Forms of Protest: Anti-Colonialism and Avant-Gardes in Africa, the Caribbean, and France

Abstract

Forms of Protest: Anti-Colonialism and Avant-Gardes in Africa, the Caribbean, and France. By Phyllis Taoua. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2002. Pp. xxv, 268. $24.95 paper. In a rich, well-researched essay, Phyllis Taoua examines discourses of liberation by writers from France and the former colonies throughout the twentieth century. Critics tend to tie African and Caribbean writers' political commitment and use of realism during colonialism and early independence to the influence of French literary movements on their writing. Revisiting the issue of agency in political and cultural self-determination, Taoua rectifies some of the misperceptions about the African, Caribbean, and French literary innovations and avant-garde movements, and demonstrates the existence of a dialogue among them. To do that, Taoua focuses on canonical works and authors. The essay is divided into three parts and six chapters. The first two parts consider dominant trends in resistance to the colonial rule: vanguard primitivism, Surrealism, and Negritude during the interwar period, and Existential humanism and new forms of realism, including the African point of view, as part of the postwar debates. The third part analyzes the impact of decolonization on experimental fiction, including the New Novel. In Chapter 1, going back to the interwar years, the influence of Picasso, Philippe Soupault, and Michel Leiris, the author records the link between vanguard primitivism and Surrealism. Taoua's examination of Leiris's L'Afrique fantome enables her to point out the change of attitudes toward non-Western objects. This new interest, she remarks, prompted museums to reorganize their space, but also signaled a commodification of aesthetics and a pillaging of cultural artifacts. Taoua argues that vanguard primitivism did not correspond, contrary to James Clifford's proposition, to a decentering of European cultural authority (p. 4), but remained, like Surrealism, a Eurocentric idiom. Taoua retraces the Surrealists' Revolution in French culture, with their dissension with the establishment but also their own tensions and limitations. In particular, she highlights the inner contradictions of the movement, notably, its appeal for dissidence and revolution and yet its gradual retreat from reality and therefore from history. Taoua demarcates the increasing divide between ethics and aesthetics, how the intended subversion of conventional modes of representation ends up in arbitrariness of decisions. Taoua identifies Andre Breton's lack of engagement through his criticism of class consciousness and his refusal to act collectively; likewise, his lack of interest, at the time, in African and Caribbean matters. His discovery of Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal will corne much later. Chapter 2 recontextualizes the significance of Negritude as an anticolonial movement. In that regard, the author advocates for the need of a critical reassessment through the historical lenses. She shows how the Caribbean writers, students, and authors of Legitime Defense in fact pushed their claims further than the Surrealists and challenged the colonial order. Despite a detailed reading of Senghor's Woman and innovative remarks about both Damas and Aime Cesaire's works and significance for the movement, Taoua's query could have been pushed further. Benetta JulesRosette's work, Black Paris, and her analysis of the Negritude generation might have helped to draw a more dynamic picture. As is, the reader is left with three iconic figures without getting a real sense of a generation or dialogue with the other intellectuals in Africa and the islands. Chapter 3 examines the aesthetic shift toward politically engaged realism and the novel, in opposition to Surrealism and its experimental poetics. Taoua closely analyzes the contradictions in the positions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus vis-a-vis the anticolonial struggle. …