African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora, The

F. Abiola Irele. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xviii + 296 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. No price reported. Paper.

Abiola Irele's critical examination of African literature is an interesting collection of essays written from 1981 to 1994. Published in 2001, these essays come across as a nice way to review some of the essential literary and cultural events that have influenced contemporary African literature. In other words, Irele is not breaking new ground, but rather refreshing one's memories. His intellectual insights, as always, are well worth the reading time.

In the preface and again in chapter 1, Irele informs us of his purpose in putting together The African Imagination. The work responds to two ways of looking at African literature. The first is to challenge the view of the African experience, both on the African continent and in the New World, as a collective experience, a type of cultural monolith. This position, he notes, has been taken by Europeans such as Janheinz Jahn and by those Africans who garner their literary experience from the négritude movement or who have at least been influenced by this Francophone phenomenon. The other cultural monolith he notes is the Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s found primarily in the United States. A second group that Irele challenges comprises the contemporary literary critics of the 1980s and 1990s who have grown out of structuralism, deconstruction, and Marxism. These critics, he explains, are more interested in literature as a form of sociological development than of aesthetic expression. He does not ignore or deny these other positions, he comments, but he will not pursue them for their own sake. He has decided, rather, "to explore the terrain of African literature in the widest acceptance of the term and to arrive at a sense of its possible boundaries" on both the African continent and in the New World (4). Further, he maintains that the term "African imagination" is more appropriate than "African literature" because it allows for a "wider scope of expression of Africans and people of African descent, which arises out of . . . historical circumstances" (7).

Chapter 2 addresses the issues of orality and literacy and their relation to the two interpretations of African literature, Western and African. Irele allows Ruth Finnegan, Jack Goody, and Walter J. Ong to state the European view of the orality-literacy connection, while the African perspective is conveyed by D. O. Fagunwa, Thomas Mofolo, J. P. Clark-Bekederemo, and Irele himself. This discussion sheds light on the cultural complexity of literature, especially on the African continent with its hundreds of languages. Often the critics that Irele questions in the preface, especially structuralists and poststructuralists, lose sight of this complexity because of their own redefined cultural perspectives. To read this 1989 essay today brings the reader back into an intriguing literary discussion that engaged critics of the period. Irele follows this with an extensive examination of African letters. He brings in scholars from W.E.B. Du Bois and Edward Blyden to Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault, showing how they have contributed to what he calls "the making of a tradition" (chap. 3) and how this tradition is connected to the African consciousness and imagination.

Chapter 4 continues Irele's examination of the concept of discourse. Here Irele notes that African writing can be categorized according to two modes: imagination or ideology. In both cases, the literature must respond to Africa's history and to Europe's creation of that history. The result, for Irele, is a rejection of Derrida and Foucault and the acceptance of history as "a harrowing experience, vividly rendered in our imaginative expression and reflected in the general tenor of our discourse" (81). And because of this experience, Irele feels that African writers cannot afford the luxury of an "uncharted nihilism" or a "morose antihumanism" characteristic of European theoreticians like Foucault and Derrida (81).

In the next five chapters Irele looks at five African writers through these twin lenses of imagination and ideology: Amadou Hampate Ba, Ahmadou Kourouma, Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite (from Barbados), and John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo. Here we can see how he combines African discourse with European critical theory to shed new light on African and Caribbean writing. Whereas the preface and the first four chapters address the theories Irele finds important to a modern critique of African literature, these next five chapters give us the opportunity to see those theories put into play, providing the meat, as it were, of the book. We are then able either to accept or deny Irele's position.

Finally, in chapter 10 the author brings his discussion of the African imagination into the stark contemporary work of New Realism. Within an African context this is a bold step, in that now European languages are combined with postcolonial theories to produce a hybrid literature. It is in this chapter that the reader sees the natural culmination of orality, African literature in African languages, and African literature in European languages.