Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic
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Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478004622 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/06/2019 |
| Series: | Theory in Forms |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Ethnographic Didacticism and Africanist Melancholy
Leiris, HampâtéBâ, and the Epistemology of Style
Far from cursing my fate, I actually regarded the happenstance that had placed me there as curiously in keeping with what for a long time had seemed to me to be my destiny: the condition of not fitting in, a condition that had already driven me to travel in Africa a few years earlier, and that explains, in a general way, the taste I have for fiction, for memories of periods from which I am separated by time, and for countries other than my own.
— MICHEL LEIRIS, Biffures
Michel Leiris wrote the words that I borrow for this chapter's epigraph in Biffures (1948), a book he spent eight long years crafting and that comprises the first volume of his La règle du jeu tetralogy. He reminisces about being stuck in the Sahara on military duty in 1939, and his frustrated autobiographical reflections prompt him to liken this experience to his work nearly a decade earlier as "secretary-archivist" for the 1931–33 Dakar-Djibouti anthropological fieldwork mission across colonial Africa, work that led to the publication in 1934 of his fieldwork journal as L'Afrique fantôme. The existential disquiet Leiris expresses ties his trip across Africa to a sense of unreality and to a penchant for fiction whose wellspring lies in his deeply felt anxious rootlessness.
At the same time that Leiris was producing his daily reflections that located anthropology within this affective constellation in which discomfiture and fiction feed off each other, the Malian ethnographer, writer, and colonial civil servant Amadou Hampâté Bâ was also traveling around Africa, working for the French colonial state and conducting fieldwork on West African oral traditions in his spare time. He, too, kept a journal: as he moved from job to job in French West Africa during the 1920s and 1930s, he assiduously collected and recorded local cultural histories and observations on the changing circumstances of oral cultures in the face of French colonization. Hampâté Bâ would go on to receive formal training in ethnography, and he later incorporated many of his early anthropological observations into his two volumes of memoirs, Amkoullel, l'enfant peul (1991) and Oui mon commandant! (1994), in which he recounts his childhood and his early career as an indigenous colonial functionary.
Far from conventional autobiographical narratives, however, Hampâté Bâ's memoirs are at once more novelistic and more ethnographic, first, because in them he deftly shows off his skills as a storyteller, knowingly drawing readers in by developing himself as a literary character; and second, because he uses his sense of storytelling to communicate anthropological knowledge about "traditional" African cultures to an imagined community of non-African readers. I focus here more on Oui mon commandant! because in this second volume Hampâté Bâ also communicates anthropological knowledge about colonial ideologies and the inner workings of the French colonial state in Africa, and he does so by thinking through his own relation to the colonial project. Similar to Leiris in Biffures, Hampâté Bâ writes that his travels in French West Africa were prompted in part by his awareness of "not fitting in," since he was simultaneously a dedicated civil servant and an educated colonial subject who was fascinated by the local oral traditions French colonialism threatened to eradicate. Hampâté Bâ does not experience his lack of fit in the same uncomfortable terms as Leiris, but it nonetheless also inflects his taste for fiction by promoting his stylized self-development as a literary character.
Spurred by the juxtaposition of two writers whose divergent anthropological relationships to Africa determine the kinds of writing they produce, in this chapter I investigate ethnographic fiction's investment in transcultural forms of knowledge production that emerge from and respond to colonial social relations. Broadly, I focus here on the epistemological cartographies Hampâté Bâ and Leiris trace as they narrativize their movements across colonial Africa. Their imaginations of imperial space intersect with actually existing imperial formations, as the maps provided to readers in their texts attest. But they also de-realize imperial space, in the case of Leiris, and stretch it far beyond its intended boundaries, in the case of Hampâté Bâ. For the former, African imperial space is haunted by a ghostly, fictive version of the continent that fieldwork endlessly outlines. For the latter, as we will see, the communicability of ethnographic knowledge links imperial itineraries to an epistemological universalism that opens up empire's constitutively restrictive cartographic ideology.
This chapter connects genre, style, characterology, and imperial countermapping; it also highlights how ethnographic fiction cultivates and speaks to communities of readers, converting them into willing participants in anthropological knowledge games or, alternatively, trapping them in the occasionally monotonous frustrations and epistemological dead-ends of fieldwork. Hampâté Bâ and Leiris stand in, respectively, for these two directions of the relationship between ethnographic fiction and readerly publics. Hampâté Bâ turns to a form of anthropological storytelling I call "ethnographic didacticism." Leiris, by contrast, forces readers to wade through the affective mire of his difficulties with fieldwork to drive home his growing certainty that the creation of ethnographic knowledge is haunted by the ghostly double of its own imponderability or, worse, its unreality. Both of these figures use ethnographic stylistics to bolster their senses of fiction, but as I explore in this chapter, they do so to contrasting epistemological ends. As I argue here, regardless of how Leiris's L'Afrique fantôme and Hampâté Bâ's memoirs call on and communicate with readers, the speculative ties these texts generate with their publics are mediated by their authors' intensely personal relationships to the colonial situation writ large — relationships whose anthropological stakes are expressed in terms of both politics and writerly style.
