The Anti-Colonial Archive France and Africa's Unfinished Business

The Anti-Colonial Archive: France and Africa's Unfinished BusinessAuthor(s): Phyllis TaouaSource: SubStance, Vol. 32, No. 3, Issue 102: The Politics of French Literary History (2003), pp.146-164Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685533 .Accessed: 24/04/2014 11:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toSubStance.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Thu, 24 Apr 2014 11:07:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Anti-Colonial Archive: France and Africa's Unfinished Business

Phyllis Taoua

A few years ago, Ania Loomba explored a number of critical approaches to the vigorously debated relationship between the local and the global in her book Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998). Since then, her work on the interface between colonial and postcolonial discourses has become a new reference point in what remains an ongoing exchange on this local/global question in postcolonial theory.' Loomba, in her conclusion to the chapter "Challenging Colonialism," points to what she considers a sensible suggestion by Peter Hulme to move away from grand narratives "not on epistemological grounds, but rather [because] the grand narrative of decolonisation has, for the moment, been adequately told and widely accepted. Smaller narratives are now needed, with attention paid to local topography, so that maps can become fuller" (252). Loomba affirms Hulme's call for renewed focus on smaller narratives and local topographies, but leaves open questions about what postcolonialism's grand narrative may exclude.

I would like to bring some pressure to bear on Hulme's position and its underlying assumptions, not because I favor grand narratives over local topographies, but because the nature of the relationship between the local and the global strikes me as more dynamic than his statement admits. I propose that if critics broaden the scope of their analysis to include smaller, local narratives, postcolonial theory's grand narrative- insofar as one does indeed exist- will be significantly altered, if not radically challenged. Rather than new knowledge of local contexts serving to flesh out a widely accepted narrative of decolonization, I argue that thick descriptions of the former African French colonies--of the kind a specialized area studies approach affords- actually upset and contest the grand narrative of decolonization as currently told by postcolonial theorists.

First, let us briefly look at two of these "grand narratives of decolonization," which seem, for the moment, to be in competition with one another. On the one hand, there is the Western capitalist view based on what Frederick Cooper identifies as "Europe's self-perceived movement toward state-building, capitalist development, and modernity." This vision posits a form of historical progress against which African, Asian and Latin American history appears as a "failure" (157). This story is told very often on the pages of the New York Times, for example. 146 I Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2003

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003


The Anti-Colonial Archive 147

On the other, there is the grand narrative of nationalist victory based on stories of triumphant resistance told with a "rather macho air to the narrating of confrontation" (ibid., 162). One thinks here of Kristin Ross's idealization of the disciplined maquisard in contrast to the comparatively complacent French cadre in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (1996). Somewhere in between these two narratives of Africa's failure to enter capitalist modernity and triumphant nationalism lies a more accurate and nuanced version of the ongoing struggles for cultural freedoms and true political self-determination in Africa today.

Cooper points out that the heroic narrative of nationalistic triumph was first popularized by historians of Africa in the period immediately following independence (157-90), which, in my view, was then recycled in postcolonial theory by critics without specialized knowledge of African history. Thus, insofar as one can claim that a "grand narrative of decolonization" does prevail in postcolonial theory, it would no doubt be a progressive version of the story. One way out of the current critical impasse, where local stories told with detailed specificity and the global dynamics of transnational capitalism do not yet meet, is the edited volume. History after the Three Worlds. Post-Eurocentric Historiographies (ed. Dirlik et al., 2000) and Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (ed. Bartolovich and Lazarus, 2002) are two productive examples of critics writing with regional expertise on a specific issue in the area of postcolonial studies. Cooper's review of "new colonial history," for example, which draws on literature, literary criticism, anthropology, Subaltern Studies, and Latin American dependency theory, calls for a reconsideration of outmoded paradigms based on the static opponents of "colonizer" and "colonized." Innovative interdisciplinary developments in African historiography allow for a more inclusive understanding of the dynamic complexities of the history of colonialism in Africa. With this in mind, Cooper seeks to debunk the "grand narratives of decolonization" and to contest erroneous generalizations that have made their way into postcolonial theory, in his contribution to History after the Three Worlds (160-64). Just last year, Benita Parry added to this revision of colonial history in Africa as it gets postulated in postcolonial theory, but she takes a different tack. Parry focuses on the striking aversion to liberation theory in postcolonial studies in her contribution to Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (125-49).

My interest in the anti-colonial archive dovetails with the kind of criticisms Parry and Cooper have recently voiced, but actually stems from the difficult conclusions I found myself drawing at the end of my book Forms of Protest: Anti-Colonialism and the Avant-Garde in Africa, the Caribbean and France (2002). I began the project many years ago with a healthy dose of optimism about the historical process of decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean. In the end,

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003


148 Phyllis Taoua

after years of archival research and travel in Africa and the Caribbean, I found myself much more disconcerted than I expected about all that had not been accomplished. My decision to work on politically engaged writers in Africa and the Caribbean was motivated by admiration for their courage and respect for the integrity of their struggle for social justice. However, the more I learned about their parallel lives as both activists and writers, the clearer it became to me that the quest for cultural freedoms and true political self-determination is still very much alive.

A pattern emerged in which decolonization resulted in dispossession with variations on a common theme. This was evident, at least, in Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville, the two countries my readings of Mongo Beti's and Sony Labou Tansi's works led me to consider most carefully. My current project on the dynamics of dispossession, which continues to explore questions that remained at the end of Forms of Protest, considers contemporary cultural production in Algeria, Senegal, Somalia, and the Ivory Coast, where interpreting the transition from colonial rule to independence does not promise much more optimistic scenarios. The source of tension, as far as the depressing conclusions my work on Forms of Protest yielded, had to do with a discrepancy between underlying assumptions in postcolonial theory about the successful overthrow of European colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean, and a more ambiguous reality on the ground. I had to unlearn that postcolonial habit of mind that posits a revolutionary break in order to fully engage with the extent to which European (and American) interventions continue to make a mess of "postcolonial" Africa.

