Deconstructing Postcolonial Literary Production
African writers are operators of postcolonial transformation. They alter our perception of ourselves and of reality. More importantly, they transform regimes of taste and modes of reading, as well as the institutions and industries of cultural production. This work of transformation is however not obvious from that which currently presents itself as postcolonial literary and book history. Postcolonial theory and literary history have highlighted the enduring architecture of colonialism and its impact on culture and creativity. The argument of this book is grounded in the notion of reversals: reading texts through and against the history of their production, an analysis of texts informed by book/literary history but also the reverse determination of the a priori of fictional works that antecedes and anticipates relations of literary production.
The idea of African writers as operators of postcolonial transformation relies on the classic Marxian philosophy that superstructural advancements have transformational effects on the infrastructural base. At the core of Marxian dialectics is the notion of uneven development. The capital-labor conflict is embedded in differential growth factors of production. This applies to the conflict of institution and culture. Specifically, advancement in consciousness outstrips mode of production to set the condition for transition from one mode to another. The material conditions of postcolonial literary production, I hope to demonstrate, follow a similar dialectics in which modes of colonial production are disarticulated by advances in postcolonial creativity, consciousness, and culture. The operation of postcolonial transformation through literature, like all processes of historical transformation, depends on the teleological possibility of its fulfilment.
The production of African literature presents a unique problem space for African literary criticism that requires a study of institutional practices and effects that mediate and permeate texts, as well as texts’ reflexivity on conditions of production and their capacity to transform institutional practices. This is another way of rearticulating the dialectics of “transformed content” vs. “operators of transformation” that in Alain Badiou’s “The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process”1 constitutes the sticking point between his theory of aesthetic autonomy and that of Pierre Macherey . Macherey was concerned about the distinction and problem of ideology in general as a condition of historical reality, and ideology as it presents itself in the form of the work of art, the latter exposing the former, while also revealing its own insufficiency. Badiou however rejects this theory of art as reflection of/on ideology, of reflection as the passage from ideology to art. This formulation presupposes in addition to their separability, the exteriority and therefore passability of the process of ideological production to that of aesthetic production. He disputes that the state of reflection is a mere passage that reproduces ideology as art but rather that “An element is produced as ideological in the structure of the aesthetic mode of production.”2 This element is an effect of the process of aesthetic production as it is a metonymical repetition of the general process of ideological production. This effect that simultaneously produces and realizes ideology is “the transformed contents.” Macherey’s error is thus, according to Badiou, that “he places the autonomy of the aesthetic process within the operators of transformation, but not in the transformed contents.”3 At the end of this introduction, I will return to the question of why Badiou does not quite correct Macherey’s “error” since he too concludes that the autonomy of the aesthetic process that is realized in the transformed contents “is not tied contextually to any subjectivity .”4
By faulting Macherey for locating aesthetic autonomy in the operators of transformation, rather than transformed content, Badiou becomes a champion of aesthetic determinism. The emphasis on institutional infrastructure often overdetermines the understanding of African literature as “transformed content” and obscures the transformational nature of African literature as an aesthetic form and expression. Current works on African literary production that tend to promote the idea of how African writing was shaped or created through western and colonial institutions fall within this logic. Remapping African Literature pushes against this trend by highlighting the counter pressures exerted on the consciousness and agendas of producers of culture, and on the institutions of literary production by African writers and texts. The book addresses questions concerning where and how the first generation of African writers got published and why that matters in our understanding of African, postcolonial, and global literary history and criticism. It draws the outlines of the African literature industry as the basis for a secondary analysis of selected texts. It uses the archive of the African Writers Series (AWS) published by the British firm, Heinemann Educational Books, in order to show how African writers, wrought change upon the apparatuses and relations of production through the mediation of literary techniques as forms of thought. The basic proposition of the book is that literary forms are conscious of their conditions of production, and to capture properly their relation to those conditions, they must first distance themselves from the relations of their production. By virtue of this essential literary act, the aesthetic form and representation supercede the state of development of institutions and infrastructure of production. These literary acts of technical mediation and aesthetic supersession enable me to develop a theory of activist formalism and to demonstrate how this advancement of literary forms creates the conditions for the transformation of the infrastructure of production.
A discussion of the autonomy of the aesthetic process in African literature that excludes subjectivity, as Badiou does, is not possible. African literary production takes shape within the objective visibility of difference, a difference that undergirded the very practice of Commonwealth Literature . It is embodied in the institutional norms represented by Heinemann. The claims of cosmopolitan production, the challenge of cultural patrimony, and the role of the English language constitute a deterministic field against which the very possibility of an Anglophonic African literature and its production could be measured. Of all the practices that define literary production, the practice of selection most directly involves discriminating among subjects, in both senses of the word. The format of the AWS and its “grouping” effect highlight the constraints of a collective project that co-opts individual authors and thereby minimizes or supplants the author function, and authorial subjectivity. The tension between what I term Heinemann’s map principle and the aesthetic principle of selection underscores the assertion of authorial and aesthetic autonomy.
