Baroque and Post/Colonial Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa: The Aesthetic Embodiment of Unreason A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Isaac V. Joslin IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Judith Preckshot July 2010 © Isaac V. Joslin 2010 Acknowledgements I would like to recognize, first and foremost, the indelible contributions of my advisor, Judith Preckshot, whose meticulous proofreading of numerous drafts of my dissertation was tantamount in helping to revise and reshape the project in its consecutive reiterations. Along with her painstakingly beautiful attention to details, both in terms of style and of content, I would like to also recognize the insightful comments and criticisms that the other members of my dissertation committee—Eileen Sivert, Njeri Githire, Christophe Wall-Romana, and Hakim Abderrezak—have made at various points along the way. I also owe a debt of gratitude to two Early Modernist professors in the Department of French and Italian, Dan Brewer and Juliette Cherbuliez, each of whom in his or her own capacity, helped me to reach a greater understanding of the historical baroque that I have usurped from its usual context. I would like to thank the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota for the generous award of a Myrna G. Smith Thesis Research Grant, which enabled me to conduct the interviews represented in the Appendices of this document, which were essential to finishing this project. I would like to also thank my fellow graduate student colleagues for the lively intellectual discussions that occurred over the years in the offices, hallways and interstices in and around Folwell Hall. Thanks to Séverine Bates for her much appreciated help with the transcriptions of the interviews that appear in the Appendices. Thanks to my wife Laura for her longsuffering patience, love, and support through the seemingly endless sequence of events comprised by the doctoral program. You are amazing. I want to thank my parents for dragging myself and my brother and sister across the Atlantic during our childhood, first to France and then to Côte d’Ivoire, to live. Because of your strength and courage, I was given the opportunity to see and experience the world, its languages, and its cultures. Thanks to all those friends, past and present, who have provided a solid community of supporters through this lengthy process. And thanks especially to my two fantastic children for keeping my eyes and ears open to the simple wonders of life. i Table of Contents Introduction: Une littérature-monde baroque Introduction: What does “baroque” mean? ………………………………………..… 1 A. How the Baroque Ended up in Africa ……………………………………..… 3 B. An Existential Baroque ……………………………………………………… 6 C. A Relational Baroque ………………………………………………………. 12 In-conclusion: in-conclusion …………………………………………………..…… 18 Chapter I: The Early Modern Baroque Interruption: Anamorphosis and Unreason Introduction: From the Renaissance to the Baroque …………………………..…… 19 A. Baroque: word or thing? ……………………...…………………………….. 22 B. Classicism and Baroque différance ………………………………………..... 30 C. Baroque (Un)reason ……………………………………………………….... 44 In-conclusion: Baroque and Baroquisme …………...……………………………… 53 Chapter II: Modern Baroque Disruptions and the Allegorical Introduction: Baroque Permutations …………………………………………….…. 55 A. The long/late nineteenth century: l’Autre Baroque …………………….…… 58 B. Life and Death and a “Modern Baroque” Economy ………………………... 65 C. Dionysus and Baroque Becoming in Theory ………………………...……... 74 In-Conclusion: Baroque in the Twentieth Century ……………………………...…. 83 Chapter III: Global (Neo)baroques Introduction: Toward a (Post) Modern Universal Baroque ……………………..…. 88 A. New (World) Baroque ………………………………………………………. 93 B. Baroque and The Society of the Spectacle ……………………………...….. 103 C. “D’un baroque mondialisé” : métissage, and créolité ………………...…… 113 In-Conclusion: The baroque in Africa? …………………………………...……… 122 Chapter IV: From Colony to Postcolony: Building the African Baroque Introduction: Colonialism, Renaissance, and Baroque in Africa …………………. 126 A. Baroque Traces: underneath Négritude ……………………………………. 133 B. Baroque Bodies and Classical Books …………………………………...…. 141 C. Le Devoir de violence : the postmodern/postcolonial problematic ………… 155 In-Conclusion: A Ruptured Continuity …………………….…………………….. 165 Chapter V: Baroque Aesthetics and Politics in Postcolonial Africa ii Introduction : Getting past the posts, into the baroque ………...…………………. 169 A. (Dis)Locating the Global Baroque : Nations and Novels …………………. 