Why the anti-colonial archive? I use the idea of the archive in the conventional sense of documents, information contained therein and places where such documents are kept (i. e., Archives d'Outremer, Archives Nationales). I also employ archive to mean the set of discursive practices that allow certain statements to be made while foreclosing other possibilities, as Michel Foucault defines the term in L'Archdologie du savoir (1969). One of the virtues of borrowing Foucault's notion of the archive as it is currently used in contemporary discourse analysis is that it not only allows for history to be brought into the field of criticism, it provides tools for foregrounding our own critical practices within a network of power relations. For my purposes here, this will allow me to ask what can and cannot be said about the colonial legacy in contemporary African literature within the discursive field of postcolonial studies. I intend to show how expanding the scope of the postcolonial archive to include the travails of anti-colonial protest requires significant adjustments in the kind of grand narratives that can be told about decolonization in Africa.

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003



Recent essays in postcolonial studies raise the question of when postcoloniality is seen to have actually begun, as critics seek to locate the concept's emergence in time.2 The inception of a postcolonial identity is generally located in the mid-1980s, when intellectuals from the Third World started to gain a presence in English departments in the West, and when global capitalism became a critical preoccupation of scholars in the humanities. Since then, many debates have occupied postcolonial critics, from what the term really means to which methods are most appropriate to this area of inquiry. In almost every intervention, remarks are made about the pitfalls of postcolonial theory's obfuscations, erasures and mystifying abstractions, explicitly related to a syndrome of intellectuals being beholden to First-World institutions, their priorities and assumptions.3 In the last few years, attempts have been made to combat the effects of this often discussed elitism by arguing for a recovery of local perspectives, attention to cultural specificities, and forthright engagements with the mechanisms of colonial dispossession that persist in our present moment. In some cases, a wholesale rejection of the field is announced, while others attempt to refine their conceptual tools and revise the field's parameters.4 It remains to be seen whether the field of postcolonial studies will indeed survive in its current form, given the persistent disagreements, institutional incentives, and the direction of world politics.

The French intellectual tradition enjoys an ambiguous status in postcolonial studies these days. Many theorists who are cited by postcolonial critics working in American universities to problematize such questions as agency, subjectivity, hegemony and discursive practices, come from France. The works of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Franqois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan exert perhaps the strongest influence. It is also true that many of the principal architects of pan-African independence movements come from French-speaking territories including Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire and L6opold Sedar Senghor. Yet, even though the positions taken by these theorists and anti-colonial leaders are embedded in French cultural practices, the most influential cultural pioneers in postcolonial studies have been active in English departments.5 Similarly, the most widely read postcolonial studies readers are contributed to and edited by English literature professors, from The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft et al., 1989) to Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives ((McClintock et al., 1997) and, more recently, Postcolonial Discourses (Castle, 2001).

It has already been noted that as the body of literature from the former colonies around the world grew after independence, critics used this literature to advance a critique of Eurocentrism, which led to our canon wars as well as to the blossoming of cultural studies in American academe.6 However, this process has been strikingly uneven. Whereas Edward Said and Henry Louis Gates have

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003


150 Phyllis Taoua

been effective cultural pioneers who have helped to broaden the horizons of English departments in the United States, I cannot think of any equivalents in French departments.

If one flips through such classics as The Empire Writes Back or The Post- Colonial Studies Reader (Ashcroft et al., 1995), evidence of the millions of lives lost, of the violent repression and the nitty-gritty reality of what it meant to resist French colonial domination before 1960, or, since then, what it still means to lead the life of an activist on the streets of Yaounde or Brazzaville is glaringly scarce indeed. The kind of scholarship of contemporary African literature that gets canonized these days posits a relationship between African cultural production and the West that appears distinctly neocolonial: Third-World performances are spun into a First-World tapestry. It would almost seem as if the popular roots of the struggle for freedom and the literary tradition to which it gave rise in Africa have been deliberately effaced in order to make way for more conveniently homogenous categories of experience such as "nomadism," which has nothing to do with a pastoral way of life in the Sahara, or "hybridity" - an all-purpose concept freely applied to texts from Asia to the Caribbean with hardly any fuss at all about context, milieu or history.7

These two phenomena are interrelated. The degree of mystifying abstraction, indeed obfuscation that characterized French theory during and after decolonization must certainly be related to a general effort to fend off the trauma of change and loss in France.8 Post-structuralism's bitterly narcissistic contemplation of difference to the point where the Other's identity no longer really matters in any worldly sense cannot be separated from the reluctance of French literature departments to historicize Eurocentrism and treat non- European literatures in French as worthwhile subjects for rigorous study. The fact that English professors have been more active than their colleagues in French departments, beginning with Edward Said's seminal work Orientalism (1979) and followed by his visible position-taking in the years since, means that Anglophone countries in the Caribbean, Africa, India and Australia occupy a particularly prominent role, whereas comparatively little is written about the francophone Caribbean, and less still about the former French colonies in Africa. The evident resistance to reforming academic literary programs in France no doubt carries over into American French departments. In the United States, French departments also remain relatively isolated from related disciplines or other interdisciplinary programs, in comparison to English, and rear-guard professors cling to the classics when enrollments in French literature seem to decline. These institutional and cultural factors have meant that French literary studies have been slower to become cross-cultural and interdisciplinary.

