Rethinking African Cultural Production

Kenneth W. Harrow,Frieda Ekotto

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253016034
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Frieda Ekotto, Kenneth W. Harrow, and an international group of scholars set forth new understandings of the conditions of contemporary African cultural production in this forward-looking volume. Arguing that it is impossible to understand African cultural productions without knowledge of the structures of production, distribution, and reception that surround them, the essays grapple with the shifting notion of what "African" means when many African authors and filmmakers no longer live or work in Africa. While the arts continue to flourish in Africa, addressing questions about marginalization, what is center and what periphery, what traditional or conservative, and what progressive or modern requires an expansive view of creative production.

1The Critical Present

Where Is “African Literature”?

Eileen Julien

FOR BABA SY

For borrow we certainly must if we are to elude the constraints of our immediate intellectual environment.

Edward Said, “Traveling Theory”

WE ARE ALL agreed that conditions for the production of literature, cinema, and visual arts by Africans continue to evolve rapidly in the era of intense globalization¹ and are today quite different from those of yesterday, the period of decolonizing nationalism. One symptom of the “unevenness” of the current context is that vast numbers of African artist-intellectuals live in metropolises outside of Africa where they typically have greater access to readers and spectators worldwide and to prestigious invitations, awards, and grants.

What happens, then, to “African” literature, film, and arts when African artist-intellectuals reside and produce their work abroad?

Is there a vast difference between the texture of texts produced by those living and working in Africa and that of texts produced by those living and working abroad? Does old-style realism remain the dominant literary mode on the continent? Are explicit depictions of sexual acts or queer sexualities, postmodernist and avant-gardist experiments, which are rife elsewhere, eschewed in Africa? These are the questions highlighted in Ken Harrow and Frieda Ekotto’s call for papers that framed a lively discussion at the 2010 Michigan State University–University of Michigan workshop on critical theory and the production of African literature and cinema. There are important assumptions behind these questions: first, an artist’s location would seem to be a critical determinant of his or her creative work, and second, scholars and readers in search of effective critical approaches should take their cues from thematic and formal shifts in literary and film texts that are a result of artists’ new locations.

So, are our longstanding protocols of literary analysis—specifically postcolonial theory, which itself has morphed or expanded from its early heyday of fierce anticolonial paradigms (master-slave, resistance-accommodation, and Manichaean binaries) to more strategic essentialisms, hybridity, and “promiscuity”²—adequate to account for and shed light on new cultural products, born of disparate transnational parentage instead of in a local, fixed genealogy?

It would seem that while narratological protocols or analysis of tropes and rhetorical figures or other textual processes, for example, remain viable and still find work in a new era, they are less visible or have become ancillary to protocols based on the interplay of texts and contexts—which is to say forms of governance, modes of production, social organization, and hierarchies. The latter protocols that work more or less well in one temporality may be far from adequate in another.

The relationship of literary forms to material conditions is a complex issue, but establishing a correspondence between conditions and practice is often a fundamental gesture in theorizing cultural production.³ The question of “place” with respect to the work of African artist-intellectuals falls within this dynamic. To be precise: What impact does residence abroad—or the continual shuttling between host country and homeland—have on literature and film by Africans? It is foolhardy to think we can establish definitive answers to all these questions. But we may be able to do a bit of space-clearing with respect to this debate so as to think more clearly about them.

To place this new cultural production in perspective, it is imperative to reconsider several truisms on the “old” production because they bear directly on the problem before us: first, the aesthetic or literary genealogies of these older texts, which are frequently (and debatably) called “first generation”⁴; and second, what we take to be these texts’ single-minded postcoloniality.

“African” Was Never Only African

The aesthetic origins of the texts that for the last fifty years we have called “African” lie and have always lain both within and beyond Africa. Many of the graphic, literary, and filmic texts most profoundly engaged with African localities, histories, realities, and aesthetic traditions have never been purely “African.” Our most classic or neo-traditional texts, dealing with race and imperialism in their innumerable guises—Chinua Achebe’s early novels of the 1950s, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God; Birago Diop’s Contes d’Amadou Koumba (1947); Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard (1953); Thomas Mofolo’s Sesuto-language Chaka, translated and published in English in 1931; Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi (1930); Shabaan Robert’s Swahili-language novel Kusadikika (1951, Believable); Sembène Ousmane’s La noire de . . . (1966, Black Girl)—are products of wide-ranging experiences in education, culture, work, written and oral modes of artistic expression, and African and indigenized languages. They straddle forms, languages, and national borders.

Such straddling is signaled by Simon Gikandi, who has written provocatively on the engagement of African autobiography and novels with Western social scientific theses and texts on Africa, and by Rhonda Cobham-Sander, who has demonstrated the inventive use of the dual anthropological personae—informant and narrator—in the early Achebe works and in Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir (1954). I myself have read Ferdinand Oyono’s character Toundi (Une vie de boy, 1954) as ethnographer and interlocutor with Andre Gide’s 1902 récit, L’immoraliste (“Of Colonial”).

A whole range of creators—certainly those who write in indigenized European languages and those whom we read most often in European, American, and African classrooms—have often stood astride diverse and multiple physical worlds, and perhaps they have always inhabited multiple subjective worlds. As Tayeb el Salih remarked at a conference at Brown University in the early 1990s, Africa has always been syncretic. Achebe, too, has argued that no one can pick a particular moment in the past and claim that it is this moment that is authentically African. Moreover, the decolonizing, nationalist, largely past-fixated movement of négritude was, after all, also born outside the continent, in Paris! One can plausibly argue in fact that Negritude’s contradictions are due precisely to its hybrid origins.

