Michael Syrotinksi. Singular Performances: Reinscribing the Subject in Francophone African Writing.

Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002. 215 pp. $59.50.

Michael Syrotinski's highly theoretical Singular Performances: Reinscribing the Subject in Francophone African Writing should be of interest to any scholar interested in postcolonial literary theory, African literature, and French literary history and philosophy. This work offers a critical examination of the question of subjectivity in recent Francophone African literature and philosophy. Through the use of lucid academic prose, Syrotinski maps out a literary tradition based on the production of an authentic African narrative voice emerging from the colonial grip of Western cultural influence. However, Syrotinski's efforts are rendered problematic by his use of Western philosophy to define the African writing subject's double-consciousness, which is caught between a colonial past and an African future. In other terms, Syrotinski uses the words and the philosophies of the Master in order to help determine the possibility of the subject's narrative liberation. Yet this internal conflict should not turn any potential reader away from this important work; rather, the reader has to interpret this work with his or her own double-consciousness.

For Syrotinski, the central conflict of Francophone African literature is the desire to produce an authentic local voice within the language and cultural heritage of French philosophy. Drawing on the work of V. Y. Mudimbe, Syrotinski traces the emergence of an "ambivalent subject of contemporary Francophone Africa." This ambivalence is derived from the paradoxical need to center subjectivity on Cartesian agency and an anti-Cartesian notion of structure. Playing on Rousseau's claim that "I am not me," Syrotinski posits that Mudimbe's use of French philosophy locates African subjectivity between Descartes' cogito and Rousseau's Otherness. This dialectic between self and Other is also located in the relation between Sartre's existentialist philosophy and Levi-Strauss's notion of structure, where Mudimbe has traced the philosophical foundations of the colonial conflict between the "native" (existentialist self) and colonialist (the structure of the Other). According to Syrotinski, Mudimbe's use of French philosophy helps to establish the theoretical groundwork for an active project of African decolonization.

The flip-side of Syrotinski's exploration of the birth of African subjectivity within and against the foundations of French culture is his analysis of the role played by the African Other in the history of Western philosophy. Since the fifth century, Western philosophers, like Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, have turned to prejudicial representations of Africans in order to establish their own sense of identity and civilization. Syrotinski claims that one of the results of this process is that Africans were by definition categorized philosophically as lacking agency, intentionality, and Western subjectivity. It is thus one of the goals of Francophone African literature to rewrite the prejudices that constitute the foundations of Western philosophy and the colonial notions of subjectivity and narrative agency. Furthermore, Syrotinski believes that this process of literary decolonization may be facilitated by more recent works in the human sciences that have critiqued traditional notions of the unified Cartesian subject.

Turning to the recent work of Judith Butler, Syrotinski shows how subjectivity and agency can be defined as ambivalent forces caught between pure subjection and pure freedom. As a subject that is both the effect of a prior power and the condition of possibility for a new form of agency, Butler's notion of ambivalent subjectivity helps Syrotinski to articulate the theoretical foundations for an African postcolonial writing subject. Moreover, by examining the self-reflexive narrative voice in the works of Mudimbe, Bernard Dadie, Ousmane Sembene, Tierno Monenembo, Veronique Tadjo, Werewere Liking, and Sony Labou Tansi, Syrotinski locates the creation of a new literary tradition around the ambivalent subjectivity of the "postcolonial" writer.

To define this notion of postcolonial narrative ambivalence, Syrotinski begins his work by looking at Mudimbe's wide array of philosophical and literary writings. Mudimbe's philosophical works help Sryotinski center his argument on an encounter between the history of French philosophy and the subjective histories of various African writers. Since Mudimbe was raised in Africa and then studied philosophy in Paris, his own background provides a strong example of this conflict and confrontation between African subjectivity and French philosophy. Furthermore, Mudimbe's literary texts often deal explicitly with a narrator's desire to affirm a sense of African subjectivity against the presence of colonial modes of knowledge (i.e., history, anthropology, and psychoanalysis). Thus, according to Syrotinski, Mudimbe's fictional texts represent "performative reinscriptions" of his philosophical works.

This notion of a "performative reinscription of subjectivity" is a common theme that ties together many of the chapters in Syrotinski's book. For example, in his analysis of the Francophone African autobiographical subject (chapter 2), Syrotinski stresses the way narrators perform their ambivalent identities by constantly exploring the links among France and Africa, writing and orality, and collectivity and individuality. By looking at the autobiographical writings of Bernard Dadie and Aoua Keite, we see how autobiography can be turned into a political and social act. In fact, the next chapter extends the concept of performative ambivalent identity by concentrating on the role of irony in Dadie's travel narratives. Syrotinski argues that this use of irony renders problematic any Western claim of objectivity and subjective transparency.

Chapter 4 of the work continues this exploration of ambivalent Francophone African writing subjectivity through an analysis of the relations among cinema, historical memory, and subject formations. By reading Ousmane Sembene's novel Guelwaar, which is based on a film with the same name, and Tierno Monenembo's novel Cinema through Homi Bhabha's theories of visual culture, Syrotinski expands his understanding of the colonial forces still shaping the collective histories of African people. In turn, this examination of colonial visual cultural history motivates Syrotinski to explore the role played by gender in the identities and subjectivities of female Francophone African writers. He uses two of Mudimbe's novels that are written from the perspective of a female narrator to help define a sense of female identity countering the traditional male-centered historical African discourse. This discussion of Mudimbe's cross-gender narrations is then followed by an analysis of two female Francophone African writers, Veronique Tadjo and Werewere Liking, who present strong examples of women claiming a right to narrate their social and political identities into existence.

In the final chapter of this book, Syrotinski examines Sony Labou Tansi's postcolonial rewritings of African history. Through his use of the term ghostwriting, Syrotinski explores the ways Tansi's narrator and subjectivity perform the ambivalent presence of a subject who is caught between African authenticity and the hauntings of a colonial past. This final chapter shows why Syrotinski is right to impose French poststructuralist reading strategies on a literary tradition that has often resisted theoretical interpretations: Perhaps the only way for an emerging African writing tradition to stop the perpetual presence of a ghostly colonial past is to take the haunting spirit on by using its own logic and terms against itself. We can therefore consider that Syrontinski's own important work is the product of an ambivalent dialogue between an emerging sense of a new African literary tradition and a French colonial philosophical rhetoric that still haunts that tradition.

Robert Samuels 

University of California, Los Angeles