Contemporary African Literature in English

Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications

M. Krishnan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137378330
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

Contemporary African Literature in English explores the contours of representation in contemporary Anglophone African literature, drawing on a wide range of authors including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aminatta Forna, Brian Chikwava, Ngug? wa Thiong'o, Nuruddin Farah and Chris Abani.

1

Ethics, Conflict and Re(-)presentation

Representation and Re-presentation

The impetus to view the African literary text at the intersection of the aesthetic and the political gives rise to an ethical imperative at the site of representation.¹ As Gilroy reminds us, in approaching discursive constructions of the black Atlantic it is essential that ‘we reread and rethink this expressive counterculture not simply as a succession of literary tropes and genres but as a philosophical discourse which refuses the modern, occidental separation of ethics and aesthetics, culture and politics’.² These arenas of meaning, so often received in isolation, remain intimately intertwined, blocking the efficacy of partial perspectives which give pride of place to one above the other. The literary work cannot, with this understanding, be seen in fragments or by slices. Rather, the totality of value for the literary text comes from its articulation of the political and the aesthetic, and the ethical meanings which arise from this articulated approach. Because the literary work operates through what may be seen as a doubling of representation, both in the ‘aesthetic appropriation of reality in the work and the appropriation of the work’s aesthetic reality by the recipient’,³ the aesthetic object plays a central role in linking cultural re-presentation with the construction of ideological horizons. As Tobin Siebers has noted, aesthetics, like ethics and politics, represents ‘the repetition of experience’ through which communities and value systems are formed,⁴ a crucial aspect of what Terry Eagleton refers to as the ‘project of reconstructing the human subject from the inside, informing its subtlest affections and bodily responses with this law which is not a law’.⁵ Framed as such, the aesthetic and the political become deeply intertwined in the negotiation of meaning and representation in the text.

Of course, asserting a link between the aesthetic, the political and the work of ethical judgement is not a new endeavour. Indeed, the role of aesthetic re-presentation in the development of social, political and moral evaluations has been a central concern of theory since Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgement and moral perfection. In this chapter, however, I consider the ethical imperative of literary practice in a slightly different manner, through a focus on the implications of the slippage between aesthetic re-presentation and political representation. This discussion draws considerably on Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ and the significantly-rewritten version of that same essay published in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.⁶ As one of the most widely-cited essays circulating within postcolonial studies today, and, at the same time, one of the most widely misunderstood, the concerns and questions which Spivak raises both in the original essay and subsequent revision are of a central importance to the focus of inquiry in this study, evoking the delicate balance of the aesthetic and the political in a call to vigilance for the producers of postcolonial intellectual histories. In these texts, Spivak addresses the question of representation through an extended reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, dwelling in particular on the distinction between vertreten (speaking-for or socio-political representation) and darstellen (speaking of, or aesthetic re-presentation), glossed as ‘proxy’ and ‘portrait’ or ‘representation or rhetoric as tropology and as persuasion’.⁷ Put simply, darstellen acts as re-presentation in the rhetorical or aesthetic sense, while vertreten, by contrast, refers to a literal ‘standing-in-for’, as social or political representation. Focusing on this dual sense of the term, Spivak considers the elision of these two senses of representation as a type of appropriation of the Third World woman, the subaltern par excellence and a figure she describes as caught within the discourses of imperialism and patriarchy to her ultimate erasure.

As the introduction to this study indicated, a predominant tension surrounding the development of postcolonial studies as a discipline has centred on the question of representation. As Lazarus aptly notes, ‘“Representation” is perhaps the single most fraught and contentious term within postcolonial studies’.⁸ Who, precisely, does the work of postcolonial criticism? To whom do they address themselves and of whom are they attempting to speak? Which voices are heard and which are lost in the shuffle? Based in these concerns, a primary criticism of postcolonial literary studies has been its celebration of certain highly-educated, middle-class and transnational intellectuals operating from within the Euro-American academy. Again, to invoke Lazarus, ‘representation is taken to be a game of high stakes; the danger is thought to rest in the fact that in speaking of or for others […] we might unintentionally and unwittingly find ourselves both objectifying “them” and superimposing our own elite cognitive maps on “them”’.⁹ The chasm between the subject positioning of these scholars and the unspeaking masses whom they represent has been cited as a critical blind spot of the discipline, reflected in literary practice by the ‘representative status’ of the writers of decolonization.¹⁰ For Spivak, the problem arises precisely when the representational status of the postcolonial intellectual elides the two very different senses of vertreten and darstellen into a single term. As Spivak puts it, while these two meanings of representation are related, ‘running them together, especially in order to say that beyond both is where oppressed subjects speak, act, and know for themselves, leads to an essentialist, utopian politics’.¹¹ This has been further explained by Dina Al-Kassim, who states that:

