Kenneth W. Harrow

Thresholds of change in African literature : the emergence of a tradition

PART ONE - Thresholds of Change in African Literature: The Emergence of a Tradition - Literatures of T moignage and the Foundations for Change - From T moignage to Revolt - PART TWO - The Margins of Autobiographical Literature of T moignage - Flying Without Perching: Metaphor, Proverb, and Gendered Discourse - Of Fathers and Sons: A Cusp in African Literature - The Ironic Limits of Revolt - Change on the Margins - Literature of the Oxymoron: The Crossed Lovers - The Still Point of Transition - Crossing the Bridge of Change - The Dance of the Creole - Wordplay at the Waters Edge - Conclusion: Esu At The Crossroads

Ancient Tribal Warfare: Foundational Fantasies of Ethnicity and History

Narratives of the genocide in Rwanda, counternarratives denying one version or another, return to the foundation fantasy, to the objectification of the other, and to historicist constructions that obscure as they reveal their perspective on the events: the more the commemoration of the genocide focuses our attention on the horrific events of 1994, and restricts the boundaries of time to that period, the more our attention is diverted from the events in the DRC and the involvement of the Rwandan government; and the more the spatial divisions and objectification of others will be served, providing the conditions of possibility for genocides and atrocities that would seem to have no end.

Manthia Diawara's Waves and the Problem of the "Authentic"

Abstract: This article begins by tracking how the delineation of “New Cinema” in the recent work of Manthia Diawara differs significantly from the approaches that had been dominant when he published his initial study on African cinema in 1992. The changes lead us to position current filmmaking practices vis-à-vis Nollywood film, and to ask how the formation of the cinematic subject functions in contemporary “new waves” of cinema. Résumé: Cet article commence en repérant, dans le travail récent de Manthia Diawara, comment la démarcation du “nouveau cinéma” diffère considérablement des approches qui avaient été dominantes lorsque son étude initiale sur le cinéma africain a été publiée en 1992. Les changements nous mènent à positionner les pratiques cinématographiques actuelles vis-à-vis le cinéma Nollywood, et à se demander comment la formation des sujets cinématiques fonctionne dans les “nouvelles vagues” contemporaines de cinéma.

IN TRIBUTE TO THINGS FALL APART

In 1958, when Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, African literature could not be said to have existed as a discipline. This, despite the fact that there had been hundreds of years of oral texts accumulating on the continent; despite decades of négritude poetry, culminating with Senghor’s 1948 publication of the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française; despite the forerunners in Batouala, Chaka, numerous South Africa writers like Mphahlele, Abrahams, francophone authors like Beti, Laye, Oyono, and especially Nigerian forerunners, Tutuola, Fagunwa and Ekwensi. Certainly, with the publication of Things Fall Apart, African literature did not magically appear as a discipline. But the historical significance of its appearance was that it played a determinant role in the germination of the disciplinary study of all those works under the heading of African literature. Of course, African literature always existed in various forms, but the study of a corpus denominated African literature had to wait for those founding texts to generate the academic interest, the public demand, the publishing commitment, and finally the political heft that would enable the coalescence of these factors into a field, and then a scholarly discipline.

The power and the word: 'L'aventure ambiguë' and 'The wedding of Zein'

The full-grown Sufi is thus conscious of being, like other men, a prisoner of a world of forms, but unlike them he is also conscious of being free, with a freedom which immeasurably outweighs his imprisonment. He may therefore be said to have two centres of consciousness, one human and one Divine, and he may speak now from one and now from another, which accounts for certain apparent contradictions (Lings, 1977: 14).

Ethics and difference: A response to Simon Gikandi's Theory, literature, and moral considerations

