L'illusion de l'altérité

Reviewed by: L’illusion de l’altérité: études de littérature africaine Alain Ricard L’illusion de l’altérité: études de littérature africaine by Bernard Mouralis Paris: Champion, 2007. 767 pp. I remember one of the first books I read on literature in Africa: it was Bernard Mouralis's Individu et collectivité dans le roman africain (Abidjan, 1969), which I read in 1972. Since that time, I have kept reading his works. I was very interested in his sociological essay Les contre–littératures (Paris, 1975) and most impressed by [End Page 236] his thesis Littérature et développement (1984). We became friends, colleagues, and almost accomplices. I owe a lot to Bernard's deep commitment to Africa, profound understanding of history and politics, impeccable erudition, and uncompromising honesty. We struggled together against the francophonist lobby embedded in the so-called "Sciences d'outre-mer" and their pseudo-"Academy"; created the Association pour l'étude des littératures de l'Afrique in Bordeaux in 1984; and share the same friendship today. This story is part of the book we are now reading. Faced with a collection of essays dating back to the 1960s, a sense of shared history is dominant, and it leads the interpretation along personal lines, even though my own work has drifted toward what I call linguistic consciousness and philological questions. Bernard continued to analyze fiction and essays and to provide an understanding of their context, an endeavor that truly belongs to the history of ideas and the sociology of knowledge. He did this all with lucidity, a sense of intellectual freedom, a refusal to sing with the powers that be, which is truly an example to all of us. His collection of over forty pieces has been organized very convincingly in seven parts: part one, the spatial dynamics (la traverse de l'espace); part two, the past within the present; part three, independence, power, and violence; part four, the question of the subject; part five, intertextuality; part six, teaching and research; and a concluding part on perspectives. Among his numerous and groundbreaking essays I would single out some of the most original, for instance his piece on Sekou Touré as a "graphomaniac" (283). The intellectual context of production has always been carefully studied, by a constant attention to the political and philosophical context, for instance in an essay on "Orientalisme et Africanisme" (195–214). He has always followed the production of essays and kept to the inclusion of essay writing in the literary corpus: "littérature d'idée ou prise de position." He alternated between general pieces and pointed criticisms of single works. He can be at the same time a historian, a sociologist, and a literary critic. In a time (1970s) when the self-referentiality of literature was supposedly universal, Bernard Mouralis understood that you write for or against something or somebody. This was the underlying dynamic of many texts originating from Africa. He took them seriously and was capable of organizing their trajectory using concepts such as development that still make sense in political as well as ecological domains. His last piece in the collection gives the key to his commitment: a belief in humanity and its powers of creating original solidarities against globalization, a deep romanticism (724). His articles will stand as a landmark in understanding the intellectual and political relations between France and Africa in the twentieth century. Alain Ricard CNRS-LLACAN Copyright © 2007 The Indiana University Press

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