The representative intellectual, in wanting to/attempting to speak for the other, inevitably rebounds into a descriptive and representation depiction of that other’s speech and interest because the subaltern is denied the right of entry. To demand or make room for the subaltern’s speech is equivalent to demanding that the subaltern adopt the discourse of political agency and enter into that enlightenment space of self-representation. This demand effectively censors those others who cannot assume their own ‘image’ in the space cleared for an enlightenment politics by perversely asking that the subaltern cease to be ‘herself’ as the price of becoming a modern subject.¹²

By doing the work of vertreten through darstellen, the subaltern is spoken for and assumed, as a totemic figure, to attend to a certain narrative and intellectual appropriation which suppresses the play of difference in favour of a continued assimilation of the already-known and the overdetermined. Writing on the problems of working-class representations, Peter Hitchcock has stated that ‘the challenge […] is to resist both the idealism that darstellen can simply do the work of vertreten and the defeatism that brackets the cultural as some kind of bourgeois fib’.¹³ At the same time, recognizing that ‘“speaking the truth about” and “acquiring the authority to speak for” implicate one another’ does not require that we ‘choose between attention to truth […] and attention to rhetoric’.¹⁴ Instead, this doubling of representation creates the very situation under which narrative, in its representational thrust, defines a space for perceiving-otherwise, whose importance remains central to the task of recuperation and regeneration. In the context of contemporary African literature the challenge, then, becomes that of resisting the urge to turn re-presentation into a straightforward representation, while maintaining the text’s position in articulating an other voice, through an attention to the play of representation in both senses. This form of representational responsibility would thus signal, as Thomas Keenan aptly states, ‘the acknowledgement of and response to complicity, implication, an acknowledgement that by definition can never be complete’.¹⁵ Particularly because, as R. Radhakrishnan notes, ‘the dominant ideology denies those different subject-positions their histories and their perspectival productions of their own agendas’,¹⁶ the notion that any single perspective may occupy the role of representative for what is, as Spivak phrases it, ‘the heterogeneous collection of subjects in the space of difference’¹⁷ becomes the site of an ethical instability, one which both interacts with the materiality of the text and impedes its resistant qualities, and which calls for a perpetual vigilance towards its formations.

The tension surrounding representation and its dual force is perhaps best exemplified in the controversy surrounding Fredric Jameson’s postulation of Third World literature as ‘necessarily’ national allegory, a concept outlined in his ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’,¹⁸ which will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter. In what has become the canonical response, Aijaz Ahmad writes that, in this move, Jameson flattens the complexity of Third World literary production, homogenizes what is a vastly heterogeneous landscape and engages in a binary-formulation of ‘us and them’ rhetoric which relies on a falsely-inflated notion of nationalism in the once-colonized world.¹⁹ Since the publication of that response, Ahmad’s reading of Jameson has in many ways become the de facto means through which the notion of national allegory has been focalized.²⁰ Yet, despite the vitriol with which it has been received, Jameson’s text provides an insightful account of the dynamics of representation in postcolonial, or Third World, literature. For Jameson, the construction of Third World literature as national allegory appears as a necessity not through its production by the Third World writer, but as a central aspect of its reception by the First World reader. As Julie McGonegal writes, ‘at the core of Jameson’s thesis is a recognition that “Third World” texts are a priori interpreted as Third World: there is and can be no possibility of unmediated access to the Other’.²¹ In other words, Third World texts are received as national allegory not so much because of their content as their conditions of circulation. Interpellated as ‘Other’, the Third World text ‘arrive[s] belatedly, always already mediated by prior interpretations and carrying the inscriptions of readings that went before’.²² This sense of the ‘always already mediated’, in turn, hinges upon the ways in which these texts exist ‘within the global economic and political system that produces the third world as the third world’.²³ As commodities circulated within a global market of readers, publishers and writers, Third World literature, a category into which African literature has certainly been interpellated, is subject to a cultural framework of exchange that, as Arjun Appadurai, in his exposition of commoditization and value, notes, ‘lies at the complex intersection of temporal, cultural, and social factors’ in which ‘the very definition of what constitutes singularities as opposed to classes is a cultural question’.²⁴ In creating a class through its network of circulation, African literature, as a unified, global commodity, remains subject to the always a priori mediation of a global marketplace in which writers and their texts are positioned as representing a certain sanctioned vision of the continent, despite the multiplicity of re-presentations depicted within that body of work. In this sense, then, Jameson’s notion of the national allegory becomes less an indictment of ‘other’ literatures and more a means through which to process the complexities of global production, circulation and reception against the background of an overdetermined sense of that which is other.

