The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures by Ayo A. Coly (review)

Reviews 219 which won the Prix Goncourt. Most of Makine’s writing is autobiographical, a creative blend of life in Russia and France. In his efforts to write about and capture Soviet life, Makine weaves in descriptions and commentaries considered“non littéraires”: photographs , films, and music (7). In approaching Makine’s texts, Clément works with the idea of ekphrasis, as theorized by Mitchell and Genette: “une représentation verbale d’une représentation visuelle” for photographs and films and “une représentation verbale d’une représentation auditive” for music (20). Following Bal as well, Clément argues that ekphrasis is “un point de focalisation dans les textes. [...] un point de concentration dans lequel Makine focalise le sens de ses romans” (20). This book is divided into three chapters: les ekphraseis photographiques, les ekphraseis filmiques, and les ekphraseis musicales. Within each chapter, Clément examines several functions of ekphrasis,which at times overlap.The first chapter on photographs and the final chapter on music are arranged similarly by function (psychological, structural, rhetorical, and ontological). Clément’s second chapter is, however, a series of descriptions of films, both real and imagined, as well as her discussion of their various functions. The rhetorical function can be seen in Makine’s descriptions of photographs whereby characters find themselves drawn into the scene and into the emotions and events of a past they never actually witnessed. The psychological function of ekphrasis is illustrated in descriptions of Russian documentaries, both real and fictional, whereby disparities are highlighted between the collective memory of East and West, as well as the individual memory of the author. In Le testament français, three photographs of a woman wearing a chapka found by the narrator serve as a structural ekphrasis, due at once to their position in the text, and their function as a mise en abyme involving a premonition of the importance of this woman. Lastly, the ontological function of ekphrasis is illustrated in the photograph of the narrator’s grandmother in Le testament français wherein the narrator is able to imagine minute details of her experience on a specific day in 1905,a year Makine chooses judiciously for its significance in France and in Russia.Clément’s book is well researched,but footnotes and citations often outweigh her analysis. Readers will find Clément’s study of film and music enlightening and rich in details, yet the book unfortunately ends with little conclusion, besides the repetition that Makine’s ekphrases are not simply“des fragments‘détachables’”(145) and that“les ekphraseis évitent à l’auteur de longs développements alourdissant la narration”(148). Florida State University Virginia Osborn Coly,Ayo A. The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures. NewYork: Lexington, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7391-4511-1. Pp. xxvii + 146. $63. This book tackles the alleged“obsolescence”of home and nation in contemporary cultural and Francophone African literary criticism (xi). Coly aligns her dismissal of postnationalism with critics who dispute its representation of the postcolonial subject as “an uprooted, deterritorialized, unfettered, and free-floating migrant” (xiii). Interestingly, gender is the paradigm that underscores the novelty of her analysis, which dwells on Francophone African migrant literatures. The book breaks new ground by deconstructing previous readings of nationalism that ignore the gender paradigm, and by correlating this oversight to their celebration of postnationalism. Engaging three migrant women writers, Coly notes the continuity between“the gender politics of anticolonial nationalism” and those of male/female postcolonial postnationalist narratives (xxv). Her subsequent analysis of postindependent home and belonging as elusive, exclusivist, inviting, and too heteropatriarchal for migrant African women is refreshing. The critic reveals the connected experiences of Calixthe Beyala, Ken Bugul, and Fatou Diome in Africa and Europe. Dealing with Bugul’s novels, the first and second chapters address the female migrant’s experience of the nation and Europe as a non-place and question the reintegration of home and the impact of homesickness on the narrative of homecoming respectively. The relevancy of the nation for women depicted by Beyala is the focus of chapter 3 where Coly correlates the dissident and culturally violent space-clearing gesture of the lesbian...