Patrice Nganang Research Articles

A Trail of Crab Tracks by Patrice Nganang

Reviewed by: A Trail of Crab Tracks by Patrice Nganang Natalie Wenzell Letsa Patrice Nganang A Trail of Crab Tracks Trans. Amy B. Reid. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 419 pages. PATRICE NGANANG'S NEWLY translated novel, A Trail of Crab Tracks, follows the relationship between Tanou, a Cameroonian American professor, and his father, Nithap, an aging retiree who is reluctantly persuaded to visit his son in the US. The first half of the novel focuses on the contemporary relationship between father and son split between homeland and diaspora. The second half, in which Nithap narrates his early life to his son, takes as its main subject the legacies of the UPC Rebellion and the role of violence and loyalty in the perpetuation of intergenerational memory. The UPC Rebellion was a war for independence fought primarily in the Bamiléké region of Cameroon against the French, beginning in 1955. By the time of independence in 1960, as described in harrowing detail in the last one hundred pages of A Trail of Crab Tracks, the French had brutalized the Bamilékés, creating concentration [End Page 69] camps, burning down villages, and leaving behind the heads of executed rebels in order to terrorize the local population. The conflict continued well after independence, with violence and terrorism between guerrilla groups and the new French-backed Cameroonian regime tormenting the Bamiléké region until the early 1970s. Because of the atrocities committed by the French as well as the fact that France has continued to back successive autocratic regimes in Cameroon up until today, the UPC Rebellion—also known as la guerre cachée, or the "Hidden War"—is notoriously underdocumented. As part of a public relations campaign to rebrand France's dubious relationship to its former colonies, French president Emmanuel Macron traveled to Cameroon this past July to announce the opening of French archival materials on the UPC Rebellion. In this context, Nganang's novel could not be more timely. Frank discussion of the Hidden War in Cameroon remains taboo, and the nature of memory and the legacies of violence under these circumstances are deeply woven into the themes of the narrative. The way in which the novel jumps between time, place, and characters can be chaotic; the prose is oftentimes more obscuring than clarifying—a quality that is evocative of the nature of politics and rumor in contemporary Cameroon. Nganang writes unapologetically for a Cameroonian audience; there are some clues left in the footnotes meant to help a foreign reader make sense of local subtleties. But the end product lays bare an effort to plumb the depths of the Cameroonian soul in the most intimate ways. Nganang's character Pastor Tbongo declares to Earnest Ouandié that Cameroon lacks a soul, "But that's what we need to create for this country. That's the only task for our era. For our own survival, we have to teach Cameroonians what unites us; we have to give some substance to this country that is self-destructing. That's what I'm trying to do here." Words that are as true today as they could have been sixty years ago. Natalie Wenzell Letsa University of Oklahoma Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

The Abolition of Museums of African Art

October 21 2021 The Abolition of Museums of African Art Patrice Nganang Patrice Nganang Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Stony Brook University. patrice.nganang@stonybrook.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Patrice Nganang Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Stony Brook University. patrice.nganang@stonybrook.edu Online Issn: 1937-2108 Print Issn: 0001-9933 © 2021 by the Regents of the University of California2021Regents of the University of California African Arts (2021) 54 (4): 5–7. https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00609 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Search Site Citation Patrice Nganang; The Abolition of Museums of African Art. African Arts 2021; 54 (4): 5–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00609 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsAfrican Arts Search Advanced Search The way a debate is framed decides upon the kinds of questions it raises. Such is the case with the retrocession of African art that is present in Western museums to the African continent where it came from. The history of the debate itself could be a matter of another debate, as well as where the questions came from and who raises them. But these are more matters of dispute, than of reasoning. At a time when issues of minority and citizen rights are thrust in the forefront of people's attention—BLM, les gilets jaunes, etc.—the call to restitute African pieces of art gains a traction that is informed by the will of Emmanuel Macron to unearth a debate of the 1970s by asking the same question whose answers were already voiced during... © 2021 by the Regents of the University of California2021Regents of the University of California You do not currently have access to this content.

