From Empire to Independence: Colonial Space in the Writing of Tutuola, Ekwensi, Beti, and Kane

Abstract

General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/pure/about/ebr-terms 1 From Empire to Independence: Colonial Space in the Writing of Tutuola, Ekwensi, Beti and Kane AbstractThis article examines the production of space in four early Anglophone and Francophone West African novels, reading Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Nigeria, 1952), Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City (Nigeria, 1954), Mongo Beti's Mission terminée (Cameroon, 1957) and Cheikh Hamadou Kane's L'Aventure ambiguë (Senegal, 1961) alongside broader social, political and economic spatial discourses from the 1950s and 60s. By so doing, the article unpacks the articulated correspondences between literary space and its wider materiality in ways which are both explicit and implicit. Drawing on insights from human geography, this essay explores the extent to which the distinct spatial programs of the British and French empires manifest within Anglophone and Francophone West African writing in the years leading to independence, ultimately arguing that the latter displays a range of discrepant, horizontal formulations in contrast to the more monolithic, vertical spatiality of the latter.Keywords: African literature; space; postcolonial literature Since its inception as a field, postcolonial studies has placed a particularly high emphasis on space as a category of analysis. Drawing on Edward W. Said's foundational exposition of the "imaginative geographies" of colonial conquest, 1 the field since that time has "identified space in all its forms as integral to the postcolonial experience." 2 Space, as Soja reminds us, functions as more than simply an absolute container or matter of lines on a map. Rather, space and spatiality imply "a struggle that is not just about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, images and imaginings, about competition for land and territory and the search for fundamental and egalitarian rights to inhabit space," 3 replete with resonances across the interconnected spheres of the mental, the material, and the social realms of existence. 4 Based upon the premise that it is precisely the manipulation of this multifaceted and allencompassing function of spatiality which served to provide imperial powers with their ostensible 2 mastery of colonized territories, both material and mythic, 5 the field has foregrounded the social and political urgency of re-imagining and re-constructing spatial formations in the post-imperial world. Yet, in its realization, the centrality of spatiality to postcolonial inquiry has remained curiously undertheorized. The discipline, instead, has fallen into what Lefebvre once characterized as the twinned myths of transparency and opacity, viewing space, on the one hand, as something "out there," an instance of "natural simplicity," 6 utterly unknowable in any real or true sense; and, on the other, as entirely ideational by nature, no more th...

Introduction: Postcolonial spaces across forms

“…Spanning India, South Africa, the Caribbean and Singapore, these five articles take a broad geographical view of the multitudinous nature of space across registers and eras, demonstrating a common spirit in the vision that identity, subjectivity and spatiality cannot be seen as discrete and disinterested entities, but rather as co-constitutive parts of a dynamic and total system. I have elsewhere written on the urgent need to reconstitute the ways in which we, as literary and cultural critics, think about and talk about space, moving from a mere focus on content to an exploration of the articulations and correspondences which motivate the production of space (Krishnan 2017). In other words, space is not merely what the text says, but what the text does.…”