De la Negritude a la Creolite: Edouard Glissant, Maryse Conde et la malediction de la theorie (review)

Abstract

Toward the middle of this remarkable study on the subject of theory with regard to African and Caribbean literature, Cilas Kemedjio cites Mongo Beti's poignant question: "Pourquoi ne puis-je pas écrire librement and dans le bonheur, comme les autres écrivains de mon pays d'adoption" 'Why can't I write freely and happily like the other writers of my adopted country [France]?' The answer for Beti is "very simple": he is an African writer, and unlike French writers, he bears the burden of working toward freedom; he cannot take it for granted yet. The aim of Kemedjio's study is, in many ways, to explain the multiple components of this deceptively simple answer, since long after the era of independence struggles, the question of internal liberation continues to plague the African intellectual. How is it possible to write when writing itself has been "fetishized" (51) so that a polar opposition between orality and writing continues to plague our understanding of the relevant epistemological and ontological issues? And if one does write, how is it possible to be heard when the interpretive, methodological, and ideological frameworks within which the work will be received are colored by conceptions of history and culture that owe so much to the hegemony of European thought, methodologies, and institutions? Kemedjio puts Foucault, Bourdieu, Saïd, and Mudimbe to excellent use in his analysis of the way that exogenous criteria of analysis and evaluation undermine the possibility of developing an "imagination théorique" (123) in keeping with the local conditions of production of a literary field. This is a thoroughly persuasive, intelligently argued, and comprehensive overview of a difficult longstanding problem rooted in the "Africanist" traditions of the West. The debates that have animated the criticism of [End Page 130] francophone African and Caribbean literature are clearly represented in the first half of the book, which thus provides both the expert critic and the beginning student with an indispensable, state-of-the-art resource.