Baroque practices in postcolonial African literature and theory: from Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony

Abstract

This article aims to elucidate a baroque aesthetic practice in the political and literary spheres of postcolonial Francophone Africa, which extends beyond the binary oppositions of power and powerlessness in a relational dynamic of subversive complicity. The baroque character and correlative baroque practices in the politics of the Postcolony identified by Achille Mbembe are depicted, embodied and transmitted in the literary production of postcolonial African writers. This baroque reorientation opens new ways of reading stylistic innovations and political encoding in a framework that blurs the line between reality and representation, which is exemplified in the novelistic practice of Henri Lopes and Sony Labou Tansi, among others. Accordingly, the baroque as a theoretical approach to reading postcolonial Francophone literature and its socio-political context engenders an understanding of how art and literature can represent and embody, in a certain sense, different forms of what douard Glissant depicts as baroque: being-in-the-world.