Littératures africaines et Antiquité: redire le face-à-face de l’Afrique et de l’Occident by Bernard Mouralis (review)

Mouralis, Bernard. Littératures africaines et Antiquité: redire le face-à-face de l’Afrique et de l’Occident. Paris: Champion, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7453-2174-9. Pp. 220. 19 a. Mouralis’s examination of the African writers’uses of Classical literature is a long overdue work of scholarship. Drawing on the research of previous scholars and his own work on literary giants like Senghor, Beti, and Mudimbe, he investigates ways in which Classical culture contributes to a fuller understanding of African aesthetics, history, and philosophy.As a result, this expansive inquiry enters into new territory in its complex, nuanced reconsideration of this relationship. The thematically organized study opens with a definition of what constitutes ‘la bibliothèque antique.’ Mouralis illustrates that the great disparity in the Classical corpus used by African writers is due to their varied educational experiences. He concludes this chapter by hypothesizing that the elusiveness of Classics in African letters might also be a consequence of the intellectual developments of the âge classique (39). While the conclusion is not surprising, the description of the educational environment in colonial Africa and the extensive cataloging of works that describe the role of Classics in twentieth-century African education render this chapter especially rich. Additionally, those who wish to investigate further the role of particular Classic texts in colonial education will find the bibliographic references most useful. Mouralis devotes the remainder of his study’s attention to fleshing out specific examples of Classical literature’s application, which he categorizes in the following three chapters as: “Usages rhétoriques et esthétiques de la bibliothèque antique”; “Usages historiques de la bibliothèque antique”; “Usages philosophiques de la bibliothèque antique.”As readers who are familiar with Mouralis’s previous scholarship might expect, these chapters provide thoughtful analysis of key passages in an array of important Francophone African works. For example, in the second chapter on rhetorical and aesthetic usages, Mouralis examines Senghor’s keen ability to incorporate into his own poetics the linguistic principles of Classical language as a system which subsequently forms an important component of Senghorian poetics (52). Despite fewer direct citations of Classics, the third chapter convincingly illustrates how Antiquity has advanced academic discussion of African history. In particular, Mouralis shows that C.A. Diop, Senghor, and Mudimbe cultivate a productive polemic on such fundamental theories as Afrocentrism and Négritude precisely because of the knowledge that each possesses of Classical historical texts. Little by little, he broadens the reader’s understanding of the ways Classical civilization connects to Africa. In the fourth chapter, Mouralis tackles the challenging philosophical concepts of being, epistemology, politics, and the nature and function of philosophy in representative African writers; each of which manifest evidence of an inescapable return to a Classic cultural inheritance. He concludes the study by illustrating further “intersections” (chapter 5) between African letters and Antiquity through four themes, which readers will recognize as key to postcolonial studies,i.e.,anthropology,colonization,bilingualism, and the Other. The thought-provoking examples of intersections in this final chapter offer some of the most compelling evidence for his thesis; which is to say, that the 238 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 Reviews 239 concerns of Classical civilization are indeed universal and relevant to studies of contemporary Africa. Mount St. Mary’s University (MD) Marco D. Roman Read, Kirk D. Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France: Stories of Gender and Reproduction . Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7546-6632-5. Pp. xiv + 205. $99.95. Birthing Bodies demonstrates the benefits of engaging a variety of genres in the discussion of a topos that can be read both literally and figuratively, for the birthing bodies in question are corporeal and textual. Further, by including theorists ranging from Thomas Lacqueur to Mary Daly to Judith Butler, Read deftly explores the intersections of gender, sex, sexuality, and performance in this corpus. As he examines a broad range of texts—poetry, novels, medical treatises, satires, polemics, travelogues— Read“dismantl[es] received ideas about gendered bodies”(12) and exposes the unease women’s bodies generate as well as how other bodies, male or hermaphroditic, appropriate the process of generation. Chapter one,“Spying at the Lying-in,” highlights the...