The Anti-Colonial Archive: France and Africa's Unfinished Business

Abstract

SubStance 32.3 (2003) 146-164 [Access article in PDF] The Anti-Colonial Archive: France and Africa's Unfinished Business Phyllis Taoua A few years ago, Ania Loomba explored a number of critical approaches to the vigorously debated relationship between the local and the global in her book Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998). Since then, her work on the interface between colonial and postcolonial discourses has become a new reference point in what remains an ongoing exchange on this local/global question in postcolonial theory. 1 Loomba, in her conclusion to the chapter "Challenging Colonialism," points to what she considers a sensible suggestion by Peter Hulme to move away from grand narratives "not on epistemological grounds, but rather [because] the grand narrative of decolonisation has, for the moment, been adequately told and widely accepted. Smaller narratives are now needed, with attention paid to local topography, so that maps can become fuller" (252). Loomba affirms Hulme's call for renewed focus on smaller narratives and local topographies, but leaves open questions about what postcolonialism's grand narrative may exclude. I would like to bring some pressure to bear on Hulme's position and its underlying assumptions, not because I favor grand narratives over local topographies, but because the nature of the relationship between the local and the global strikes me as more dynamic than his statement admits. I propose that if critics broaden the scope of their analysis to include smaller, local narratives, postcolonial theory's grand narrative—insofar as one does indeed exist—will be significantly altered, if not radically challenged. Rather than new knowledge of local contexts serving to flesh out a widely accepted narrative of decolonization, I argue that thick descriptions of the former African French colonies—of the kind a specialized area studies approach affords—actually upset and contest the grand narrative of decolonization as currently told by postcolonial theorists. First, let us briefly look at two of these "grand narratives of decolonization," which seem, for the moment, to be in competition with one another. On the one hand, there is the Western capitalist view based on what Frederick Cooper identifiesas "Europe's self-perceived movement toward state-building, capitalist development, and modernity." This vision posits a formof historical progress against which African, Asian and Latin American history appears as a "failure" (157). This story is told very often on the pages of the New York Times, for example. [End Page 146] On the other, there is the grand narrative of nationalist victory based on stories of triumphant resistance told with a "rather macho air to the narrating of confrontation" (ibid., 162). One thinks here of Kristin Ross's idealization of the disciplined maquisard in contrast to the comparatively complacent French cadre in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (1996). Somewhere in between these two narratives of Africa's failure to enter capitalist modernity and triumphant nationalism lies a more accurate and nuanced version of the ongoing struggles for cultural freedoms and true political self-determination in Africa today. Cooper points out that the heroic narrative of nationalistic triumph was first popularized by historians of Africa in the period immediately following independence (157-90), which, in my view, was then recycled in postcolonial theory by critics without specialized knowledge of African history. Thus, insofar as one can claim that a "grand narrative of decolonization" does prevail in postcolonial theory, it would no doubt be a progressive version of the story. One way out of the current critical impasse, where local stories told with detailed specificity and the global dynamics of transnational capitalism do not yet meet, is the edited volume. History after the Three Worlds. Post-Eurocentric Historiographies (ed. Dirlik et al., 2000) and Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (ed. Bartolovich and Lazarus, 2002) are two productive examples of critics writing with regional expertise on a specific issue in the area of postcolonial studies. Cooper's review of "new colonial history," for example, which draws on literature, literary criticism, anthropology, Subaltern Studies, and Latin American dependency theory, calls for a reconsideration of outmoded paradigms based on the static opponents of "colonizer" and "colonized." Innovative interdisciplinary developments...