We have to credit Simon Gikandi with the effort to return us to the ethical issues surrounding notions of difference, argued in a his recent article in RAL 32.4 (2001): 1-18, based on a plenary presentation at the 2000 African Literature Association conference. Gikandi elaborates a position that I find ultimately problematic, though the issues discussed en route focus us on the one critical question with which I am concerned, that is, what relationship is there between the notion of difference and ethics. Gikandi opposes a European-centered ideology of difference that concerns itself with nonmainstream, marginalized groups against an Africanized concept, one associated with the history of the construction of African peoples according the European notions of otherness. In the former we have a postmodern attempt to deconstruct Eurocentered notions of universal values and concomitant mechanisms of cultural domination to which modernism was given. In that context, understandings of difference function in favor of the dispossessed, those barred from sharing in the regimens of power and authority. In Africa, European racialist ideologies, such as those adopted by the Belgians and Germans in Rwanda, and elsewhere, were put to deadly, conflictual purposes, marking difference, as understood from the elaborations of Negritude to Hutu Power, as the excuse to avoid ethical imperatives. In the case of the European deconstructionist move, the ethical imperative was devalued along with the universalist claims of Enlightenment humanism. The corresponding devaluation of Eurocentric ideologies would account for the “ethnic excuse,” examples of which are the sacrifices in Things Fall Apart (1958) or Death and the King’s Horseman (1975). Gikandi does not mention the sacrifices in Mudimbe’s novels since it is there that the ethnic excuse is reduced by parodic distance to the very sort of statement towards which Gikandi is reaching, that is, the need to maintain the ethic imperative in the face of the ethnic claims of difference. Thus Gikandi works out a frame in which difference can be first associated with modernist notions of otherness, corresponding to the colonial period in which European notions were read onto African identities. This “difference” corresponds to Otherness, at its most radical, and attests to the arrogant nature of a modernism that assumed its primacy and inevitability. The refutation of modernism’s universalist claims, and its corresponding humanist dependency on Enlightenment thinking, emerges with the second notion of difference as multiplicity, or, inevitably, diversity. Gikandi writes, in reference to his attempts to utilize these arguments to counter his students’ adverse reactions to the above-mentioned sacrifices in Things Fall Apart or Death and the King’s Horseman, that his response was “to call attention to the multiplicity—and differance—of these texts and

Under the Cover of the Way: A Feminist Reading of Hampat B's Kadara

I n 1983, I published “A Sufi Interpretation of Le re g a rd du ro i,” in R e s e a rc h in African L i t e r a t u re s, an article in which I challenged the hithert o E u rocentric interpretations of Laye’s novel. The narrative had been t reated as a Christian allegory, despite the fact that the author was Muslim, and the pattern of the narrative fit a Sufi Muslim mold. In general, Muslim a p p roaches to African literature were rarely taken. My interpretation was based on the view that R e g a rd was stru c t u red around the journey of an initiate, or pilgrim, under the tutelage of a guide, who would lead him to the ultimate goal, union with the divine. As I had little to orient me in this a p p roach, I followed Martin Lings and other Sufi scholars, who described the beliefs associated with the Sufi Wa y, with its stages, the roles of knowledge, truth, and love, and the series of obstacles on the pilgrim’s path. In s h o rt, I presented the keys to a hermeneutic that would explain the symbolism of the text, as a guide would reveal the meaning of the mysteries of the Wa y. When I was done, I felt I had unraveled the symbolism of the text, with all its various parts elucidated and joined in one compre h e n s i b l e p a t t e rn . Yet within a short number of years, I began to grow uneasy over the i n t e r p retation. Reading Barthes, it occurred to me that I had transform e d R e g a rd into a readerly text in which the free play of meaning had been held down and reduced to the level of a mechanical explanation. Perhaps I had been blinded by the beauty of the Wa y, the devotion of the seeker, and the g l o ry and stature of the guide. I had been seduced by the path of initiation, and found it natural to join the sociological fact of Laye’s upbringing in K o u roussa with that of the Sufi traditions that had permeated some of the Muslim orders, like the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya, and that had been active a round Kankan and Kouroussa. Some years later I came across Hampaté Bâ’s Ti e rno Bokar: le sage de B a d i a g a r a (1957) where Hampaté Bâ portrays a figure of devotion and spirituality comparable to the Sufi figures in the works of Laye (Le re g a rd du ro i , 1954), Cheikh Hamidou Kane (L’ a v e n t u re ambiguë, 1961), and Tayeb Salih (The Wedding of Zein, 1968). Cast in autobiographical form, Hampaté Bâ re p resents himself as Ti e rn o ’s disciple; Hampaté Bâ’s personality, style, and values all exerted the same seductive force as did Laye’s R e g a rd or Salih’s Z e i n, building upon the beauty of the Wa y, the path of truth. This reading of K a ï d a r a could then be termed the end of the aff a i r. Hampaté Bâ terms K a ï d a r a a “récit initiatique peul,” and the pattern of initiation is not difficult to discern. Yet the sense of satisfaction in tracing its lines along the trajectory of a Sufi model can no longer be sustained, and in pondering the basis for that unease, I now question the fundamental p roject of all of Hampaté Bâ’s work.

