De la Negritude a la Creolite: Edouard Glissant, Maryse Conde et la Malediction de la Theorie (review)

Kemedjio, Cilas. De la Négritude à la Créolité: Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé et la Malédiction de la Théorie. Hamburg: LIT, 1999.

What is theory with regard to non-Eurocentric texts? Can Western theory be applied universally to all literatures? How does it operate in African and Caribbean literature? In asking these questions, Cilas Kemedjio is concerned less with reading and critiquing Western theory itself than with investigating the possibility of African and Caribbean discourses by exploring the epistemological foundations for new theoretical practices conceived within the Caribbean and African contexts. The aim of Kemedjio’s study is threefold. First, he wants to bring to light various constraints and obstacles impinging on the emergence of African and Caribbean literary and critical discourses. These constraints range from political censure to the control of the means of production and the dominance of Western theories within the Francophone literary field. This first part of the book provides a dense account of the strategies elaborated by writers such as V.Y. Mudimbe and Mongo Béti, as they expose and come to terms with these constraints. This project leads [End Page 146] them to address the emergence of writing within African and Caribbean cultures, and thus, the central position of writing within structures of domination. Another question implicitly addressed here is whether the practice of writing in these areas, be it fictional or theoretical, should still be viewed as a mere extension of the hegemonic model.