One Train Can Hide Another

Second, we have come to think of this early production as stable, bound to the continent and associated with the seemingly timeless conventions of decolonizing nationalism. Yet, as many scholars point out, what we considered to be the heart, the raison d’être, of Euro-language “African” literature and film was tied to a particular temporality. It was the scripting of the fight against the colonizer; it was the reclaiming of (a typically male) subjectivity vis-à-vis a colonial archive. And as urgent as these thematics were, they nonetheless obscured twists of plot, contradictions of character, ambiguities in meaning, and other fundamental facets of African experience, the interplay of gender, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality, for example. Even the texts of this era, then, in Akin Adesokan’s words, “say things behind their [authors’] backs; the works speak beyond their authors’ declared or implied intentions” (3).

But readers and scholars of decolonizing African texts typically read in allegiance to a macro-political agenda and ignored or minimized the incoherence and contradiction that are woven into every text. Thus while scholars, if not the artists, writers, and filmmakers themselves, did not look beyond the macro-politics, many aspects of social experience that went beyond the decolonizing agenda were in fact perceptible even in the high texts of decolonization, had our selective ways of reading, oriented by metacritical discourses on the “authentic” and the “true,” not prevented us from seeing them (Gikandi; Julien, “Towards New Readings”). My point here is simply that the “old” production was surely more complex than we were able to perceive and admit. In other words, even as current literary, film, and artistic production by Africans residing abroad can clearly be associated with new emphases and experimentation, we are not in the midst of a shift from a closed, stable literary arena to a brave new world. These visible changes, signs of intellectual and artistic vitality, are the continuation of processes that are immemorial and ongoing.

The Michigan call focused above all on the displacement of writers, filmmakers, and other creators, the shift in their home base from country of origin in Africa to the West—and, we might add, to the East or to yet another African nation. There may be an important reason for this: creative texts by Africans have generally been defined spatially: They “come from ‘Africa,’” perceived as the closed arena with fixed genealogies and topoi, as observed above. These boundaries and specificities are closely linked to a deeply rooted belief in an intractable African “exceptionalism.” Whatever its intellectual benefits—and there are many—Africanists trained under the “area studies model” may find it particularly difficult to conceptualize “Africa” in the new dispensation privileging transcontinental and comparative studies, where historical legacies seem to be discounted.

Thinking about “Location”

There is, then, a long history of nuanced, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives on the relationship between location and creative practice that may offer insight into this issue as part of contemporary processes.

Here, I start with The Politics of Modernism, Raymond Williams’s critique of the scholarly “normalization” of a very selective European modernism. Williams asserts that the presence of so many immigrants in the metropolises, especially in early twentieth-century Paris, created a sense of “liberating diversity” (43) and helped establish the only community available to this diverse multitude of artists and writers: “a community of the medium; of their own [artistic] practices” (45).⁵ For Williams, “small groups in any form of divergence or dissent could find some kind of foothold, in ways that would not have been possible if the artists and thinkers composing them had been scattered in more traditional, closed societies” (45). It would be hard to challenge this argument that the ruptures, fragmentation, and individual subjectivities that are characteristic of metropolitan modernism would not have found a receptive audience in small, tight-knit towns or rural communities. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that Williams’s overall argument is that the parameters of modernism that hold sway in scholarship today are ideological rather than logical and that they have blinded us to other modern practices of art that do not fit the established paradigm of metropolitan modernism. Williams’s view thus parallels the one I have just presented above, that while we see what is happening in the creative practice of Africans now living elsewhere and that takes center stage, which is to say the metropolises and international circuit, might we have overlooked the formal innovation or the representation of “marginal” behaviors in creative practice on the ground in Africa itself? Moreover, while we seek to understand creative practice “at the center,” we should not take it to be “normative.”

Writing some ten years later, Edward Said agrees with Williams’s assessment of the “liberating diversity” of “exile” and the lesser freedom of “traditional, closed societies,” but he assigns the coefficients differently. Said stresses, in an echo of Nietzsche, the problematic “naturalization” of “home”: “Home and language . . . become nature, and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy. . . . Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons.” If, for Said, those who stay at home are more likely to espouse dogma and orthodoxy, it is exiles who “cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience” (Reflections 185).⁶ This commonsensical claim, which is the basis for the celebration of hybrid identities, is aligned with Ekotto and Harrow’s assertion of important creative breaks beyond the confines of “home.” Barrier-breaking in exile is nonetheless a complex phenomenon, and the celebration of its possibilities might be counterbalanced by other considerations. For example, Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop suggests the possibility of a creative, productive self-exile in the context of home: “I’m interested in the ways a person can be torn, the ways he can be separated from the group. And I think a writer is always separated from the group” (Sugnet 159). Diop’s praise of separation is not an allusion to spatial dislocation but to the vantage point offered by a certain social marginality within one’s community.

If on the other hand the borders and barriers to be crossed are of our own making rather than those imposed by our society, these still more powerful forms of imprisonment stay with us, regardless of where we find ourselves. Perhaps the most important caveat with respect to this view is that the exile of an artist-intellectual abroad, who is “playing to the market” rather than to the audience, carries its own risks of entrapment in the paradigms and stardust of the metropolis, which also have the capacity to reify, as Said himself warns.

In a foreshadowing of this romantic, if not elite, understanding of what we now call cosmopolitanism, Gertrude Stein, the grande dame of the “lost generation” of American writers who called Paris home from the turn of the century through much of the 1940s, claimed similarly that writers “needed two countries because the creative life depended upon that detachment or ungrounding only available in a foreign place” (Kennedy 26, my emphasis). While Boris Diop espouses “detachment” as a critical disposition, his remarks cit...