2024/03/19 by Kemedjio, Cilas
#African discourse #Africanist fabrication #Chemin d’Europe #Colonial school #Ferdinand Oyono #Literature and the Production of Knowledge
paper · doi:10.57832/d34x-2298
Writing about anticolonial dissidence is a project of reinvention that aims to neutralize the normative and disciplinary dimension inscribed in writing by the victor in order to allow it to become a locus for the possibility of contestation. The process of conversion and appropriation of the conqueror’s literature ultimately creates a writing that brings with it a project of amelioration of life conditions. The social mission of literature produced by peoples subjugated by the colonial adventure stems from this project of subverting the literature that was learned in the colonial schools. Ferdinand Oyono, in Chemin d’Europe (Road to Europe), establishes a milestone of what can be called a pragmatic theory of the mission of évolués (a defense of their own class interests). Having failed the baccalauréat and been expelled from his seminary, Barnabas seeks to undertake a European adventure. The present analysis, based on Ferdinand Oyono’s Road to Europe, explores francophone literature as a space of production for a postcolonial discourse on the creation of Africanism. Africanist fabrication here means the ensemble of circumstances that preside over the fabrication of an Africa as seen through Western eyes. Literary texts are conscious of conditions of birth. The mise en abyme of this critical awareness assumes the shape of a meditation on the colonial school, the setting for the formation of writers. Challenging that Africanist order is part of the broad decolonial project that gives rise to movements of cultural restoration such as the Harlem Renaissance, Haitian indegenism, and Negritude, anticolonialism, and the emergence of an actual African discourse.