Similarly, the educational practice cannot be conceived without the notion of the subject, just as the notion of the subject is not conceivable without the constitutive work of institutions. If the educational criteria of the AWS dictated the pedagogical imperative of Achebe’s novels, how did those novels implement their pedagogical vision? And, how did the novels’ pedagogical vision transform the educational criteria and commonwealth horizon into the moment of acculturation or actually transcend them. The riposte to educational criteria was the intertextuality of expressive and humanist aesthetics that marked a transformation of commonwealth practice to the pan-African practice. Intertextuality initially anchored by the reference to Soyinka’s work authorizes a new criticism and history of the 1970s, while Ngugi’s subsequent insistence on language redirects the pan-African practice as a mode of authenticating African literature in what we might call the globalectical moment of its circulation. Heinemann’s support for Ngugi’s project and promoting African language literatures symbolized the new direction the company had taken since it began its operations in Africa. African literary history is thus a dynamic of push and pull that is characterized by the relation of determinacy of production and authorial and aesthetic autonomy , what in this book’s argument could only be captured and understood through the concept of auto-heteronomy.
Remapping African Literature offers a theory of the material imperatives underlying the cultural institutions and industries of literary production in relation to the development of a relatively new, and novel, body of African literature. It theorizes the making of modern African literature by specifically examining the roles played by the publishing house of Heinemann Educational Books and its African partners in the creation of “African literature” in the postcolonial period. By tracking the diffusion of African literature, this book seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the development of African literature in the postcolonial era was mediated by an Anglophone literary regime—represented by Heinemann. As a project situated in literary studies, the work ultimately undertakes new modes of reading major authors such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, framed by conditions in Africa, the diaspora, and the postcolonial world. These and other writers are examined within the optics of the contingencies of production and the counter-effects they generated in the nature of textual production, dissemination, and the regulating principles and classical procedures of editorial practices and publication. In other words, the Anglophone tradition serves as a determinant frame for production, but particular contingencies generate counter-effects that exert influence of the writers themselves on that frame.
Remapping African Literature brings together three important and interconnected subjects in African literary criticism. It argues that a philoshophical understanding of the postcolonial condition in Africa can be approached at a micro level through the prism of the social history engendered by the publication of the Heinemann African Writers Series. Additionally, the canon of literature, constituted in large measure by the AWS, and curated by an international publisher, can be read as being grounded in the larger political economy of global production, printing and corporate practices, and residual national or local sensibilities. The tensions that structure the relationship between Heinemann and the African authors published in its series serve to highlight fundamental processes and forces at work between former imperial powers and cultures and the relatively new postcolonial cultures in Africa.
The enabling context of the AWS was constituted, in part, by the hangover from British imperialism and colonial education. This context guaranteed against the grain of the AWS that their initial function, along with those of other “Third World” Literatures in English, was first and foremost the securing of the global triumph of the English language, thus fostering the British Commonwealth project and the cultural dominance of Englishness, which in return afforded the writers international recognition. The parallel emergence of cosmopolitan centers of artistic production in a number of African cities such as Ibadan , Nairobi, and Johannesburg, the particular atmosphere of the postcolonial/postindependent city similar to those of Paris and London served to provide the main thoroughfares for artistic creativity and added vital material and imaginative dimensions to the character of African literary texts. This newly formed character, from newly defined regional centers of cultural production, has since asserted itself in ways that no longer fit within the cultural project of Englishness. These contingencies of production and reproduction now demand that African literature be read neither as a medium of coloniality or identity, nor as their expression, but as the continuous manifestation of open, complex, and dialectical relations. Such a redefinition could provide an aperture through the labyrinthine paths of entanglement of Africa with the world based on a fundamental understanding of the relations of production of African literature.
Thus, this book aims at discovering alternative genealogies of African literary production, how the internal, indigenous, and residual cultural processes and experiences, form new grounds for imagining and imaging the postcolonial subjecthood that was invented in African literature. It brings together the varied streams of African literary criticism generated by professional academics and editors to view the literary text from the point of view of the dialectics of internal and external relations of its production. In other words, the necessity of the book derives from what I consider the overrepresentation in the field of African literary criticism of how global institutional moments invented, propelled, and appropriated literature in Africa, and the general dogma of an approach to literature that is determined by the mediation and the imperatives of the industries of literary production. This overrepresentation and dogma, of which Adele King’s Rereading Camara Laye,5 is the prime example, have occurred precisely because not much editorial criticism or history of publishing relations has been informed by Marxist dialectics and materialism. King argues th...