In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Migration and transformation in recent African literary criticism
  • Katie Reid (bio)
Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Postcolonial Eyes: intercontinental travel in francophone African literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (hb £65 – 978 1 84631 049 2). 2009, 224 pp.
Oyekan Owomoyela, The Columbia Guide to West African Literature in English Since 1945. New York NY: Columbia University Press (hb £50 – 978 0 23112 686 1). 2008, 216 pp.
Arlene A. Elder, Narrative Shape-Shifting: myth, humor and history in the fiction of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing and Yvonne Vera. Woodbridge: James Currey (hb £45 – 978 1 84701 012 4). 2009, 176 pp.
Brenda Cooper, A New Generation of African Writers: migration, material culture and language. Woodbridge: James Currey (hb £45 – 978 1 84701 507 5). 2008, 192 pp.

As cultural globality continues to demand ever new responses and intersects, questions regarding the place of Africa and the responsibilities of the African writer persist. In many theoretical formulations, it is post-colonial cosmopolitanism and the alleged commonality of transnational culture that provide the ethical basis of a ‘global’ identity. On a literary stage, predominantly theorized and discussed in terms of its transnationality, competitive international markets highlight recurrent issues of canon formation and, accordingly, the value placed on African literary accomplishments. Debates around who and what might constitute African literature in this context point to the shifting epistemological ground that African authors and literary critics alike must negotiate. All four texts under review here reflect this shifting ground, each with different aims, approaches and areas of focus.

Postcolonial Eyes is a fitting addition to the excellent Liverpool University Press series ‘Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures’. This volume by Aedín Ní Loingsigh explores the ways in which francophone African writers have contributed to and negotiated [End Page 312] textualizations of travel and cultural encounter. Written accessibly, without sacrificing its considerable theoretical sophistication, Postcolonial Eyes includes scrutiny of the travel literature genre, in order to ‘untie travel writing from its Western moorings and open up a space for African representations’ (p. 3). This successfully illustrates increased global mobility over a chronology that ranges from 1937 to 1995, highlighting ‘the ways in which particular socio-historical contexts shape attitudes to intercontinental travel in an African context’ (p. 28).

Loingsigh engages generously with an impressive range of ground-breaking post-colonial and other travel theorizations, extending their discursive boundaries where necessary to refocus their relevance for francophone Africa. Negotiating her range of under-read texts with a deft touch, she uses these insights to insist on the re-evaluation of accepted theoretical positioning via a dialogue with the African travel texts of her focus. In individual chapters these are: Ousman Socé’s Mirages de Paris; Aké Loba’s Kocoumbo, l’étudiant noir; L’Africain de Grœnland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie; and Calixthe Beyala’s literary diptych, Le petit prince de Belleville and Maman a un amant; Bernard Dadié also has two texts under consideration, Un Nègre à Paris and Patron de New York, the latter of which is studied alongside Lamine Diakhaté’s Chalys d’Harlem in a chapter entitled ‘Atlantic travels’.

Using travel as a focus enables Loingsigh to prise open a particular, Western mode of seeing. She points to the availability of processes of modernity as they appear in early texts’ representations of unspoilt, African idylls, whilst also foregrounding these processes in other textual spots where we are not necessarily accustomed or directed to seeing them. Indeed, one of the core strengths of the text is the way in which the theoretical approaches and the clarity of the close readings of the texts at hand reveal the processes by which debilitating racist discourses are ‘othered’ when observed through the eyes of the African traveller. Highlighting ‘tentative’ and ‘unexpected’ openings (p. 29) in this way enables Loingsigh to ‘expose the blind spots of travel criticism’s metaphorical language’ (p. 175). She discusses the strength of Paris’s centripetal pull but she also shows the geographical diversity of francophone transatlantic travel narratives, and includes welcome reflections regarding the place of Africa from transitional and modern spaces within Africa, such as those made during stopovers in Dakar.

This is also the lens by which Loingsigh...

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