Nos & leurs Afriques: constructions littéraires des identités africaines cinquante ans après les décolonisations. Áfricas de uns e de outros: construções literárias de identidades africanas cinquenta anos após as descolonizaçãos ed. by Ana Paula Coutinho, Maria de Fátima Outeirinho, and José Domingues de Almeida (review)

Eight essays in this engaging collection are published in French; seven in Portuguese. All are prefaced by a summary in the other language. By juxtaposing francophone to lusophone literary scholarship, the editors propose to explore the ‘problématiques transversales’ (p. 10) pertinent to both. The collection focuses on images of Africa, and on constructions of African identity in both African and European work, approaching its theme from angles such as anti-colonial art, travel writing, cinema, memory, and myth, as well as through questions of gender and race. Many of the essays are pleasingly attentive to the political context and material realities from which emerge the artworks whose treatment of identity they discuss, and are concerned to articulate how the questions raised by the writings of earlier anti-colonial struggles may or may not remain relevant today. David Murphy and Manuela Ribeiro Sanches are particularly adept at walking the line between emphasizing political context and resisting simplistic assertions of political ‘message’. The volume stresses the connections between African and European experiences, a theme particularly well treated by Ana Margarida Fonseca and Isabel Moutinho, who highlight not only European presence in Africa but also African presence in Europe. Explicit discussion of the connections and chasms between African literatures, however, and especially between different linguistic traditions, is more elusive, although Marc Quaghebeur’s dextrous movement between national and regional questions is a fine exception. Nevertheless, the strength of many of this collection’s individual contributions does not entirely make up for a certain under-theorizing of its premises. Francophone and lusophone colonial and postcolonial histories have so rarely been treated comparatively that the fact that this volume takes them together is itself extremely valuable. However, more explicit treatment of the differences between particular contexts would have helped to clarify the significance of the similarities. Furthermore, fierce disagreements about the importance of ‘identity’ have loomed large in postcolonial scholarship, about which the editorial preamble remains silent. Perhaps this decision follows from a stated desire to depart from the critical frameworks offered by anglophone postcolonial studies (p. 9), but in making such a proposition it would have been more convincing to include a rationale for how and why the collection should be read as theoretically distinct from existing work. Finally, in thinking about the relationship between Africa and Europe, more discussion of the logic for omitting (with some exceptions) the anglophone dimension would be welcome. If the collection stands as a corrective, or at least as an alternative perspective, to the hegemony of anglophone postcolonial studies, it is not immediately clear why this should involve the decentring not just of anglophone theory but of anglophone primary texts too. Problematically, the volume seems at times to assimilate francophone and lusophone literatures with African literature as a whole. That said, the collection remains an important addition to the scant literature that takes francophone and lusophone writing from and about Africa together, and many of the essays stand alone as valuable discussions of literary, cinematic, and artistic refractions of the experience of empire.