Comment s’en sortir dans les « sous-quartiers » de Yaoundé ?

Dans Temps de chien, Patrice Nganang ecrit et donne a lire les sous-quartiers de Yaounde, megapole postcoloniale. Ceux-ci constituent un espace de sociabilite, de parole, de theâtre, d’illusion et de rumeur, mais egalement un espace de violence, de chaos, de danger et de tragedie ; un espace voue a la survie deshumanisante, potentiellement genocidaire. Le narrateur subalterne, le chien au nom d’homme, Mboudjak, cherche a repondre a la question : « Ou est l’homme ? » et l’ecrivain esquisse des pistes pour « s’en sortir » par le recours a l’humour, l’imagination, la philosophie, la parole, l’etre ensemble, le combat politique, l’humanisme et l’art engage.

Book Reviews

Michael J. Bazyler and Frank M. Tuerkheimer, Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust (New York: New York University Press, 2014) - Reviewed by Klaus BerghahnMary Fulbrook and Andrew Port, eds. Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler (New York: Berghahn Press, 2013) - Reviewed by Russell DaltonNina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang, ed. German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014) - Reviewed by Jason VerberAndrew Wackerfuss, Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2015) - Reviewed by Robert TobinHans Kundnani, The Paradox of German Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) - Reviewed by Beverly CrawfordGavriel D. Rosenfeld, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) - Reviewed by Jeffrey Luppes

L’Écran du bestiaire

The most critically successful works of two Central African novelists writing in French, Alain Mabanckou and Patrice Nganang, are told from the point of view of a narrator who, for one reason or another, could be considered intellectually inferior to the average person. This article will show that by appropriating negative colonial stereotypes of Africans as child-like or animal-like, writers are able to provide a counter-discursive response to these stereotypes and gain greater stylistic freedom to indigenize the former colonial language, thanks to the intermediary of what we will call the intellectually subordinate narrator – a narrator who the reader expects, and therefore accepts, to be cognitively different. We will examine how this phenomenon works as a form of strategic exoticism in Mabankou’s Memoires de porc-epic (2006) and Nganang’s Temps de chien (2001).

<em>Preemptive Testimony:</em> Literature as Witness to Genocide in Rwanda

This article examines the work of literature as testimony to tragedy in the context of the Rwandan genocide and the 1998 “Writing in Duty to Memory” project, in which ten African authors visited Rwanda with the idea of bearing witness to what happened in 1994. The article surveys varying outlooks on the value of literary testimony, particularly Patrice Nganang’s idea of preemptive writing. Nganang admonishes African authors to preempt future tragedy rather than offer testimonies to past trauma. By reading the works of two “Writing in Duty to Memory” project authors, Boris Diop’s Murambi, the Book of Bones and Veronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda , I argue that literature can not only restore the inhumanity of events like genocide, but also preempt future tragedy by exposing the conditions that make violence possible and imagining a way to move forward constructively.

German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian and Oceanic Experiences. Edited by Nina Berman, Klaus Muhlhahn, and Patrice Nganang. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 356 pages + 11 b/w illustrations. $75.00.

German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian and Oceanic Experiences. Edited by Nina Berman, Klaus Muhlhahn, and Patrice Nganang. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 356 pages + 11 b/w illustrations. $75.00.

The infrapolitics of subordination in Patrice Nganang's Dog Days

Patrice Nganang's award winning novel Dog Days illustrates a recent trend in African literature in French from the mid-1990s, namely a move away from narratives about rulers to narratives about the ruled, a move away from studying the socially dominant to analyzing the socially subordinate. This paper aims to foreground some of the thinking on social subordination in recent African literature by examining Patrice Nganang's Dog Days in the light of James Scott's work on power relations and resistance in his book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, as well as Achille Mbembe's reflections on power relations in his book, On the Postcolony. Unlike earlier works of African literature that either underscore the process of victimisation of social subordinates and/or the place of resistance in their everyday acts, these more recent works exude pessimism about the willingness of subordinate subjects to engage in resistance, while affirming the necessity for, and efficacy of direct resistance as the primary antidote for social disorder. In the theory of social subordination elaborated upon in this novel which accords with, but also contradicts, Scott's analysis of the nature and process of resistance at particular points, acts of deference on the part of social subordinates do not necessarily conceal hidden transcripts. Furthermore, and to the extent that we occasionally encounter hidden transcripts, such transcripts are noteworthy mainly in so far as they instigate direct resistance against those who exercise power unjustly.

