AiW Guest: Ranka Primorac, University of Southampton, UK.
“This indicates that the Magistrate would need to step back and step aside, to allow for a seeing besides him.
Those would be the steps to learn.”
Caroline Rooney, African Literature, Animism and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), 201; emphasis in the original. The reference is to the unnamed magistrate character in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).
Caroline Rooney is Zimbabwean; this biographical fact matters in the present context. It explains how I (Ranka) met Caroline in the early 2000s, how I eventually came to write this piece, and how I knew what to look for in reading her thought-inspiring, intellectually demanding, funky 2000 monograph on animism, Western philosophy and African literature – first a few years after it was published, and then again nearly a quarter of a century later.
African literature, Animism and Politics is a book about how a certain archive of Western critical thought (stretching from, say, Kant, via Hegel and Freud, to Derrida and Deleuze & Guattari) misunderstands and mis-labels, yet also rubs shoulders with, and could be re-constellated to acknowledge, African animist beliefs and practices; and about how such beliefs and practices have been mediated by modern African literature, which thus functions as an intellectual tradition in its own right. This is a lot. (It is not for nothing that the second sentence of the book’s Introduction mischievously asks its readers, ‘Have I lost you already?’ (1).) But I, too, have lived in Zimbabwe for a while and I knew long before I entered academia that “the [Western discursive] attempt to render an African culture impossible [is] itself an impossibility for there just is this culture in all its diversity.” (113)
Back in 2000, African Literature, Animism and Politics provided a pioneering critical discussion of how the thinkers of Europe’s second Enlightenment misread the cultural and ontological make-up of African worlds, where even some of Enlightenment’s staunchest critics — Derrida, Spivak, Deleuze and Guattari—failed to address adequately the Africa-shaped blind spot in European thought. This blindness was enabled by Europe’s long tradition of opposing “man” to “nature”, and critical thought itself to living time. In the book’s second half, in a smile-inducing reading of John Coetzee’s 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians1, Rooney analyses the social and intellectual position of the novel’s protagonist, a male imperial official confronted with a native woman whose sight has been impaired by state torture. Not entirely unlike the fathers of European philosophical thought that Rooney discusses before she turns to Coetzee, the Magistrate cannot see that what he needs to do if he truly wants to open up a line of vision between himself and an overlooked other – the native woman standing right in front of him – is to get over and beside himself. African Literature, Animism and Politics guides its readers through a version of “the steps to learn”. In doing so, it arguably gets beside and exceeds the very academic paradigm that engendered it.
On the final page, African Literature, Animism and Politics recapitulates briefly the broad direction of its own research engagement. In seeking, broadly, to re-signify the unfashionable (at the time) term “animism” – the belief in spirits identified as part of the natural world – the book touches on “African philosophies, Eastern philosophies, the mystical traditions, the study of literary creativity, psychoanalysis, modern physics and biology” (227). The book’s careful interweaving of distinct analytical strands comprises precise readings of African, postcolonial and World literary texts, treated everywhere as dialogic partners to philosophy and critical theory, rather than as illustrative material. Rooney’s takes on Amos Tutuola, Oscar Wilde, Nella Larsen, Giles Foden, Alex LaGuma and others are unlikely to leave me any time soon. (A personal favourite: the deadpan comparisons between Hegel and Tutuola’s Complete Gentleman.)
Above all, this is a book that demonstrates, time and time again and in direct opposition to Aristotle and those who write after him, that intellectual activity is a form of movement: literally, spirited. Rooney’s text addresses its readers directly, leaves traces of earlier drafts, circles between topics at varying speeds, and adduces examples without insisting on an illusion of inevitability; it touches on TV shows current at the time of writing, leaves trains of thought deliberately curtailed and sprays sparkling research agendas in its wake. It seems to me that all theory books should work to make their readers laugh, but woefully few of them do. Meanwhile, Rooney – in a spoken-word Zimbabwean turn of phrase: “What I should like to say is that: me, I never have original ideas. I do not believe in original knowledge in that respect. […] The original idea is the singular ideal is the phallus.” (169) You grin, and nod, and read on. All this at the time when UK Postcolonial literary and cultural studies were (from where I was sitting) fast becoming both po-faced and ossified.
