Africa and the archive: Literature, identity, and the postcolonial.

摘要

Africa has operated not only as a geographical space to be conquered, but as a source of knowledge that could be collected, classified, exhibited by empires as they attempted to consolidate power over their colonies. This dissertation studies some of the divergent results when literature and film confront this “invention” of Africa. For the purpose of this dissertation, the archive is both a literal space (an “archive” like libraries, historical archives, and museums) and an epistemology (the “Archive” in Foucault's terms, a discourse informed by contradiction). By entering an “archive,” the storyteller (whether writer or film maker) confronts the immense body of knowledge produced about Africa. The identitarian process intersects with the textuality of the Archive as both a burden of colonialism and a rich resource for African cultural validation, a burial ground for African subjectivity and a wellspring of African nationalism. Chapter one reads Raoul Peck's film Lumumba: la mort du prophète as documentary not only on Lumumba but the space that Africa occupies in the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Chapters two and three are a comparative reading of V. Y. Mudimbe's L'Ecart and Pepetela's Lueji: O nascimento dum império, two novels in which Africans enter historical archives. Both texts explore identity on an individual and a national level, but the results are starkly different. Chapter four examines the textuality of empire and violence against women in Le Devoir de violence, and the implications of representation itself. Chapter five studies the archives as mimicked in André Brink's An Instant in the Wind, but not easily exited. A remarkable number of inter-related themes are examined, including the relationship between institutional archives and the colonial state, history and anthropology as disciplines, nationalism as a counter narrative and as complicit with the Archive, the place of women and the subaltern, and the relationship between sexuality/masturbation, identity, and imagination. Each text responds along a continuum between the oppression/determinism of the Archive, on the one hand, and imagination/agency, on the other. The stories challenge the veracity of the colonial archives, and destabilize the dominance of facts over imagination, of science over fiction.