalism derives largely from Western philosophers. Many readers of Senghor have assumed that his rejection of "reason" in favor of emotion means that he did not embrace Western philosophy. In fact, the contrary is true: Senghor's critique of reason is very much based on his readings of French and German phenomenology.

In chapter two, Frindéthié presents narrative digressions as a key characteristic of griotism. At the beginning of the chapter, he asserts that "The proponents of Negritude-and especially Senghor and Césaire-over-celebrated the griot's narrative technique as the essence of black-ness, convinced that they had discovered in this rhetorical strategy evidence of a black essence to oppose a white essence" (38). This claim is somewhat difficult to justify, as is his attempt to ascribe the "Francophone African rhetorical pattern" that Frindéthié describes to the work of Césaire and Senghor, given that poetry and theater (not narrative prose) were the primary genres used by these authors to express Negritude, and the figure of the griot does not play a fundamental role in their works. Nevertheless, Frindéthié's analysis of discursive patterns in this chapter, in particular his close reading of an excerpt from Amadou Kourouma's foundational post-independence novel, Les soleils des indépendances, raises an interesting question: why did the figure of the griot and his digressive style of storytelling emerge as the dominant mode of narration at the moment of greatest disillusion...