In the realm of postcolonial literary studies, this elision of re-presentation with representation, or the aesthetic and the political work of the text, is of central importance. In engaging in the act of creating a work of narrative fiction, all of the writers under examination in this study can be said to engage in an act of re-presentation. At the same time, by virtue of their celebrity status, numerous accolades and wide readerships in North America and Europe, those authors feted internationally may equally become drawn into a discourse of representation, in which he or she functions as a stand-in of sorts for the numerous and diverse populations presented within their literary writing. Indeed, for certain authors this role as representative is a desirable corrective to the historical circulation of negative images of the African continent. In discussing her role as a representative of the continent, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for instance, has stated that she ‘hate[s] the image of Africa as simply a continent of starving people and warring people and, behind that, the notion of a continent of stupid people’, citing Western tendencies to forget that Africa, like anywhere else, is a continent rife with varied classes.²⁵ As Stephen Moss has explained, with her novels Adichie ‘is determined to show an Africa that isn’t one huge refugee camp—a continent with many diverse stories, not a single story of suffering and dependency’.²⁶ For Adichie, then, the work of cultural re-presentation takes on a distinctly political edge, directly confronting decades of negative stereotyping as a much-needed counter-discourse. Likewise, Aminatta Forna’s work has been located as part of the effort to advocate for the war-torn populations of Sierra Leone. As John Marx explains, ‘Forna’s name is on the byline of journalistic commentary about international justice and on the cover of both a memoir of political turmoil in Sierra Leone and the 2006 novel “of how it was to live as a woman in our country’s past” called Ancestor Stones’.²⁷ Certainly, both of these perspectives, and others like them, are laudable in their ultimate aim to destabilize hegemonic views of the African continent and find a venue for its diverse voices. At the same time, such authorial self-positionings open the possibility of further appropriation and reductionism at the site of reception, regardless of intention. Faced with this dilemma, others of these authors take a different approach to their role as representatives of African culture and society. Chris Abani, for example, has stated that, in literary inquiry, ‘the problem is we’re looking for something that doesn’t exist. We’re looking for authenticity. There is no such thing as authenticity. […] Art is never about its content it’s always about its scaffolding’, mocking the notion that art may be cathartic or provide a moment of total closure in its representative function.²⁸ At the same time, however, Abani’s own status as an artist is not so straightforwardly held. According to Abani’s publicity materials, following the publication of his first novel, Masters of the Board (1984), the then-teenaged author was sentenced to prison for allegedly providing the blueprint, with the novel, for a failed coup against the Babangida government. Later, having been released from prison, the author would become involved in protest and political theatre, leading to a series of additional periods of imprisonment, including a stint in Nigeria’s notorious Kiri Kiri maximum security prison, and culminating in a death sentence for treason. Yet, this very tale, rarely told by the man himself but widely circulated as part of his biography, was severely challenged by Ikhide R. Ikheloa in a November 2011 blog posting that claimed these details to be largely fabricated.²⁹ Linking what he claims to be the curious lack of official documentation of these events to a broader charge of authorial exploitation of the African continent in the name of international literary prestige, Ikheloa’s criticisms of Abani, along with the often-vitriolic debate they have sparked within the African literature community, indicate the level of unease and suspicion with which an attempt at a conscious separation of artistic re-presentation and social representation is met. The truth of Ikheloa’s allegations and the details of Abani’s early biography will likely be known by no one but the author himself. Nonetheless, the attacks against Abani illustrate the ways in which the demand for some level of verifiable proof of the author’s status, and therefore legitimacy, as a representative of African conflict emerges as a central concern tied directly to the literary value of his work. Reverting to a polemicism that demands a singly-determined politicization of the text, the controversy surrounding Abani’s biography points towards the continual lack of ease with which the transnational circulation of African artistic formations is met.

Of no small significance in all of the above cases is the fact of location, the noti...