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003



Over the last ten years, knowledge of non-European literature in French- often taught by adjunct visiting professors or by faculty for whom it is their second or third area of specialization-is becoming more wide-spread but remains in many cases rather superficial. Important work remains to be done building institutions and fostering practices in American academe that are not Eurocentric, particularly in the humanities. When headway is indeed made, conservative backlash against efforts to diversify the curriculum emerges of the kind Edward Said and his colleagues in the English Department at Columbia University have endured.9 Behind the scenes of these high-profile battles in the "cultural wars," which appear quite alive in American academe, professors in the humanities whose work is devoted to non-European cultures find themselves under the duress of constantly justifying the value of their research. The progress that has been made in relativizing the master-works scheme in English departments promises to make its way into French departments too. As French studies become more interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, well-informed analyses of the colonial experience of the kind one already finds in African studies will become part of the working knowledge of scholars of French.'0 There have also been valuable contributions by literary critics such as Michael Dash in the Caribbean, Abiola Irele in West Africa, Richard Bjornson in Central Africa, with much to offer on the topic of rethinking methods and incorporating local perspectives." Such rigorous scholars who combine thorough knowledge of the regions about which they write with sophisticated theoretical approaches to international dynamics serve as productive intermediaries.

Anti-colonial protest in French-administered Africa that ranged from the 1920s to the 1960s cannot adequately be conceived of as an historical development belonging entirely to the past. Given the present circumstances, returning to the politics of anti-colonial protest yields noteworthy results as a corrective to the reluctance to historicize in postcolonial studies. A special issue of Research in African Literatures (Fall 1999) on dissident Algeria has documented in sobering terms the devastation in that country in the years since 1962, as well as the persistent effects of wounds left by violent colonial oppression. The trauma of colonial violation and the social destruction that follows in its wake go hand-in- hand in ways that Fanon could not have imagined in 1961. Beyond the Maghreb, in sub-Saharan Africa one finds a pattern of dispossession that repeats itself with a vengeance: the supplanting of resistance movements, the assassination of grassroots leaders with prophet-like status, and the promotion of collaborators willing to do business with the West. A characterization of the results of this

process-- from the social structures it produced to the forms of cultural production

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003


152 Phyllis Taoua

to which it gave rise- as "postcolonial" glosses over too many contradictions and makes room for indulgent fiction-making.

As a result of conservative social pressures, the phenomenon of anti-colonial protest remains under-researched in the archives. Two areas in which more investigation needs to be done on the colonial experience are: the emergence of anti-colonial movements in Paris during the interwar years, and the international network of early anti-imperialist alliances from Moscow to Douala. The founding of the Parti communistefranpais in 1920 was followed the next year by a Section Coloniale, which reflected the anti-imperialist orientation of the party at the time. Although itis known that the future H6 Chi Minh was present in Tours in 1921 when the Section Coloniale was inaugurated and that a significant number of Africans who had fought as soldiers during the First World War gave an international dimension to the birth of anti-colonialism in Paris during the interwar period, much work remains to be done documenting these alliances.'2 During visits to the Archives d'outremer in Aix-en-Provence, the Archives nationales in Paris and the annex of the Bibliothdque nationale in Versailles in 1994, I discovered that a substantial portion of collections pertaining to anti-colonial protest were not available, and that the materials that were available had been rarely consulted. As these collections are examined, important contributions willlbe added to the relatively short bibliography that already exists on the birth of anti-colonialism and its ties to the PC13 Through this kind of expansion in the scope of documents consulted, falsehoods can be rectified, paradigms revised and more kinds of experience explored.

Beyond the issues of actually conducting time-consuming archival research and compiling bibliographies, lies the question of a more general knowledge of the importance of anti-colonialism in the formation of African literature in French. It would not be an overstatement to claim that the major writers from Africa who publish in French were involved directly or indirectly in the anti-colonial struggle. During the interwar period, the leaders were LUopold Sedar Senghor, Aim6 Cesaire, Leon Gontran-Damas and they, of course, influenced a vast array of writers and activists in Africa and the Diaspora for many years. During the postwar period, a new group of writers emerged to redefine anti-colonialism with a more combative form of nationalism, led by Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Sembene Ousmane and Mongo Beti; they in turn influenced another generation of writers and activists across the continent and throughout the Diaspora. In the years since official decolonization, such writers as Aime Cesaire, Sembene Ousmane and Mongo Beti remained active, and new writers joined their ranks, including Sony Labou Tansi and Ahmadou Kourouma in SubSaharan Africa, and Assia Djebar, Kateb Yacine, and Rachid Boudjedra in the Maghreb. For

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003



each of these canonical writers one can find dozens more who are not as well known but who have also been engaged in the same or similar struggles against European colonial domination in Africa and its aftermath.14

The most well-known anti-colonial African writer to publish in French must be the Cameroonian novelist and activist, Mongo Beti. His political engagement began during the colonial period in the 1950s and continued after independence until just last year. The continuity of purpose in his efforts, which was a single- minded pursuit of freedom and justice in Cameroon, and inAfrica more generally, unifies Mongo Beti's literary oeuvre and political activism. This author's passionate denunciation, in essays, novels and deeds, of the way in which the historical process of decolonization was hijacked in Cameroon, presents postcolonial theory with a provocative challenge. How useful is it to approach his literary writings today with a backward-looking paradigm that effaces the politics of anti-colonial protest?

Mongo Beti's initiation into anti-colonialism began as a young boy overhearing his father and uncles discuss the abusive, arbitrary practices of French colonials in comparison to their German counterparts (Kom, 52-53). Mongo Beti's thinking on French colonialism, in particular, was later refined and cultivated in the yard of the high school he attended in Yaounde, where political tracts and Aime Cesaire's poems were circulated by militants belonging to what became the most popular anti-colonial movement in Cameroon. It was in high school that Mongo Beti began his life as an activist, through his involvement with the Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC), an anti-colonial grassroots organization led by Ruben Um Nyobe, with more than 100,000 adherents country-wide, and ties to the PCF (Bjornson, 46070). Um Nyobe, the spiritual and intellectual leader of the UPC, has been described as a man of remarkable humility, fairness, and self-sacrifice. Apopulist, he was a charismatic trade unionist whose beliefs were a combination of his own personal experience, his ethnic Bassa traditions, Marxist socialism and an adapted form of Christianity, which he learned at American Presbyterian schools near his village Boumnydbel in southeastern Cameroon (ibid., 47). On two occasions, Mongo Beti remembers enduring long lessons on Marxism by Ruben Um NyobO, whom he met at public meetings held in the marketplace and then at Um Nyobe's private residence (Kom, 53).