These late colonial ethnographic fictions, communicating cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and confusing alienation, on the other, speak to contrasting artistic and political trends in the interwar French empire. As Gary Wilder has shown, after World War I, France tried to "reground itself" in the empire just when imperial projects were newly contested on the world stage. This period saw France adopt reformist and welfarist policies at home and in the colonies; in West Africa, humanist ethnology informed new administrative practices that were characterized by "a dual imperative to protect and to transform native society." But as France anxiously sought to redefine itself in relation to the empire in the interwar period, African, Antillean, and American intellectuals imagined new forms of Pan-African cultural politics based on alternative ways of knowing black experiences in the colonial world: Martinican Guyanese author René Maran published his Prix Goncourt–winning Batouala in 1921, for example, and Aimé Césaire, then a student, would begin publishing the journal L'Etudiant Noir in the mid-1930s. The Negritude movement and other forms of black internationalism coexisted with metropolitan anxieties about the empire, and the knowledge projects developed by Leiris and Hampâté Bâ situate relationships to readers within the push and pull of national concerns about imperial legitimacy and cosmopolitan projections of Africanist epistemologies. And these projects are embedded in acts of historical layering, as well, since Leiris's paratextual reframings and the posthumous publication of Hampâté Bâ's memoirs situate their late-colonial ethnographic fictions within postcolonial circuits of readership.
The 1931–33 Dakar-Djibouti mission legitimized fieldwork in French anthropology by bridging the epistemological and institutional gap separating those researchers who went to the field and brought home ethnographic data from those who, ensconced in their armchairs, simply interpreted it. Fieldwork was now expected to speak directly to publics at home, too. As Alice Conklin has argued, the highly publicized and lavishly funded Dakar-Djibouti mission tied 1930s anthropology in France to cultural resources that could be extracted from the colonies and put on display back home in an effort to instruct visitors to the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro about "[all] things colonial." Leiris's journal was always composed with a potential public in mind, but it does not fit neatly into this vein of instructive colonial marketing. The fictionality that occurs throughout L'Afrique fantôme is, instead, born of his deep ambivalence toward a colonial situation that made his idealized ethnographic desires possible, and the experience he provides for his readers serves to reveal the fraught underside of what the mission's backers imagined would be the streamlined transmission of anthropological knowledge about African societies under French rule.
Hampâté Bâ's memoirs, which contain an instructive project of their own, allow us to go even further and read this didactic impulse of early French anthropology against the grain: in his work he seeks not only to speak authoritatively to readers about African oral traditions, but also to speak ethnographically about the French colonial state from the inside and from the perspective of a colonial subject. Although his work evinces certain ambivalences with respect to the French colonial project and also offers powerful critiques of colonial epistemologies, it is also deeply invested in developing a different knowledge project entirely — one whose cosmopolitanism recognizes colonial epistemological categories without relying on them exclusively. Leiris and Hampâté Bâ show us how ethnographic fiction thus looks inescapably, and at times in spite of itself, toward colonial strategies of knowledge production and accumulation. However, relatedly and at the same time, reading them together demonstrates how this experimental genre also possesses a distinctly African genealogy, a cultural geography that provokes the adepts of ethnographic fiction to convert colonial social relations into objects of ethnographic commentary via the didactic interchange of storytelling.
Africa, Fictionality, and Generic Legibility
These texts are not works of purely imaginative invention: Leiris and Hampâté Bâ are, of course, real individuals who allow readers to tag along on journeys that actually took place. However, the fact that we as readers never come to doubt the actually existing personal and geographic referents that undergird the narrative relationships these texts establish does not imply that fictionality has fallen by the wayside. For both writers, fictionality serves to stretch their work beyond generic boundaries.
Consider the case of Hampâté Bâ: appended to the text of Oui mon commandant! is a several-page defense of the authenticity and veracity of his work written by the executor of his literary estate, Hélène Heckmann. She responds to unnamed literary scholars who have either questioned the representation of certain characters or wondered whether Hampâté Bâ might have fudged or embellished certain aspects of his dealings with French colonial administrators. The very inclusion of such a posthumous defensive appendix should give us pause and alert us to the presence of textual elements that go beyond the conventions of autobiographical narrative. In other words, that Hampâté Bâ's work calls for posthumous reassurances about its authenticity is symptomatic of its relationship to fictionality. The play of fiction in Hampâté Bâ's memoirs does not involve authenticity or clever insincerity, though; it has to do, rather, with the creative forms of distancing that he instantiates between his writerly self and the self that appears as a literary character and storyteller, contained within the autonomous ethnographic world of the text. In this respect, Hampâté Bâ's memoirs call to mind those of J. M. Coetzee, in which autobiographical distancing also introduces fiction into the memoir form (not least because the third volume, Summertime, is subtitled "Fiction").
Hampâté Bâ, for his part, does not go so far as to refer to himself as "he" in his memoirs, but his ethnographic and literary je has a similar effect on readers. This detachment is playful, and the autobiographical character he creates keeps one eye on the story he crafts while the other seems fixed on readers, impatiently anticipating their enjoyment. As we will see, this dual fixation is part and parcel of his sense of didacticism. These qualities also lend his autobiographical distancing an unmistakable air of "extroversion" which, as Eileen Julien has argued, is a key component of novelistic fiction in Africa.
