Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization 1945–1967. By Ruth Bush

Abstract

This is a valuable contribution to the sociology of books in both French and African literatures. Engaging with postcolonial studies and the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Pascale Casanova on cultural fields, and building on Gisèle Sapiro’s research on authorship and world literature, Ruth Bush examines the material conditions of African letters in post-war France. She demonstrates convincingly how, in the context of decolonization, the history of African literature is intertwined with the history of French literature. In six concise chapters, Bush details the historical and cultural conditions that contributed to the particular ‘dynamics of French and African literary history’ (p. 4) and discloses the ensuing complex literary logics and interrelated practices that have transformed, over the years, into norms and prescriptions for and by African writers. Key to Bush’s argument is the delineation of conflicting literary dynamics and ideological pronouncements shaping African letters, derived from the shifting literary processes and communities of post-war France, the persistence of static representations of Africa in the French imaginary, and claims and manoeuvres for a renewed ‘French universalism’. Bush’s impressive research in the archives of Le Seuil, Présence Africaine, and Gallimard, among others, and her thorough investigation of readers’ reports, editorial correspondence, and literary-prize cultures, allow her to discern the ‘uneven’ (p. 179) mediating role played by literary institutions in the social lives of African texts. Such mediating processes, Bush argues, have been facilitated by the contributions and multifaceted interventions of literary figures such as Paul Flamand, Alioune Diop, Léopold Senghor, Michel Leiris, Frantz Fanon, Léon Damas, and Jean-Paul Sartre through editorial initiatives, recommendations, rejections, prefaces, essays, collections, series, and anthologies. In addition, Bush’s stimulating analyses of narratives by Hamidou Kane, Abdoulaye Sadji, and Malick Fall provide nuanced readings of literary processes and narrative modalities often assumed coercive or perceived as hegemonic. The study brings new insights on issues of literary value of African narratives, authorial authenticity, and African subjectivity by opening new avenues for literary interpretations. It demonstrates that taking into account the ‘material circumstances of textual production’ (p. 226) is crucial to an understanding of how, during decolonization, African writers and mediating institutions attempted to accommodate ‘political and aesthetic differences’ (p. 217) through subtle ‘regimes’ of writing (p. 153) defined by adopted and valorized narrative configurations, aesthetic obligations, and linguistic imperatives. Importantly, Bush contends that these regimes are also characterized by strategic narrative modes of resistance to the universalist tendencies that hindered the production of African letters. There are criticisms of Bush’s study: its accumulation of biographical details about mediators; its disregard for the role of academic institutions in the making of African letters at the moment African literature becomes a discipline; its concentration on Senegal while overlooking other African territories with ambitious literary policies. Nonetheless, Bush’s study is innovative and lucid in depicting the ‘complex portrait of the French-language publishing scene’ (p. 251) in which African letters contributed to shift the ‘Parisian capital of the world republic of letters’ (p. 195).