This political apprenticeship continued to bear fruit when Mongo Beti arrived in France to pursue his studies, after passing the baccalaureat in Cameroon. As a student in Paris, this young Cameroonian participated alongside other students from French African colonies in the Fd&eration des Etudiants de l'Afrique noire en France (FEANF), a student group that became increasingly outspoken and

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003


154 Phyllis Taoua

militant as anti-colonial nationalism gained momentum across the African continent during the 1950s. Meanwhile, Ruben Um Nyobe disseminated his views at home with printed material, formed hundreds of local committees, participated in United Nations hearings on African independence as early as 1952, and visited student leaders of such groups as FEANF in Paris on his way back to Cameroon (Bjornson, 54-55). Both Mongo Beti's fiction and activism were directly inspired by the UPC's politics; the early novels, Ville cruelle (1954) and Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba (1956), were written with a revolutionary spirit, during a period of intense anti-colonial fervor, before the assassination of Ruben Um Nyobe. Ultimately, the French colonial administration defeated the UPC with military force and by capturing and assassinating the movement's leaders: Um Nyobe was assassinated by French colonial agents in 1958 in the Bassa region of Cameroon; Dr. FHlix-Roland Moumi6, Nyob6's successor as head of the UPC, was killed in Geneva in 1960 (ibid., 46-70). Of course, under these circumstances, returning to Cameroon would have been difficult for Mongo Beti, who was a vigorous UPC adherent, so he witnessed from a distance the arrival in power of Ahmadou Ahidjo with the help of the departing French colonials once the significant resistance mounted by the UPC had been effectively neutralized.

During years of exile in France, Mongo Beti continued both his militant and literary activities, which involved running the review Peuples noirs, peuples africains, publishing political essays denouncing the neocolonial state of affairs in Cameroon, and writing fiction. After a period of nearly fourteen years of silence that followed Um Nyobe's death in 1958, Mongo Beti initiated a second phase of writing with a hard-hitting critique of how decolonization had been derailed in Cameroon in Main basse sur le Cameroun, autopsie d'une dicolonisation (1972), followed by two novels inspired by the memory of Ruben Um Nyobe, Perpetue et I'habitude du malheur (1974) and Remember Ruben (1974). Another wave of inspiration came once Mongo Beti returned to his homeland after 32 years of uninterrupted exile; this began with a political essay denouncing Paul Biya, Ahidjo's appointed successor, for his mismanagement of the state's affairs and complicity with French neocolonial policies in La France contre l'Afrique (1993), followed by a series of novels about contemporary Cameroon, L'Histoire du fou (1994), Trop de soleil tue l'amour (1999) and Branle-bas en blanc et noir (2000). In his last interviews, published as Mongo Beti parle (2002) just a few months after Beti's death in 2001, this indefatigable critic of social injustice repeatedly mentioned the UPC and Ruben Um Nyobe as he took stock of his career over the years.

But these experiences that stayed with Mongo Beti, fueling his activism and shaping his fiction, are certainly part of a much broader set of relations between

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003



former colonial powers and the militants who resisted them. In an essay last year dealing with the curious avoidance in postcolonial studies of liberation theory and anti-colonialism, Benita Parry also lists slain leaders of African origin who agitated against imperial domination: Patrice Lumumba (Congo/Zaire), Amilcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau), Walter Rodney (Guyana), Jacques St6phane Alexis (Haiti), Mondlane and Machel (Mozambique), Ruth First (South Africa), and Sankara (Burkina Faso) (Parry 149).

Two conceptual adjustments come to mind as starting points for addressing what postcolonial theory does not effectively articulate about Mongo Beti's trajectory, and others like it. The first has to do with reconceiving the rupture, break or shift signaled by the prefix "post," which has been the subject of so much debate.5 Although postcolonial theory is essentially backward-looking, it is paradoxically blind to the lessons of history that belong to the very past the term itself implies.'6 Not only are the phases of Mongo Beti's literary production incomprehensible without an understanding of the fate of anti-colonialism in Africa, the ethics and aesthetics of his literary texts are embedded in that historical experience. Insofar as unambiguous sites of resistance are dissolved into effects of ambivalence and irony with postcolonial rhetorical maneuvers, such trendy approaches have little to offer readers of Mongo Beti's novels.7 The second adjustment builds on the first and pertains to the way a "grand narrative" of triumphant decolonization made its way into the fabric of postcolonial theory. While it is tempting to idealize the nationalistic maquisard, the grand narrative of decolonization that follows from this mindset is inaccurate and obscures important ongoing relationships. The rhetorical value of this leftist version of decolonization brings pressure to bear on domestic French politics by providing an external point of reference where revolution is seen to have actually worked. However, this kind of Eurocentric appropriation of anti-colonial protest reveals only a partial understanding of what was and was not actually accomplished in France's African colonies. Although impressive acts of heroism and disciplined struggle under difficult circumstances were very much a part of the massive effort anti-colonial activism required, European colonials and their American allies succeeded more often than not in eliminating charismatic, grassroots leaders and cultivating willing collaborators to replace them.

