Who controls literature? Black writers and white alpha-editors in Hispanophone African literature

Abstract

The article analyses how cultural products coming from Hispanophone Africa, that is Equatorial Guinea, have been managed from the West, with the result that while Africa suffers a shortage of Black cultural production, Europe gets adulterated products manipulated by white alpha-editors who have acted as gatekeepers of Equatorial Guinea’s literature and have prevented Western audiences from getting original African texts. Four case studies (books by René Maran, Leoncio Evita Enoy, María Nsué Angüe, and Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel) cover a hundred-year span, from colonial to postcolonial times, and are used to analyze instances of white alpha-editor interventions: the choice of texts, their edition (in some cases to make them fit standard Spanish-language conventions), and prologues written to present them to the metropolitan audience. I show how colonial interventions did not stop after independence but have continued to affect Hispanophone African texts up until today.