We could hardly accuse Leiris of excessive extroversion in the relationships he establishes with his readers. Whereas Hampâté Bâ carefully spins ethnographic vignettes for a public that is always squarely in view, in L'Afrique fantôme Leiris draws readers into his own introspection to make them feel all the more keenly his frustrations with what he comes increasingly to view as ethnography's broken promises. Fiction for Leiris appears indissolubly tied to what he perceives as the perpetually disappointing inauthenticity of ethnographic objects, a form of epistemological malaise that, by extension, infects and sterilizes his idealized vision of ethnography as offering true "contact" between researchers and the people they study. Anthropology as such was not a dead end for Leiris, though, and L'Afrique fantôme is not his personal narrative of the discipline's failure. Leiris was a poet who had recently fallen out with Parisian Surrealists when he met Marcel Griaule and was recruited to join the mission; it was not until years later that he actually received formal training in ethnography. Leiris went on to write La possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar (1958), a properly social-scientific study of spirit possession in which we come across some of the same individuals from rural Ethiopia whom he writes about with such vexation in the pages of his earlier fieldwork diary. Fictionality "happens" in L'Afrique fantôme as it reveals itself in the proliferation of events that provoke Leiris to lay bare his existential and epistemological disappointment: bewilderingly fruitless research encounters, his inability to assume the new form of selfhood he left Europe to find, and a constantly threatening sense that authentic ethnographic knowledge production could be happening somewhere else, always wherever he is not. Leiris's skill lies in making these events meaningful for readers, turning us into often unwilling participant-observers in and of his frustration as he gradually unveils ever larger chunks of his tormented interiority — an act South African novelist André Brink has called "a striptease of the soul."
The play of fictionality thus prevents these texts from being immediately legible in terms of the generic classifications that, at first blush, readers might want to bring to bear on them: Hampâté Bâ's memoirs are too extroverted to be straightforward reflections on a life well lived, and Leiris's approval of each new edition of L'Afrique fantôme, always in a different series at Gallimard, signals his understanding that the book's eclectic publication history stems from its remarkable ability to sidestep attempts to read it into any one genre. At the same time, the question of generic legibility for Leiris and Hampâté Bâ is of a piece with their understandings of the legibility of Africa in ethnographic knowledge production. Put another way, generic flexibility, the very characteristic that makes these texts such telling ethnographic fictions, springs from the desire to narrativize one's ethnographic relationship to Africa.
This impulse drives Hampâté Bâ's autobiographical extroversion in his memoirs. He recounts his childhood in Amkoullel, l'enfant peul, and Oui mon commandant! deals with his early career as a colonial civil servant in French Sudan and Upper Volta (now Mali and Burkina Faso, respectively). After several years of French schooling in Djenne and Bamako, he won admission to but refused to attend the prestigious École Normale William Ponty in Senegal, which would have enabled him to become a stably employed administrator or teacher. This refusal so incensed local French administrators that they gave Hampâté Bâ the sardonically menial (in relation to his qualifications) "essentially revocable and precarious position as temporary writer," a role that situated him "essentially precariously" among other indigenous functionaries who complicated colonial social roles, being neither high-level bureaucrats nor "traditional" illiterate indigenous subjects. This administrative role led Hampâté Bâ to shuttle from job to job, outpost to outpost, in both French Sudan and Upper Volta during the 1920s and 1930s, where he spent his free time documenting oral traditions and local cultural histories.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction: Ethnographic Fictions in the French Atlantic 1
1. Ethnographic Didacticism and Africanist Melancholy: Leiris, Hampăté Bă, and the Epistemology of Style 17
2. The Director of Modern Life: Jean Rouch's Ethnofiction 55
3. Folkore, Fiction, and Ethnographic Nation Building: Price-Mars, Alexis, Depestre, Laferrière 98
4. Creole Novels and the Ethnographic Production of Literary History: Glissant, Chamoiseau, Confiant 134
5. Speculative Cityscapes and Premillennial Policing: Ethnographies of the Present in Jean-Claude Izzo's Crime Trilogy 169
Conclusion: Empire, Democracy, and Nonsovereign Knowledges 203
Notes 217
Bibliography 257
Index 273
What People are Saying About This
“Taking up a set of important issues regarding anthropology, colonialism, and the politics of representation, Justin Izzo shows how ethnographic fictions not only demonstrate the limitations of anthropological knowledge, they become alternative anthropologies of colonial and postcolonial encounters. Experiments with Empire should be read by scholars interested in questions of empire, knowledge production, and aesthetics. It grapples with the kind of political and epistemological questions that should be central to the next generation of postcolonial studies.”
“Justin Izzo's fascinating study brings to life the experimental ethnographic fictions created by writers and filmmakers in French colonial spaces on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing alternative modes of life and ways of knowing the world that arise within empire from below. He shows us how these twentieth-century experimentations open potential avenues for developing democratic futures in our time.”