173 B. “Nouveau Baroque” and baroquisme, in Le Pleurer-Rire ………………… 180 C. The baroque Postcolony: power, politics, and performance …………….… 188 In-Conclusion: Political Aesthetic Agency ……………………………….………. 194 Chapter VI: Sony Labou Tansi Writing Africa Baroque Introduction: African-World Fictions ……………………………………….……. 201 A. “Writing Africa,” writing the body en “chair-mots-de-passe” ………...….. 205 B. La Vie et demie : “Radio-trottoir” to “Roman-trottoir” ………….…………. 213 C. Baroque femininity in the Postcolony …………………………………...… 220 In-Conclusion: Can men be women too? ………………………………………..... 228 Chapter VII: Extra-textual Distortions in African Women’s baroque writing Introduction: Baroque Madness and the African Metropolis …………………….. 234 A. Tu t’appelleras Tanga : The prostituted body-text ………………….…….. 239 B. The Madness of Civilization and its Baroque embodiment ………...……... 254 C. Baroque Pictures in Prose: La Folie et la mort ……………………………. 263 In-Conclusion: Creating baroque escapes ………………………………………… 273 In-Conclusion: Lines of Flight to follow Introduction: What lies ahead …………………………………………………….. 276 A. Traces of some other works ………………………………………………. 277 B. Performance, poetics, and story-telling …………………………….…….. 282 C. “African” Cinema ………………………………………………………… 288 In-conclusion: The end is the beginning ………………………………………….. 294 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………….…. 295 Appendices: Quatre conversations sur le baroque en Afrique Appendice A : Entretien avec Professeur Amadou Ly ……...……………………. 310 Appendice B: Entretien avec Professeur Joseph Paré ………………………….…. 324 Appendice C : Entretien avec Professeur Papa Gueye ………………………...…. 332 Appendice D : Entretien avec Professeur Ibra Diene …………………………..… 343 iii Introduction: Une littérature-monde baroque The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. […] Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird’s dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. --Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (124-5) Introduction: What does “baroque” mean? I choose to open with this first-person quotation of Vladimir Nabokov for several reasons. First, the nature of the work, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited , in which these few lines appear strikes me as particularly relevant for the questions that arise in relation to representation and reality, specifically with regard to the temporal mutability of both. The autobiographical text, which was initially published in 1948, reappeared in a revised edition in 1966 after Nabokov was able to unearth personal and historical documents thought to be lost after the Bolshevik Revolution, his father’s assassination, and the appropriation of his estate by the new communist regime. The notion that one can re-visit one’s autobiography is interesting in the sense that an autobiography initially is a representation of one’s life as lived in reality (up to a certain point, obviously, and therefore by nature incomplete), and so re-visiting an autobiography implies both a change in the representational material, but also necessarily a change in reality as time has altered the circumstances and perception of the work’s re-composition. This relationship to time, the always-changing face of reality, and the continuous attempts at self-inscription made by humanity within this time in an effort to transcend it (think of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu ) reveal the “truly temporal predicament” that lies at the base of Baroque allegory and irony (Chambers, 80). Before going any further into the relationship between Being and Time (c.f. Heidegger), let me come to my second reason for opening with this quotation, which should be obvious given the title of this dissertation, and that is the inclusion of the word 1 “baroque.” It is often the case that particular works or certain artists will be referred to as “classic” with little thought to what this term signifies, both aesthetically and historically, and without so much as a fleeting glance at its theoretical counterpart: “baroque,” a term which is generally brandished as almost as superficially as the other, though its occurrence is more rare. A mere triviality, when one encounters the ascription “classic,” there is generally little investigation as to what it means, but if asked to define classic, a suitable definition would prove to be quite elusive. At best, one might conjure up images of an American automobile from the 1950’s, or perhaps a vague impression of ancient Greco-Roman architecture, but all in all, the word itself, would mean very little.