“True fictions”: Subjectivity and intertextuality in the writings of Sylvia Leith-Ross

Abstract

This article examines the writings of the anthropologist Sylvia Leith-Ross, who worked and travelled in Nigeria from the early 1900s to the 1960s. Her key anthropological study, African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (1939) has been analysed by anthropologists and scholars of white women’s colonial history. However, no one has yet attempted to investigate her other writings, such as her field memoirs, African Conversation Piece (1944) and Beyond the Niger (1951). Critics who have discussed African Women have tended to compare Leith-Ross’s ethnography to contemporary studies and have criticized her imperialist tone. While I do not dispute that her writings are deeply problematic, this article analyses Leith-Ross’s work from a different perspective; one which attends to the stylistics of her writing. Drawing on previous work on the “literary” aspects of ethnographic writing by Clifford and Marcus et al., I illustrate the ways in which Leith-Ross blurs the boundaries between autobiography, travel writing, and ethnography in an attempt to formulate a more reflexive style of ethnography. By doing so, I argue that she challenged traditional anthropological methods and pushed the boundaries of convention. However, Leith-Ross’s later texts are imbued with a sense of “imperialist nostalgia” as she begins to lament the modernizing effects of colonialism and the move towards independence in Nigeria. The progressive potential of the challenges she makes to traditional anthropological methodologies is blunted by this shift. Nevertheless, this article calls for a reappraisal of Leith-Ross’s writings and suggests that her work reveals much about the developments that were occurring in anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the shifting relationship between Nigeria and Britain at a pivotal moment in colonial history.