This is what Caroline has told me about the book’s genesis:
“What prompted me to write the book at the time was that the new (then) field of postcolonial theory as opposed to the older field [of] ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘third world’ literature was shaped through the influences of French philosophy (Young, Spivak, Bhabha especially) where the intellectual legacies were European Enlightenment ones. Others at the time opposed this with historical materialism while I was interested in how liberation struggles were accompanied were accompanied by indigenous spiritual philosophies that were not as dualist or binary as the European tradition. Derrida was trying to deconstruct binary oppositions but he doesn’t engage with non-dualist philosophies. So I tried to put the two intellectual legacies into dialogue with each other or into counterpoint (as Said would say).”
Caroline Rooney, personal e-mail communication, 23 May 2024.
This is a clear and valuable description, with the “newness” of the field presumably referring to the 1990s, when African Literature, Animism and Politics was being written. To me, situated at the time on the margins of the UK university system (as a PhD student at a “new” British university in the late 1990s and early 2000s), there was much that was reified about the field, which was arguably both peaking and changing at the time Rooney’s book was published.2 The dynamism and playfulness of African Literature, Animism and Politics did not permeate (in my experience) the manner in which Postcolonial literary and cultural studies were being institutionally taken up in Britain at the time.3 For one thing, India remained (in the discursive sense) the jewel in the Postcolonial academic crown, just as it had been for Britain in the economic sense at the height of the materially existing British Empire. (This must be one reason why Said’s work on the Orient was uncritically deployed in African and other postcolonial contexts, as African Literature, Animism and Politics details.) Those of us who were seeking to enter academia professionally could hardly do so without reading and teaching Rushdie; Coetzee was the order of the day if you were interested in thinking about literary Africa.4 In important and insidious ways, the newly hegemonic academic paradigm had retained Eurocentric methods of measuring literary value. For another, both intellectual traditions mentioned in the email from which I’ve just quoted already had something of the quality of a diktat about them.
While their proponents took pot-shots at one another at conferences, Postcolonialism was being institutionally embedded at the rate that seems, in retrospect, lightning fast. The early 2000s were an era of mushrooming textbook production and the growing consensus that the presence of a “generalist postcolonialist” academic staff member was a desirable supplement to otherwise unchanged UK departments of English. Such consensus was often accompanied by fast-forming clichés that had Postcolonial literature “giving voice to the voiceless” and enabling authors from the global margins to “write back” to the former imperial centre. That such formulations were one way of preserving the centre’s centrality did not, of course, go un-noticed. But the critiques went hand-in-hand with a mainstreaming and an intellectual dilution of sorts.
That African Literature, Animism and Politics has bypassed such trends – that it remains fresh and challenging a quarter of a century after it appeared, that it is still an enabling research tool and has the potential to be useful in teaching5 — is due, I think, to (at least) three interconnected sets of textual traits. I can here touch on them only briefly. Firstly, despite conforming to some early postcolonial conventions, Rooney’s book is, today, retrospectively legible as a study in comparative literature.6 Connecting its thickly layered argument strands is the intertextual figure of Antigone – Sophocles’ heroine who refuses to negotiate with state power whose rules she has broken while honouring a higher law, which, together with being the product of criminal desire (as the sister/daughter to Oedipus), turns her into an outcast. The suppression and death of Antigone (Rooney tells us) symbolically enables the Western system of thought, based on the law of the father and the singularity of inheritance. African Literature, Animism and Politics argues for a return to visibility of Antigone as the focal point of several kinds of transgressive identification. In thinking about how this figure speaks to texts that, collectively,…