Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny by Cécile Bishop (review)

In the introduction to Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny, Cécile Bishop candidly admits that hers is not a comprehensive study of cultural representations of African dictatorships. Instead, she states that it is “an argument about the importance of aesthetic experience to the work of criticism, even when it is concerned with a topic as obviously politically as dictatorship” (5). What follows is a nuanced sample of Bishop’s proposed theoretical framework in practice, in which she analyzes representations of African dictators across a diverse spectrum of genres and mediums in light of the audience or spectator’s experience of both the aesthetic and extra-aesthetic.

Accordingly, Bishop divides her book into three chapters, the first of which presents two disparate readings of Henri Lopes’s Le Pleurer-rire. The first analysis discusses the text’s hyper-awareness of its status as a censorable text, which Bishop interprets, first, as a parody of censorship as well as “a mockery of the very expectations it creates, namely that the text is necessarily going to be subversive because it is an African novel dealing with dictatorship” (25). The second analysis, on the other hand, concerns itself with Lopes’s biographical connections to the narrative, which Bishop encourages her readers not to become too fixated on, insofar as the literary elements of the text should, first and foremost, inform its literary interpretation. From there, Bishop proceeds in the second chapter to analyze three filmic representations of Idi Amin, Général Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait, The Last King of Scotland, and Amin: The Rise and Fall. She uses these films as a springboard to examine how historical truth has very little role in determining the overall success of a film, arguing that “perceptions of truth in filmic representations are largely dependent on aesthetics” and, in particular, on the reception of clichés based on genre (48).

Bishop uses this trajectory to transition to her third chapter, in which she addresses Achille Mbembe’s essay “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony” by asserting that his epistemological experimentations help contribute to new forms of knowledge production. Indeed, by using categorical distinctions, such as fiction and the social sciences or the aesthetic and the political, simultaneously, Mbembe is intentionally drawing his reader’s attention to them, prompting Bishop’s observation that “it is . . . only by paying attention to these aesthetic and generic conventions, and to the type of experiences they create, that the political effects of a text may come to be understood” (100). Bishop then concludes her monograph by making a final plea for the importance of the aesthetic experience because, though it may be perceived as secondary to the urgency of the political subject matter often featured in postcolonial literature, it cannot be understood in such terms or in pre-established notions of aesthetics alone.

Clearly, Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship tackles an impressively broad subject matter; however, it becomes most successful in the close readings it stages around the aforementioned texts. Indeed, the monograph convincingly demonstrates that the political and the aesthetic interact in complex and often contradictory ways in a fictional text, with Bishop effectively highlighting a system by which political readings are inevitably assigned more value in scholarship. Bishop effectively argues against this framework by suggesting that “Although many of these approaches seem to be concerned more with the political effects of literary or artistic representations than with their aesthetic aspects, they actually fail to offer any account of the way in which the works under consideration may affect or influence their readers of spectators politically” (99). Never is Bishop’s premise made more intelligible than in her analysis of Mbembe, in which she maintains that the reader’s aesthetic experience of his style and language choices directly influences the political effects of the text.

Insofar as Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship can be critiqued, it is due...