RELOCATING AGENCY: MODERNITY AND AFRICAN LETTERS

Comparative Literature, Summer 2004 by Desai, Gaurav

RELOCATING AGENCY: MODERNITY AND AFRICAN LETTERS. By Olakunle George. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 227 p.

Had he not become a literary critic, Olakunle George would surely have made an excellent surgeon. There is an unfailing meticulousness, consistency of approach, measured critique, and a no-nonsense tone to his prose. Commenting on Homi Bhabha, George writes: "Bhabha often takes refuge in lyricism. The poetry takes flight and escapes the persistence of what brought his object (that is, the colonial condition) into being: history and political economy" (p. 70). There are no such flights in Relocating Ageniy, a book that painstakingly analyzes the implications of canonical discussions of modernity and juxtaposes them with the tradition of African letters.

I would venture to guess that many readers will find the book to be conceptually ahead of its time and yet timely in a situated, disciplinary way. George's early chapters on the framing of modernity in Western theoretical discourse provide a much needed critical backdrop to the later discussions of African contexts. I refer particularly to George's excellent critique of objectivist/realist thinking, along with his engagement of the divergent visions of modernity in Habermas and Lyotard. Althusser, who over the years I have come to think of as being overused to the point of cliché, gets a respectable read-particularly in his proto-poststructuralist vein. Postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak are treated by George not as gurus to be cited for the sake of comprehensiveness, but rather as enablers or detractors of the critical project at hand.

Unsympathetic readers will not have the patience to stay with George through his detailed analysis of these oftentimes difficult thinkers. But therein, I believe, lies the importance of George's work. He makes a persuasive argument for why these discourses do matter and, moreover, demonstrates that many of the debates on modernity as they are articulated in the West echo the debates that were being conducted in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. The third chapter, "The Logic of Agency in African Literary Criticism," is a particularly noteworthy review of this history.

It is his ability to do careful readings of texts that will impress readers most. Fluent in Yoruba, George brings a linguistic command to readings of Fagunwa that are necessarily lost on Anglophone readers of this important Nigerian writer. Likewise, his readings of the Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka demonstrate George's deep embeddedness in Yoruba cosmology. And this is what makes the book so strong: no one can fault Professor George for being lost in high theory at the expense of critical engagement with African letters. Likewise, no one can fault him for ignoring the demands of theory, since even his readings of so-called "literary" texts are meant to blur the boundaries between the aesthetic and the conceptual.

Of the many claims that the book makes, I find the following most compelling:

(a) Agency in language and in politics can emanate out of acts that are otherwise conceptually problematic. This insight allows George to trace the unintended effects of acts of writing both literary and theoretical texts. George alerts us to the disjuncture between a conceptual claim and a political opportunity, or between an avithorial intention and the critical reception of the author's work (as he demonstrates with the example of Soyinka's own take on the relative importance of colonial agency in Death and the King's Horseman). If there is one thing that readers will surely take from this book, it is this discussion of what George calls "agency in motion."

(b) Literary works might productively be read as self-consciously theorizing the possibilities of human agency in art as well as in life. This claim is important to George because he is interested in dismantling a top-down approach wherein a theoretical model is brought to shed light on a literary text. Rather, George would have us look for the theory within the text itself. This is an important move, and one which he enacts with sustained effort, but the structure of his book (moving from a reading of canonical thinkers like Habermas and Lyotard through Africanist theory to African literary texts) somewhat goes against the grain of this aspiration. Nevertheless, George's readings of both Fagunwa and Soyinka can indeed stand on their own, demonstrating yet another claim that, when reading literary and other cultural texts, we must pay attention to the ways in which they serve both as representations of particular ideologies and as material enactments of the same or perhaps even competing ideologies.

(c) "Poststructuralist theory can be most useful if its implicit opposition to certain kinds of (non-poststructuralist) third world discourses is dialectically superseded" (p. 7). George's discussion of the limitations of camp thinking, with its preconceived, often formulaic dismissals is, I think, absolutely on the mark. For instance, George writes about the poststructuralist dismissal of nativism, "even where such replications are to be found, where nativism is to be encountered, robed in raffia skirts and bearing jungle drums, it will still be too hasty to conclude that a specific theoretical lesson automatically follows or should follow from that discovery. In the poststructuralist context that postcolonial theory inhabits, nativism has become something of a pariah" (p. 51). We should note that George makes this claim not in order to embrace nativism, but rather to seek to ascertain its importance for those who embrace it. Later on in the book, George makes a plea for a more historically nuanced poststructuralism that does not remain satisfied by merely exposing the errors of objeclivist thought. "Properly pursued, the logic of poststructuralist theory lies in tracing the genealogy and effects of discourses, as against simply declaring their 'constructed-ness'" (p. 195). We might call this move a move from an anti-foundational poststructuralism to a post-foundational one.