Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature (review)

Postcolonial Eyes is the most recent publication in the well-respected Liverpool University Press series 'Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures' edited by Edmund Smyth and Charles Forsdick. Aedín Ní Loingsigh outlines early in the study the need 'to untie travel writing from its Western moorings to open up a space for African representations of travel' (p. 3). Examining for the first time a specifically sub-Saharan African lineage within the broader tradition of travel writing, Postcolonial Eyes highlights the exclusion of African writers from the genre of travel writing and identifies the preoccupations of African writers' approaches to travel. In so doing, it addresses the lack of an existing theoretical framework within which to analyse African representations of travel by engaging critically with existing scholarship on travel writing, as well as with cultural, post-colonial, francophone, and gender studies. Chapters examine the work of six francophone African writers: Ousmane Socé Diop, Aké Loba, Bernard Dadié, Lamine Diakhaté, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, and Calixthe Beyala. Combining a close reading of familiar texts with less well-known material, the study emphasizes the diversity of African textualizations of travel and opens up new critical perspectives on travel as a cultural encounter. Close analysis of Socé's Mirages de Paris (1937) illustrates the distinctiveness of colonial African intercontinental travel writing and underlines its contribution to the broader genre of travel literature. At the same time, Ní Loingsigh observes, the text highlights 'an important exilic dimension of colonized Africans' journeys to Europe that is linked to a particular politics of visualizing Africans in inter-war Europe' (p. 29). Contrasting journeys towards Paris are explored in an analysis of Loba's Kocoumbo, l'étudiant noir (1960) and Dadié's Un Nègre à Paris (1959), demanding a rethinking of the relationship between Africans and their former colonizers in a post-independence world. Diakhaté's Chalys d'Harlem (1978) and Dadié's Patron de New York (1964) allow for the elaboration of a more sophisticated African literature of travel in Chapter 4, while Kpomassie's L'Africain du Groenland (1981), analysed in the following chapter, reverses the story of European colonial encounter in its positive relation of a journey 'back' to the European 'centre', a pattern of travel that distinguishes African travel literature from European. Finally, considered together in Chapter 6, Beyala's Le Petit Prince de Belleville (1992) and Maman a un amant (1993) engage with the under-studied area of influences of gender on attitudes to travel and ways of travelling. Ní Loingsigh reminds us that the presentation of these texts in chronological order is not meant to suggest a coherent line of development but to emphasize the ways in which particular sociohistorical contexts inform attitudes to intercontinental travel in an African context. Postcolonial Eyes succeeds in offering a close critical reading of francophone African writing that highlights the movement through exile, migration, study, and tourism of mobile, critically reflective subjects rather than 'static objects of reflection for the West' (p. 172). Written in clear and accessible language, this thorough, concise, and theoretically sophisticated study will be of interest to researchers and students in francophone post-colonial studies, travel, and gender studies.