If we consider now the case of Sony Labou Tansi, a Congolese writer and activist who came of age after 1960, another dimension of this general problem can be brought into focus. The literary works he published appeared between 1978 and 1995, which would qualify him as a postcolonial writer, strictly speaking. Born in the former Belgian Congo in 1947, Sony immigrated to Congo- Brazzaville with his maternal uncle, fleeing ethnic persecution in Mobutu's Zaire during the 1960s. Sony Labou Tansi spent most of his life in Maklikek1h, a SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003


156 Phyllis Taoua

quartier populaire of Brazzaville; but there was little difference for him between the Kinshassa and Brazzaville sides of the Congo River, since Sony identified himself first and foremost as an ethnic Kongo. The Kongo kingdom was first carved up and divided between Belgian and French colonial territories, then into parts of Angola, Zaire and Congo-Brazzaville. From his point of view, these lines of demarcation were as arbitrary as they were destructive, and thus the oppression of his people and the assassination of its leaders on both sides of the Congo River had an enormous influence on his literary and political activism. Although an organized armed struggle against European colonial domination comparable to what the UPC waged in Cameroon did not take place in Congo- Brazzaville, a number of charismatic leaders were arrested, jailed and assassinated by European colonial agents and their collaborators: most notorious among these victims are Patrice Lumumba, Simon Kimbangu and Andre Matswa. Thus, a pattern of decolonization-as-dispossession repeats itself in the Congo region with some notable permutations.

By the time Sony Labou Tansi arrived in Brazzaville, a military dictatorship with a Marxist-Leninist orientation had ousted the first president, Fulbert Youlou, who was an ethnic Kongo. The series of coups d'6tat that followed Youlou's overthrow until a National Conference was held in 1991 was represented by Sony in his novels and plays as a relentless repetition of insane acts of injustice: guns, violence, censorship, repression, poverty and fear. He came of age as a writer and activist under repressive military dictatorships, which he perceived as illegitimate regimes supported by foreign interests, especially the former French colonials,- what he calls "les puissances ,trangbres qui fournissaient les guides" in his first novel La Vie et demie (1978). The path to military dictatorship in Congo-Brazzaville is littered with the bodies of activists who resisted European colonials and the corrupt African leaders who replaced them. But, in contrast to Mongo Beti and many other Cameroonian and Congolese writers, Sony decided to stay home and not to pursue his studies in Europe. Although the conditions of daily life were extremely difficult and the political climate insidiously repressive, Sony's choice to stay and fight reflected his deeply held belief that the solution to the Kongo people's problems had to come from local forms of knowledge and power. The perspective Sony Labou Tansi's literary works gives of the situation in Congo-Brazzaville is not that of an intellectual in exile but rather an emphatically local one, anchored in the ethno-spiritual worldview of a Kongo traditionalist.

Although Sony had little faith in the secular tradition of left-wing politics in France and even less in African Marxism as practiced in Brazzaville, Andre Matswa - the martyr-prophet figure Sony Labou Tansi cherished--

had been to

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003



Paris during the interwar years where he developed a pan-African anti-colonial movement. Whereas Ruben Um Nyobe's example dominated Mongo Beti's career, a veritable pantheon of martyr-prophet figures pervades Sony Labou Tansi's poetry, theater, political writings and novels from La Vie et demie to Le Commencement des douleurs (1995).18 Arguably the most important among them was Andre Matswa, an ethnic Kongo educated in Christian missionary schools- an experience that shaped the syncretic religion and political vision he developed over nearly twenty years.19 Matswa left for France in 1921, where he was drafted into the French armed services to fight in the War of the Riff in Morocco. This unpleasant military experience gave him first-hand experience of armed combat and a growing distrust of France's colonial mission. Matswa was one of many African soldiers enlisted to fight in the colonizer's army who gathered in Paris during the interwar years and who shaped pan-African anti-colonial movements associated with the Communist Party. In 1926, Matswa founded the Association amicale des originaires de l'AEF known as L'Amicale, which in less than three years gained thousands of followers in France and Africa. By 1929, the French colonial administration estimated its adherents at 13,000 in French Equatorial Africa alone, but the organization's influence extended throughout the region into Gabon, Oubangui-Chari and Chad. Arrested and jailed twice for his anti- colonial activism in 1930 and 1935, Matswa was finally killed in his prison cell in 1942 while in the custody of French colonial agents.20 Demonstrations led by tribal chiefs to contest Matswa's arrest and detention were brutally supplanted by authorities in Congo-Brazzaville, which led to the radicalization of L'Amicale during the late 30s and early 40s.23

When Sony entered the political stage, Matswa's legacy as the leader of L'Amicale had already been appropriated by a group of Kongo militants who later formed the Mouvement congolais pour le developpement et d6mocratie intigrale (MCDDI) in the 1980s, of which Sony Labou Tansi was also a founding member.2 Rather than the pan-Africanist with an anti-colonial message that he was, Matswa's image had been fused with that of another Kongo martyr, Simon Kimbangu, who shared a similar fate: Kimbangu was jailed by Belgian authorities in 1921 for similar grassroots activism. He too died in prison, in 1951, after 30 years of uninterrupted detention. The character Layisho, in La Vie et demie, who spent 133 years in prison for his subversive ideas is inspired by these detained prophet-figures and is one of the many literary interpretations of this messianic tradition to appear in Sony Labou Tansi's works. Proud, audacious, and head- strong, Estina Bronzario in Les Sept solitudes of Lorsa Lopez (1985) is surely one of the most vivid characterizations of the Kongo personality conceived by Sony Labou Tansi. Kimbangu, unlike other Kongo martyrs, claimed to have been

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003


158 Phyllis Taoua

visited by God and chosen as the savior of the black race in the same way Jesus was sent for the salvation of white people; his beliefs form the basis of the church he founded, Eglise de Jesus Christ sur terre par le prophete Simon Kimbangu (EJCSK).2 In a long and exceptionally lucid passage at the end of L'Etat honteux (1981), a voice from the dead makes a speech in public addressed to the president, which is imbued with Sony's version of Kimbangu's teachings.