Aesthetics of subtlety and the postcolony: a response to ‘The Infrapolitics of Subordination in Patrice Nganang's Dog Days’

This article offers a new lens in the analysis of subordination in literary texts. It seeks to refine the analysis of resistance which has been an integral aspect of postcolonial literature and the...

Globalization, mondialisation and the immonde in Contemporary Francophone African Literature

Taking as its theoretical frame of reference Jean-Luc Nancy's distinction between globalization and mondialisation, this article explores the relationship between contemporary Africa, the ‘world’ and the ‘literary’. The discussion centres on a number of present-day African novelists, and looks in particular at a controversial recent text by the Cameroonian writer and critic, Patrice Nganang, who is inspired by the work of the well-known theorist of postcolonial Africa, Achille Mbembe. For both writers ‘Africa’, as a generic point of reference, is seen in terms of a certain genealogy of Africanist thinking, from colonial times through to the contemporary postcolonial era, and the article reflects on what a radical challenge to this genealogy might entail. Using a more phenomenologically oriented reading of monde (world) and immonde (abject, literally un-world), this rupture could be conceived in terms of the kind of ‘epistemological break’ that thinkers like Althusser and Foucault introduced into common usage and theoretical currency in contemporary French thought back in the 1960s.

<em>Littératures africaines et comparatisme</em> ed. Florence Paravy

Reviewed by: Littératures africaines et comparatisme Dominic Thomas Littératures africaines et comparatisme ed. Florence Paravy. Preface by Jean-Marc Moura. Paris: L’Association pour l’Etude des Littératures Africaines et le Centre des Sciences de la Littérature Française de l’Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, 2011. 211 pp. ISBN: 97812917403204 paper. These proceedings date back to a conference focusing on African literatures held at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense in 2008. They are divided into four sections, “Quelles frontières pour les études littéraires,” “Horizons continentaux,” “Littératures africaines et héritage européen,” and “Migrations et disporas,” and are augmented with a preface by Jean-Marc Moura, one of France’s most esteemed specialists in the field of “francophone postcolonial studies.” As Moura points out, “le comparatisme a eu du mal à intégrer les littératures extra-occidentales à ses objets d’enseignement et de recherches” ‘the field of comparative literary studies in France has struggled to incorporate non-Western works in its curriculum and research’ (5), a remark echoed in the opening chapter by Charles Bonn, who observes the “peu de place que tiennent les littératures francophones, et plus particulièrement celles du Tiers-Monde ou des immigrations, dans l’enseignement universitaire français” ‘limited space occupied by francophone literatures, especially those originating in the third world or in the context of immigration’ (13). Indeed, if the problematic status and critical reception of postcolonial studies in France are now well-known, the institutional impact these heated debates have had on comparative African literary studies has in turn received less critical attention. As this book underscores, this can be partially attributed to infrastructural reasons. For the most part, the field of comparative literary studies in general in France can be characterized by its adherence to, what are often, outmoded paradigms of canon formation concentrated on various European language traditions and providing an analytical and critical framework that proves inadequate when it comes [End Page 199] to addressing the complex levels at which diverse African literatures are produced, excluding, as Charles Bonn shows, “identités problématiques, migrantes, transnationales” ‘problematic, migrant, or transnational identities’ (14). Not surprisingly then, recourse is made to those critical models developed, for the most part, in English-language scholarship in postcolonial studies, world literature, and global literature. After all, this pluri-disciplinary research has played a determining role in expanding the curriculum in language departments in the United States (and elsewhere) and to accounting more accurately for the broader experience of Europe in the world during and since colonialism. For example, the United States has been particularly receptive to “francophone” African and Caribbean writers for some time now—Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Assia Djebar, Alain Mabanckou, Patrice Nganang, Emmanuel Dongala, and Abdourahman A. Waberi—whereas such institutional appointments remain inconceivable in France. Molly Grogan Lynch considers the various blind spots in the 2007 Manifesto for a World Literature in French and in those subsequent attempts to decode the “postcolonial” in both the French notion of “littérature monde” and the English-language term “world literature.” Conceptual and theoretical frameworks developed in other research environments offer the potential of enriching our readings of cultural, political, and sociological materials in other languages, but how does one begin to engage in such comparative analysis given the complex manner in which national literatures were conceived and elaborated in the aftermath of colonialism, asks Dominique Ranaivoson in her contribution? Likewise, language and orality in the African context (as examined in Ursula Baumgardt’s essay) share particularities that cannot automatically be explained without elaborating a new analytical apparatus, one that would simultaneously have to address how analogous language traditions (the case of Swahili, for example, in Elena Bertoncini’s “Les trois littératures swahilies”) exist in transnational contexts. In turn, contributors suggest what can be learned from a comparative focus organized thematically (le “roman d’apprentissage” or Bildungsroman, as discussed by Christine Le Quellec Cottier) in terms of “European” influences on African texts or writers as different as Valentin Y. Mudimbe, Léopold Sédar Senghor, or Cheikh Anta Diop, whether they be from antiquity (as in Bernard...

