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Fictions of African Dictatorship: Cultural Representations of Postcolonial Power. Edited by Charlotte Baker and Hannah Grayson

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knaa140

1468-2931

Cécile Bishop,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Charlotte Baker and Hannah Grayson gather a wide-ranging collection of essays on literary and filmic representations of African dictatorial regimes. The key concern of the volume is ‘the efficacy of fictional representation as a mode of representing and resisting authoritarianism’ (p. 4). Impressive for its transnational scope, the collection offers a broad range of responses to that question. Several contributors approach the novel as a means of understanding the workings of real-life dictatorships. Lucien Bindi Ngouté, for example, uses works by Ahmadou Kourouma to detail the strategies by which dictators consolidate their power. Comparably, Lorenzo Mari and Teresa Solis discuss Italian-language representations of Mohamed Siad Barre’s rule over Somalia, analysing topics such as women’s participation in the resistance. F. Fiona Moolla, by contrast, problematizes the way fiction may be connected to historical contexts by comparing the works of Nuruddin Farah and Ahmed Omar Askar. While Farah’s elusive dictator figures transcend their Somalian context to represent oppression in general, Askar’s short stories read like a journalistic account of Siad Barre’s regime. Conversely, Angie Epifano and Kerry Vincent shed light on the distortions imposed by censorship and propaganda. Epifano examines how Ahmed Sékou Touré sought to use the arts to forge a modern yet authentic national culture in Guinea, while Vincent discusses the self-censorship that led Macmillan Publishers to have Eric Sibanda’s whodunit ‘Sagila Semnikati’ rewritten without its author’s consent, eliminating references to Swaziland’s royal residence. For most of the contributors, literary representations are a means of resisting dictatorial power. Some focus on resistance as it appears within the fictional world of the novel. In his analysis of Bensalem Himmich’s Majnun al-hukm, Khalid Lyamlahy thus considers that the novel should develop ‘an efficient counter-discourse to despotism and authoritarianism’ (p. 42), while Maria Muresan focuses on the depiction of sorcery and rituals in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, arguing that rituals both reinforce patterns of domination and open pathways towards resistance. Meanwhile, Asante Lucy Mtenje interprets novels by Tiyambe Zeleza and James Ng’ombe as sites where the depiction of female sexuality both enacts and destabilizes the patriarchal norms of postcolonial Malawi. Others, by contrast, identify the subversive potential of fiction in its effects on the audience. Discussing Gamal al-Ghitani’s novel al-Zaynī Barakāt, Alya El Hosseiny argues that while resistance to authoritarianism fails in the narrative itself, the novel as a whole may nevertheless be regarded as a space of freedom. Eline Kuenen draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque to argue that the novelists In Koli Jean Bofane and Alain Mabanckou undermine the performances of African postcolonial dictators through their emphasis on theatricality and obscenity. Rita Keresztesi interprets the experimental strategies used in Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s film Le Président (2013) as a response to the manipulation of televised images by Paul Biya in Cameroon. Madeleine Wilson’s discussion of Karen King-Aribisala’s The Hangman’s Game stands out by moving away from critical narratives centred on resistance, emphasizing instead the ‘structural analogy’ between authorship and authoritarianism in King-Aribisala’s postmodern narrative.