The writer-martyr-political party configuration that can be observed in Mongo Beti's career presents itself here with a few modifications. When Sony was active in the MCDDI, the party was led by his dose associate, Bernard Kol6las, who ran for president, and represented the political ambitions of a Kongo-Lari constituency, based in Mak6l16ke1, the Pool region of Brazzaville. Chants and prayers recited in this milieu had combined the names of Matswa and Kimbangu since the 1940s; during the 1980s, Koldlas's name was added to the mix and he was likened to Moses. Koldlas's followers believed that he would lead the Kongo people to the Promised Land: the political power of which they had been dispossessed.24 The crystallization of a political conscience during the colonial period proved to be a complex process involving a combination of populist pan- Africanism, syncretic religion in which Christianity was adapted to local spiritual beliefs, sociological factors related to group dynamics of clan structures, and first-hand experience of one of the bloodiest and most violent episodes in French colonialhistory?' As a result of these layers of experience, the Kongo-Lari group-- sometimes referred to in Brazzaville as simply Kongo or "the people of the Pool region" - developed a martyr complex in which the deep-seated mistrust that they felt towards European colonials as a colonized people was transferred to rival ethnic groups after decolonization. The divide-and-conquer scheme that pits rival ethnic groups against one another set a blazing fire in this region as recent history demonstrates.26 The particular set of power relations set up at the time of decolonization in the Congo has been manipulated from abroad, allowing for access to lucrative oil reserves, while the suspicion and hatred that fuels ethnic conflict continues to wreak havoc on the Congolese people. In Sony Labou Tansi's literary and political writings, the pattern of decolonization-as-dispossession extended to both sides of the Congo River and was seen to have originated in the elimination of popular grassroots leaders with an anti-colonial message. Thus, even though Sony Labou Tansi's literary works were published nearly 20 years after decolonization, the ethics and aesthetics of his literary expression are just as embedded in the history of colonial domination as are those of Mongo Beti.

Certainly, there is much to gain from the new impulse to contextualize in postcolonial studies. However, the dominant narrative of decolonization as successful revolution would come completely unhinged if examples from what

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003



Mongo Beti called the "R6publiques Francophones" were to be accounted for and incorporated with thick descriptions from local perspectives. Rather than decolonization bringing freedom and self-determination to the peoples of Africa, too often one finds a pattern of dispossession in which corruption, ethnic divisions and poverty prevail7 A penchant for stylizing postcolonial literature into abstract effects, analyzed in terms of irony, ambivalence and nomadism that are divorced from the complexities of the milieux about which they were written is currently being called into question and rightly so.28 Such abstractions transform statements about human suffering in the Third World into rhetorical problems that are fun to fiddle with. At the same time they efface the disturbing mechanisms of exploitation that are still with us today in terms that render knowledge of this ongoing legacy strangely superfluous.29

Mongo Beti's and Sony Labou Tansi's literary works and lives as activists were embedded in local political struggles against French rule and the dubious legacy it left behind. Although their novels have been labeled postcolonial, it is impossible to appreciate their literary meaning without knowledge of the anti- colonial archive. The continuity of purpose in the creative works of African writers who came of age under colonialism, devoted their first works of literature to denouncing French colonial rule in Africa, and then continued to write in opposition to corrupt leaders after independence, means that their trajectories cannotbe adequately accounted for within the prevailing postcolonial paradigm. Many of the underlying issues against which anti-colonial writers and activists

resisted-- a sense of cultural alienation, depersonalization, external intervention,

unequal access to resources and markets, corruption, human rights abuses, etc. - persist today. This is not to say that African independence ceremonies had nothing at all to celebrate; however, the spill over from colonial rule into the many varied societies that subsequently emerged can hardly be denied, and is considered today a matter of grave concern by many of Africa's greatest writers.

The term postcolonial is fraught with an imperfect logic of rupture; it signifies a change that is marked only in relation to the past and yet it forecloses discursive possibilities informed by the historical realities of that very same past. Postcolonial discourse is both backward-looking and blind to the continued effects of the past on the present, about which it claims to speak. A tension persists in postcolonial discourse because one is unable to define the postcolonial independently of colonial experience while, at the same time, this discourse is unable to account for the simplest truths about the social, political, and cultural realities that have emerged in contemporary Africa. Although much attention has been given to the role colonial discourses about the "natives" have played in the development of postcolonial studies, the actual fate of anti-colonial resistance

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003


160 Phyllis Taoua

movements has been completely ignored. This being the case, scholars of contemporary France who are interested in the legacy of colonial domination face a particularly challenging situation. The kind of deep-rooted Eurocentrism that runs through European and American intellectual traditions - of which the escapist mystifications of post-structuralist theory recycled in postcolonial studies is a vivid reminder - will have to be overcome if French studies is to have its own cultural pioneers and if France's participation in the ongoing dispossession of Africa is to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.

University of Arizona

Bibliography

Ahluwalia, Pal. Politics and Post-Colonial Theory. African Inflections. London/New York: Routledge, 2001.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father's House. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Ashcroft, Bill and Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. Eds. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and

Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York/London: Routledge, 1989. -. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York/London: Routledge, 1995. Bartolovich, Crystal and Neil Lazarus. Eds. Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bessiere, Jean and Jean-Marc Moura. Eds. Littiratures postcoloniales etfrancophonie. Paris :

Honor6 Champion, 2001. Beti, Mongo. Ville cruelle. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1954. Published with the pseudonym

Eza Boto. -. Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba. Paris: Laffont, 1956. -. Main basse sur le Cameroun, autopsie d'une d'colonisation. Paris: Maspero, 1972. -. Perpitue et l'habitude du malheur. Paris: Buchet Chastel, 1974. -. Remember Ruben. Paris: 10/18,1974. -. La France contre l'Afrique. Paris: La D'couverte, 1993. -. L'Histoire dufou. Paris: Juilllard, 1994. -. Trop de soleil tue l'amour. Paris: Juilllard, 1999. -. Branle-bas en blanc et noir. Paris: Juilllard, 2000. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York/London: Routledge, 1994. Bjornson, Richard. The African Questfor Freedom and Identity: Cameroonian Writing and the National

Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Castle, Gregory. Postcolonial Discourses. An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Clark, Phyllis. "Passionate Engagements: A Reading of Sony"s Private Ancestral Shrine."