Writing the Postcolonial Animal: Patrice Nganang's Temps de Chien

Patrice Nganang introduces an animal character in his novel Temps de chien and the dog is the autodiegetic narrator who begins the story: “Je suis un chien,” (“I am a dog”) he says at the outset. Having a dog speak in a kind of canine autobiography is not new—Miguel de Cervantes (Novela del coloquio de los perros, 1613) and E. T. A. Hoffmann (Die neusten Schicksale des Hundes Berganza, 1814) did it before—but Patrice Nganang couples it with geographical transplantation: the story takes place in Yaoundé, Cameroon, which is a way of decentering the point of view onto another continent. Moreover, endowing animals with the power of speech has been fairly common since Aesop and in every oral tradition, especially in tales, but this practice is part of a strategy typical of postcolonial literature, which aims at reclaiming an oral tradition that had been muzzled by colonization for a long time, as well as at appropriating Western literary genres. As postcolonial studies tend to join environmental approaches and “animal studies,” this article aims at showing to what extent animal autobiography partakes of a philosophical and political projects which aspires to un-think Eurocentrism and to deconstruct logocentrism in the context of a literature which renews the pastoral and the fable.

Patrice Nganang's <em>L'invention du beau regard</em> and <em>Dog Days</em>: Three Phases of Capitalism with Two Dogs and One Devouring Pig

Western epistemologies about Africa that have become dominant in the past decade focus upon Africa as a site of death. The alternative Shrobenius proposition sees in Africa the source of life. From the late 1970s on, it is the Afro-pessimistic paradigm that has been on the ascendancy. In Oyono's Une vie de boy (1956), the commandants and the Peres blancs (white fathers), displaced the African fathers, erecting an unbridgeable barrier between the African sons and the ruling colonial fathers. With the end of the Indepen-dences, those white fathers were replaced by the Autocrats whose imperial or presidential aspirations posed equally daunting barriers between themselves and the children of the Independences. We need to assess the passage from the 1950s to the present fiction of Nganang where the losses of the father are now occurring under globalization, with its shadows that are cast over the current African autocracy. This paper approaches this question of the changes from then to now by working through a model offered by Žižek that joins together the figures of the fathers, and their relations with their that joins together the figures of the fathers, and their relations with their women and children, with the dominant ideological and economic orders, thus providing us with a meaningful relationship between the kinds of subjectivities that are embodied in the protagonists and their respective symbolic/economic/political orders.

