Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library (review)

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This book locates itself at the intersection of several 75 disciplines, utilizing different modes of inquiry, most of which Gaurav 76 Desai commands with 77 fluency. Postcolonial discourse theory and one of its antecedents, 78 poststructuralism, are 79 brought into play, especially as they bear on Africa. Desai is also 80 concerned to explore some 81 of the nexes of recent scholarship on history and anthropology. In 82 examining some of the ways 83 in which Africa came to occupy its place in the European historical 84 imagination, Desai turns to 85 the disciplines that have most thickly described the continent: 86 anthropology, ethnophilosophy, 87 the histories of education and science, as well as history itself. The 88 most important 89 contribution Subject to Colonialism makes is to African cultural 90 studies, with 91 particular attention to the figure of the intellectual, the professional, 92 or the "cultural 93 worker" at the historical moment before independence. A secondary 94 contribution consists in its 95 being one of the offerings from the side of literature to the dialogue 96 between literary theory 97 and anthropology on the topics of the relation between colonialism and 98 epistemology. 99

The 100 book consists of an introduction and three chapters. The first chapter, 101 constellated around 102 European representations of Africans' intellectual abilities, devotes 103 attention to apical 104 figures such as Lévy-Bruhl and Evans-Pritchard and Boas, to 105 psychoanalysis and 106 education, and to the reach of phrenology into twentieth-century African 107 studies. The second 108 chapter consists of a discipline-specific examination of the vexed 109 history of African 110 anthropology. The final chapter engages Akiga's Story: The Tiv Tribe 111 as Seen by One of Its 112 Members, an indigenous-language text written around 1935 by Akiga Sai, 113 a Tiv historian from 114 Nigeria. The success of this substantial chapter lies partly in its 115 having made more visible 116 the work of a relatively obscure African intellectual. In part it is 117 due to the organizational 118 focus that attention to a single figure imposes and, still more, to 119 Desai's own devotion to the 120 process of meaning-making. This devotion is well situated to reading 121 the work of a convert who 122 understands himself to be poised on the threshold between a precolonial 123 and a colonized world. 124

Desai devotes several pages of his introduction to explaining why 125 he aligns himself with 126 "post-foundationalists" rather than "anti-foundationalists." The former 127 are those who recognize 128 the limitations of Enlightenment modes of knowing, including the fact 129 that while such 130 epistemologies developed out of conditions of great inequality, they 131 nevertheless have value 132 for us today "not as an already-existing foundation that all reasonable 133 men and women must 134 naturally agree upon, but [to use Bruce Robbins's language] as a risky, 135 uncertain balancing of 136 the different values, vocabularies, and priorities that reasonably emerge 137 from different 138 circumstances" (567). Desai thus advocates not throwing out the baby 139 with the bathwater but, 140 rather, testing the water constantly for its cleanliness and helpfulness 141 to the baby. 142

In 143 chapter two, much attention is devoted to Malinowski, some to his student, 144 Kenyatta. Desai 145 seeks to rescue Malinowski from those (leftists) of the "relevance" 146 school who would criticize 147 Malinowski for the racist effects 148 149 150 151 of his functionalism, rather than understand him as 152 committed not to an ideology nor even colonial practice, but to the 153 profession...