Research in African Literatures, vol. 31, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 39-68. Cooper, Frederick. "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History," History

after the Three Worlds. Post-Eurocentric Historiographies. Dirlik, Arif and Vinay Bahl, Peter Gran. Eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.

Dewitte, Philippe. Les Mouvements negres en France, 1919-39. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1985. Dirlik, Arif "The Post-Colonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,"

Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial Perspectives. McClintock, Anne and Aamir Mufti, Ella Shoat. Eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. pp. 501-28.

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003



Dirlik, Arif and Vinay Bahl, Peter Gran. Eds. History after the Three Worlds. Post-Eurocentric Historiographies. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.

Durand, Pierre. Cette mystcrieuse section coloniale: le PCF et les colonies, 1920-62. Paris: Editions Messidor, 1986.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.

Kom, Ambroise. Mongo Beti parle. No. 54. Bayreuth, Germany: Bayreuth African Studies Series, 2002.

Labou Tansi, Sony. La Vie et demie. Paris: Seuil, 1978. -. L'Etat honteux. Paris: Seuil, 1981. -. Les Sept solitudes de Lorsa Lopez. Paris: Seuil, 1985. -. Le Commencement des douleurs. Paris: Seuil, 1995. Liauzu, Claude. Aux Origines des tiers-mondismes. Colonises et anti-colonialistes en France, 1919-39.

Paris: L'Harmattan, 1982. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York/London: Routledge, 1998. MacGaffey, Wyatt Religion in Africa.

London: Heinemann, 1994. pp. 240-56. -. Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 2000. Martin-Granel, Nicholas. L'Autre monde. Paris: La Revue Noire, 1997. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press,

2001. McClintock, Anne and Aamir Mufti, Ella Shoat. Eds. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation &

Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border

Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso, 1997. Parry, Benita. "Liberation Theory: Variations on themes of Marxism and Modernity,"

Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus. Eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Research in African Literatures. Special Issue on Dissident Algeria. Vol. 30. Fall 1999. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Slemon, Stephen. "The Scramble for Post-colonialism," The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Bill

Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. Eds. New York/London: Routledge, 1995. pp. 45- 53.

Werbner, Richard and Terence Ranger. Eds. Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed Books, 1996.

Woungly-Massanga, La Revolution au Congo. Paris: Maspero, 1974.

Notes

1. See, for example, Walter Mignolo, Local Historiesl Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

2. Arif Dirlik begins his essay "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticisim in the Age of Global Capitalism" in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial Perspectives with the following: "'When exactly ...does the 'post-colonial' begin?' queries Ella Shohat in a discussion of the subject. Misreading the question deliberately, I will supply here an answer that is only partially facetious: 'When Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe'" (501). Dirlik evaluates the role of Third-World intellectuals from India, Africa and even his native Turkey (which he qualifies as more or less 'Third World') in the shaping of postcolonial studies in the West. He finds that "postcolonial"

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003


162 Phyllis Taoua

was first applied to migrant intellectuals who found positions in American and European academic institutions. Dirlik argues that the relatively new presence of Third-World intellectuals in these venues in the1980s coincided with transformations in the world economy, but these crucial changes in the globalization of capital were suppressed by the Third-World intellectuals seeking to enter the First World's club. He finds that when "postcolonial" is applied to conditions in the real world, it "mystifies both politically and methodologically a situation that represents not the abolition but the reconfiguration of earlier forms of domination" (503). Stephen Slemon charts the use of "postcolonial" in its varied contexts and purposes in order to define what postcolonial studies should be today: tolerant of methodological differences and mindful of the fact that political, economic and discursive oppression in the real world is the intended referent ("The Scramble for Post-Colonialism" in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader). But Slemon's warnings against postcolonial studies becoming an "academic glass-bead game" suggests that the field was not as concerned with the realities of colonial dispossession as it purported. In his concluding remarks to the collection Postcolonial Identities in Africa, Terence Ranger summarizes: "The message of the new anthropology and history, therefore, is twofold. Colonial Africa is much more like postcolonial Africa than most of us have hitherto imagined. And its dynamics have continued to shape postcolonial society. It is only when this message has been digested that we can establish what the real peculiarities of postcolonial Africa are" (280). Ranger identifies the need to locate the elusive threshold of change from the colonial to the postcolonial in Africa as the cutting edge of current research on Africa, subsequently taken up by such scholars as Achille Mbembe in On the Postcolony.

3. See Moore-Gilbert, and Loomba. For more specific criticisms related to the African context, see Parry, and Cooper.

4. Crystal Bartolovich describes how neo-Marxist scholars such as Arif Dirlik and Aijaz Ahmad categorically repudiate postcolonial theory, while she calls for retooling and setting new parameters (1-17).

5. See Ashcroft et al., (2-13) and Moore-Gilbert, (8-9). 6. Loomba, xi-xviii. 7. See Loomba, 178-80, and Moore-Gilbert, 129-30; and 181-83. 8. It seems to me that Kristin Ross's observations about how French structuralism

bracketed history at the very moment "primitive peoples" began to make their own history can be extended to the post-structuralists who retreated into mystifying abstractions when it came time to come to terms with a loss in imperial status and acknowledge the Other's difference. See Ross.

9. In the summer of 2002, the New York Times ran a front page story on the divisions in Columbia University's English Department where Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak teach. The Department's politics became so dysfunctional that deliberations about appointments became battles only about ideology, which led to an administrative take- over.

10. Compare, for example, Kristin Ross's interpretation of French decolonization in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies with Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony.

11. See, for example, Michael Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), and Richard Bjornson, The African Quest for Freedom and Identity: Cameroonian Writing and the National Experience.

