Postcolonial Francophone autobiographies: from Africa to the Antilles

Abstract

Sankara’s volume in University of Virginia Press’s wide-ranging series aims to survey francophone life writing on both the African continent and in the Caribbean, an ambitious project on which he asserts there has been “a paucity of scholarship” (1). His reading of autobiographical writing through reception theory contrasts the audiences in France and the writers’ birthplaces that such narratives address, bringing it into conversation with postcolonial studies. This is a welcome aim, as African and Euro-American receptions can differ significantly. Sankara’s understanding of autobiography as involving a first-person singular account “centered around the development of the author’s personality” (54) suggests his adherence to Lejeune’s traditional definition of 1971; notions of a fixed “self” have, however, been problematized by scholars (including Lejeune) since postmodernism. In addition, Sankara’s focus on six authors is selective rather than inclusive. In the case of Senegalese author Kesso Barry, a more prolific autobiographical writer such as Ken Bugul, Nafissatou Diallo, or Calixthe Beyala might have been chosen and could challenge his conclusion that “Caribbean writers bring more innovative elements to the autobiographical genre than their African counterparts” (163). Each chapter identifies a particular problematic. For example, Sankara reads Amadou Hampâte Bâ’s late Amkoullel as self-theorizing about the unreliability of memory and argues that Bâ’s shift in old age from ethnographic tales to memoir signals “his ambiguity in constructing his Self out of the colonial encounter” (51). Sankara effectively elucidates how “a voice that would not challenge the ‘positive’ aspects” of colonialism in Bâ’s memoir has led to its curricular canonization in France, but also to its dismissal as outdated by some African writers (50). In contrast, he insightfully discusses Valentine Mudimbe’s philosophical autobiography as the essayistic story of an exceptional being employing a Western phenomenological lens to sketch his oblique relation to colonialism. While Sankara does not pursue his intriguing suggestion to read