Representation and Misrepresentation in Postcolonial Literature and Theory

Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance, by Celia Britton. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1999.

Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture, by Christopher L. Miller. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.

The two books under review are quite different. Celia Britton's first book is a monograph devoted to a single author, albeit to one of the most important of contemporary Caribbean writers, Edouard Glissant. Christopher Miller's latest offering is a collection of essays addressing a wide range of topics in colonial/postcolonial literary history and theory. On the whole, it must be said that the less ambitious work proves to be the more successful of the two.

I say on the whole, because Miller's work is strikingly uneven. Where Britton is able to move almost effortlessly between close examination of Glissant's novels and discussion of the theoretical issues he and other postcolonial writers raise, Miller in effect divides his collection in two. The four essays that open the collection make important contributions to our understanding of the early history and dynamics of francophone colonial literature and culture. The essays on curriculum and theory that close the collection are another matter: Chapter 5 offers a cogently-argued if predictable call for the incorporation of African literature into the curriculum for the sake of intercultural literacy, while Chapter 6 is little more than a diatribe aimed at Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus that more or less completely misses its mark. The collection as a whole nonetheless raises an important question: what are the relative merits of binary opposition and multiplicity or complexity as modes of thought for addressing colonialism and postcoloniality?

Miller's first essay, on "African Paris in the 1920's," is perhaps the most important of the collection. Following J. Ayodele Langley's lead (cited, p.13), but devoting more attention to literary and archival than biographical materials, it corroborates Langley's claim that the challenge posed to French colonialism by francophone African writing starts not with the Negritude movement of the 1930s, as much literary historiography to date has assumed or stated, but with a far more radical group of writers in the 1920s. ¹ Lamine Senghor's novel, La violation d'un pays of 1927, is the central literary exhibit, but Miller also examines the vital anti-colonialist newspaper culture of the decade as well as other miscellaneous works of scholarship. In this important light, the later (Léopold) Senghor's work and the Negritude movement it sponsored appear not as ground-breaking or revolutionary but as "less radical, more descriptive, more essentialist" (37) than their predecessors in the 1920s. Miller is also able to show how the shift from "the radicalism of Lamine Senghor to the comfortable accommodationism of Léopold Sédar Senghor" (40) has been obscured in the historiography as well as in the later Senghor's own writings.

Though not as revisionary as the first essay, chapters 2 and 3 contribute significantly to our understanding of the (in)famous International Colonial Exposition of 1931 and the conflict of representations surrounding it. Mention is made of the Surrealists' broadsides and counterexposition, and of the black African press's own counter-attacks (already treated in more detail in chapter 1), but the bulk of the chapter is a thorough-going and subtle analysis of Ousmane Socé Diop's neglected 1937 novel devoted to the Exposition, Mirages de Paris, which demonstrates Socé's awareness of how hallucinatory representations of colonial encounters necessarily were (the chapter is entitled "Hallucinations of France and Africa"), even as he works to undermine the dominant representations offered at the Exposition. Given the subtlety of the analysis and the nature of the conclusion, it is unfortunate that the chapter is framed, through readings of two Baudelaire poems, in terms of a choice between being for or against métissage, between...