12. While conducting research for my book Forms of Protest at the Archives Nationales in Paris, I came across correspondence between colonial administrators about Communist tracts inciting the colonized to rebel, translated into African languages and sent on mail boats to Africa. Which African languages were these tracts translated into? Who

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003



translated the documents? Where did they end up? What did they say exactly? There remains quite a lot of work to do along these lines.

13. See, for example, Pierre Durand, Claude Liauzu,and Philippe Dewitte. 14. See, for example, Alain Ricard, Litt&atures d'Afrique noire, des langues aux livres. (Paris :

Karthala, 1995) and Loomba, 93-103. 15. See, for example, Loomba, Moore-Gilbert, Appiah, Slemon, Terence Ranger, "Postscript:

Colonial and postcolonial Identities," Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London: Zed Books, 1996); Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony; and "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticisim in the Age of Global Capitalism" in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial Perspectives, 501-28.

16. Dirlik relates this kind of amnesia to a syndrome of Third-World intellectuals wanting to "forget" past exploitation and to celebrate their new-found power within First-World institutions, which comes with significant incentives:

While this discourse shares in the same themes as postcolonial discourses everywhere, it rearranges these themes into a celebration of the end of colonialism, as if the only tasks left were to abolish the ideological and cultural legacy of colonialism; this sounds convincing only to the extent that, with its gazed fixed on the past, it avoids confrontation with the present. The current global condition appears in the discourse only as a projection of the subjectivities and epistemologies of First World intellectuals of Third World origin; this is another way of saying that the discourse constitutes the world in the self-image of these intellectuals: which makes it an expression not of powerlessness but of newfound power. (513)

Dirlik goes on to argue that this arrivisme of First World intellectuals of Third World origin plays into the conservative establishment's preference to avoid an intractable "vocabulary that insists on keeping in the foreground contemporary problems of political division and oppression" (513).

17. Frederick Cooper remarks: "Even as subtle and interactive an argument as Homi Bhabha's treatment of mimicry, in which the colonized person's acting as if "white but not quite" destabilizes the colonizer's view of the boundaries and control, relies on detaching the dyad colonizer/colonized from anything either subject might be engaged in except their mutual confrontation" (165).

18. See Clark, "Passionate Engagements." 19. For background on Andre Matswa, see Woungly-Massanga. 20. Woungly-Massanga. 21. Woungly-Massanga. 22. Clark, "Passionate Engagements." 23. See, Wyatt MacGaffey, "Kimbanguism & the Question of Syncretism in Zaire," Religion

in Africa (London: Heinemann, 1994), pp. 240-56. 24. Clark, "Passionate Engagements." 25. See, for example, Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the

Particular (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 26. One of the most insightful observers of this situation in Central Africa is Philip

Gourevitch in We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with ourfamilies. Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

27. For views that are both familiar with the African context and postcolonial theory on this point, see Richard Werbner and Terrance Ranger, Postcolonial Identities in Africa, and Mbembe.

28. For recent reviews of these debates in postcolonial theory, see Loomba, and Moore- Gilbert.

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003


164 Phyllis Taoua

29. Dirlik attributes the way in which postcolonial discourse divests itself of real political issues even as it capitalizes on an implied rhetoric of resistance and dissidence to the desire of First-World intellectuals of Third-World origin to fit into elite institutions:

Postcoloniality, however, is also appealing because it disguises the power relations that shape a seemingly shapeless world and contributes to a conceptualization of that world that, while functional for the consolidation of hegemony, is also subversive of possibilities of resistance. Postcolonial critics have engaged in valid criticism of past forms of ideological hegemony but have had little to say about its contemporary figurations. (523)

He goes on to imply an ethical abdication of the part of this intellectual class for shifting the burden to intervene, resist and bring about change to the victims (523). Although I do agree with the basic lines of the syndrome Dirlik describes, I think that there are significant discriminations to be made between the leaders of this intellectual class. Edward Said, one of the pioneers in the field, is more committed to exposing the ongoing dynamics of dispossession than his colleagues Gayatri Spivak or Homi Bhabha, often mentioned as his postcolonial homologues. Cf. Moore-Gilbert.

SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003


Article Contentsp. 146p. 147p. 148p. 149p. 150p. 151p. 152p. 153p. 154p. 155p. 156p. 157p. 158p. 159p. 160p. 161p. 162p. 163p. 164

Issue Table of ContentsSubStance, Vol. 32, No. 3, Issue 102: The Politics of French Literary History (2003), pp. 1-191Front Matter [pp. 1-2]Introduction: The Politics of French Literary History [pp. 3-5]Revisiting "A New History of French Literature" [pp. 6-18]The Politics of French Literary History in the US and France Today [pp. 19-28]Cline: The Success of the "Monstre Sacr" in Postwar France[pp. 29-42]Paul Morand: The Paradoxes of "Revision" [pp. 43-54]Of Books, Bombs, and Backward Thinking: Jean Dutourd's Reactionary Literary History [pp. 55-77]What the Nazis Saw: "Les Mouches" in Occupied Paris [pp. 78-91]"Une voiture peut en cacher une autre": Twentieth-Century Women Writers Read George Sand [pp. 92-108]Passages beyond the Resistance: Ren Char's "Seuls demeurent" and Its Harmonics in Semprun and Foucault[pp. 109-132]Michel Leiris: Race, Poetry, Politics; Rereading the Mission Lucas [pp. 133-145]The Anti-Colonial Archive: France and Africa's Unfinished Business [pp. 146-164]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 165-167]Review: untitled [pp. 168-174]Review: untitled [pp. 175-179]Review: untitled [pp. 180-184]Review: untitled [pp. 185-189]

Back Matter [pp. 190-191]

The Anti-Colonial Archive France and Africa's Unfinished Business

Documents

Transcript of The Anti-Colonial Archive France and Africa's Unfinished Business