The nonhuman animal and Levinasian otherness: Contemporary narratives and criticism

This essay discusses literary Human Animal Studies in South Africa since 2000 with its implicit contradiction of Levinasian notions of nonhuman animals as faceless others. Literary Human Animal Studies foregrounds the representation of nonhuman animals, whether they are developed as subjects or have points of view and to what extent humans and animals inhabit a ‘shared’ world. I argue, citing examples, for some sense of an ethical shift in recent South African writing since JM Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (1999), Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller (2005), Michiel Heyns's The Reluctant Passenger (2003) and Njabulo S Ndebele's essay “The Year of the Dog” (2007) variously acknowledge nonhuman animals as ethical subjects. Yet no recent South African literary narrative focuses on dogs like Patrice Nganang's Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle (2006) which satirises Cameroonian politics as it contradicts conventional human‐animal hierarchies. Finally, the essay briefly considers the substantial ethical attention paid to animals in global English fiction.

The Ramifications of Linguistic Innovation in African Literature: An Interview With Patrice Nganang

The Ramifications of Linguistic Innovation in African Literature: An Interview With Patrice Nganang

Patrice Nganang. Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle. Translated from the French and with an afterword by Amy Baram Reid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. (Originally published as Temps de chien: chronique animale: roman. Paris: Serpent a plumes, 2001). vii + 232 pp. Glossary. Bibliography. $49.50. Cloth. $18.50. Paper.

Patrice Nganang. Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle. Translated from the French and with an afterword by Amy Baram Reid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. (Originally published as Temps de chien: chronique animale: roman. Paris: Serpent a plumes, 2001). vii + 232 pp. Glossary. Bibliography. 18.50. Paper. - Volume 50 Issue 2

Germany's colonial pasts

Part I: Politics of Colonial Culture 1. What Does German Have To Do With National Socialism? Pascal Grosse, Humboldt University Berlin 2. Introduction of Protectorate Law in Togo and David Simo, University of Yaounde, Cameroon 3. Weimar Republic: A Postcolonial State in a Still-Colonial World Marcia Klotz, University of California at Irvine Part II: Gender and Sexuality 4. Sittenkontrolle ist hier bereits eingefuhrt: Jewish Prostitution in German Southwest Joachim Warmbold, Tel Aviv University 5. Race, Gender, and Sexuality in German Southwest Africa. Han's Grimm's Sudafrikanische Novellen Sara Lennox, University of Massachusetts at Amherst 6. Going Native in Kenya Nina Berman, Ohio State University Part III: Identifications of Self and Other 7. Inventing the Auslandsdeutsche: Emigration, Colonial Fantasy, and German Diasporic Identity, 1848-1870 Bradley Naranch, Johns Hopkins University 8. Colonialism and the Culture of Respectability Woodruff D. Smith, University of Massachusetts at Boston 9. Music and German Construction of in the Pacific Vanessa Agnew, University of Michigan Part IV: Nazi Visions of Africa 10. Race Power in Postcolonial Germany: The German Africa Show and the National Socialist Sate, 1935-1940 Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, University of Pennsylvania 11. Raum ohne Volk: German Colonial Film Propaganda Robert Gordon, University of Vermont & Dennis Mahoney, University of Vermont Part V: Reflections of 12. Tranquebar Tales: The Colonial Labyrinths of a German Archive Gita Rajan, Hunter College of the City University of New York 13. Constructing Racial Difference in 'Colonial Poland' Kristin Kopp, Harvard University 14. Theology as a Vision for Colonialism: From Supersessionism to Dejudaization in German Protestantism Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College 15. Approaches from the Outside: Autobiographies of Black Men in Germany Alain Patrice Nganang, Shippensburg University

Cinema and Social Discourse in Cameroon (review)