The journey of the West African migrant: Francophone cinematic representations in Frontiéres, Bamako, and La Pirogue

That an empathic response to testimonies can lead to altruism is a key assumption of much cultural research on trauma and witnessing, which prides itself on its ethical commitment. Most trauma theorists also agree that empathy is to be distinguished from forms of affective involvement that do not recognize and respect the otherness of the other, and which are variously referred to as sympathy, projective identification, incorporation, or crude empathy. While this caveat against imperialism and appropriation is meant to prevent empathy from turning into a closed-loop process, canonical trauma theory itself has been plagued by Eurocentrism from its inception, as it tends not to adequately address the sufferings of members of non-Western or minority groups. In this essay, I will discuss the challenges that transcultural witnessing poses for empathic understanding and ethical thinking, using both theoretical and literary texts as examples, and focusing specifically on Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What. Published by McSweeney’s in 2006, What Is the What, subtitled The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, is a collaborative first-person testimony that tells the story of a refugee from the second Sudanese civil war. I argue that in this book Eggers manages both to stay true to the continuing cultural demand for empathy with distant others and to defuse or counter the prevailing scepticism about the morality of empathic identification that tends to find such efforts hopelessly wanting. What Is the What does not resolve all the moral ambiguities surrounding transcultural witnessing, but it is unafraid to confront them and refuses to be paralysed by them. The novel harnesses feeling in the face of suffering while continually reminding the reader that Deng’s experiences are not his or hers to inhabit. Rather than solidifying an already existing community, it calls a community of otherwise distant and disconnected people into being for the purposes of alleviating suffering.

Garritano Carmela. African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013. xii + 246 pp. List of Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Notes. List of Films and Videos. References. Index.

museum’s director, Francesco Paolo Campione, in which he provides details about the connection between the museum and the Everlés and their donation to the museum of the objects in the exhibit. This is followed by an excellent chapter, “In the Sorcerer’s Cauldron,” in which DarkowskaNidzgorski provides a splendid overview of both the history and the geographical extent of puppet theater in West Africa. “The Inaccessible Theater of Memory: Masks, Marionettes, and Bamana Society,” by Paolo Maiullari, focuses, through a postmodern lens, on the Bamana festival known as Sogo bo (The Animals Come Out). In “The Animals Come Out: The Bamana Mask Festival,” Elisabeth den Otter expands on Maiullari’s chapter with an emphasis on specific puppets, including those performed in and around canoes. Gianinazzi’s chapter, “Ci-Wara: Multiple Meanings and Art,” covers the ci-wara performance—the mythical antelope figure—in great detail. All of the chapters of the text are richly illustrated with excellent field photographs from several sources. These and the clearly written chapter texts will provide Italian speakers with a comprehensive introduction to the fascinating world of Bamana masquerades and puppet theater. The catalogue section of the book illustrates the forty-four objects shown in the October‒March 2013 exhibition. Among these objects are nine ci-wara antelopes and thirty-five puppets. Sogo: Maschere e Marionette Bamana is beautifully produced and greatly enhanced by excellent black-and-white text illustrations and color catalogue photographs. Although its intended audience is Italian speakers, the illustrations alone will make it appealing to a wide audience of those interested in African art. These two excellent volumes, covering the arts of diverse geographic areas of Africa, highlight the creative talents of numerous artists that now greatly enrich a global audience. Pascal James Imperato State University of New York New York, New York doi:10.1017/asr.2013.93 Pascal.Imperato@downstate.edu

32.95. Paper.

mism, for he believes that members of NMMZ are keen to consider local community participation seriously and hold a genuine desire for meaningful consultation with all stakeholders. He advises NMMZ to loosen its control over management and the representation of Great Zimbabwe to allow space for the effective inclusion of other perspectives on its past. It remains to be seen how far and how seriously the NMMZ will take the advice. This is a challenging and deeply absorbing book that will fascinate a wide range of readers, offering provocative analytical insights on Great Zimbabwe. There is little doubt that in The Silence of Great Zimbabwe the author sets a high and most welcome standard of excellence for future scholarship.