Reviewed by: Cinema and Social Discourse in Cameroon Françoise Pfaff Tcheuyap, Alexie , ed. 2005. Cinema and Social Discourse in Cameroon. Bayreuth, Germany: Bayreuth African Studies. 342 pp. Indigenous sub-Saharan African filmmaking began some fifty years ago. Initially studied within historical, sociopolitical, cultural, linguistic, or thematic paradigms, it was analyzed later from semiotic, structuralist, postmodern, and postcolonial perspectives. A number of books and journals have treated films by Cameroonian directors, but no volume on Cameroon appeared in the country series on African cinema edited by Victor Bachy in the 1980s and 1990s, and the only book on Cameroonian cinema was Guy Jérémie Ngansop's Le cinéma camerounais en crise (1987). [End Page 97] Cinema and Social Discourse in Cameroon, edited by Alexie Tcheuyap, professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada, brings a timely contribution, especially on post-1980 films. The collection includes fourteen articles, most previously unpublished, by African and Western specialists in various fields. Tcheuyap's introduction describes the precariousness of Cameroonian film production and distribution under postcolonial autocratic governments intolerant of spoken, printed or cinematic challenges. Emphasizing the lack of coherent cultural policy and infrastructure such as film schools or postproduction facilities, Tcheuyap states that "producing a film in Cameroon, as in many African countries, is still something of a miracle" (p. 2). Films selected for inclusion were directed by Cameroonians, consider Cameroon as a category of analysis, or were filmed there. The chapters "attempt to address the aesthetic, ideological, and social problems related to images and their political significance in what is left of this rich country" (p. 4). Opening the first section, "The State, Images and Cultural Discourses," Gilbert Doho establishes a clear delineation between two groups of Cameroonian directors: (1) A self-censoring first generation, including Jean Pierre Dikongue-Pipa, Daniel Kamwa, and Alphonse Beni, that produced propagandistic documentaries celebrating the "father of the nation" or the prowess of soccer players, politically benign feature films on marriage and the dowry, and escapist action movies—all of which "refused to engage with burning national issues. This cinema was the site of a vicious collaboration between the state and independent filmmakers" (p. 22). (2) A second generation—Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Bassek Ba Kobhio, Jean-Marie Teno, and others "who deliberately use the camera not only to decolonize the gaze but also to deconstruct neocolonial political monsters" (p. 29). In contrast to the older, "apolitical" or "amnesic" directors, they question the past and present, and contribute to national reconstruction. Bole Butake explores local and cable television shows and the impact that imported Hollywood, Bollywood, Nigerian video, and Latin American telenovela productions have had on viewers' expectations. In the field of television, Butake foresees the success of private enterprise over government-sponsored initiatives. In contrast to these studies, other chapters consider individual films that, for multiple reasons, are screened more often at African, European, and U.S. festivals than in Cameroon, where U.S., French, and Asian movies predominate, except for an occasional commercial success, like Kamwa's Pousse Pousse (1975). Using semiotics and postmodern Western theories, Boulou E. de B'béri provides an interesting explanation of Duala cultural connotations in Dikongue-Pipa's Muna Moto (1975). Edmond Mfaboum keenly investigates self-censorship, "social cries," and "political silences" in the early films of Kamwa and Dikongue-Pipa. [End Page 98] In section two, "Postcolonial (De)Constructions," Jonathan Haynes and P. Julie Papaioannou offer informative postcolonial explorations of stylistically innovative works by Bekolo: Quartier Mozart (1992) and Aristotle's Plot (1996). Alain Patrice Nganang skillfully analyzes Teno's documentaries and feature films as "essays on power and authority in postcolonial Africa" (p. 140), and Sheila Petty aptly explores Teno'suse of space and camera angle as expressive vehicles in Clando (1996). Tcheuyap presents an innovative discussion of the occult in Bekolo's Quartier Mozart and Kamwa's Le cercle des pouvoirs (1997). He concludes that Kamwa "reveals the dark side of modernity and the invisible dynamics at work in the (dis)function of the postcolonial state, a veritable witch state" (p. 190). In the third section, "Writing Back and Theoretical Challenges," Sarah B. Buchanan convincingly demonstrates Bekolo's untraditional cinematic...