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What is theory with regard to non-Eurocentric texts? Can Western theory be applied universally to all literatures? How does it operate in African and Caribbean literature? In asking these questions, Cilas Kemedjio is concerned less with reading and critiquing Western theory itself than with investigating the possibility of African and Caribbean discourses by exploring the epistemological foundations for new theoretical practices conceived within the Caribbean and African contexts. The aim of Kemedjio's study is threefold. First, he wants to bring to light various constraints and obstacles impinging on the emergence of African and Caribbean literary and critical discourses. These constraints range from political censure to the control of the means of production and the dominance of Western theories within the Francophone literary field. This first part of the book provides a dense account of the strategies elaborated by writers such as V.Y. Mudimbe and Mongo Béti, as they expose and come to terms with these constraints. This project leadsthem to address the emergence of writing within African and Caribbean cultures, and thus, the central position of writing within structures of domination. Another question implicitly addressed here is whether the practice of writing in these areas, be it fictional or theoretical, should still be viewed as a mere extension of the hegemonic model.
Second, Kemedjio examines Western theory and criticism concerned with the body of literary works known as "Caribbean and African literature in French." In tracing how these so-called "Africanist discourses" operate, he emphasiszes their dominant tendencies in the range of approaches adopted. Through a study of Anne-Marie Jeay's anthropological reading of Maryse Condé's novel, Segu, Kemedjio investigates the criteria Jeay uses to deligitimize Condé's representation and fictional discourse on Africa. Kemedjio shows these criteria to be those of a "colonist," which leads him to voice concerns articulated by many African and Caribbean writers: that African and Caribbean literature must be "decolonized," not only in the sense of discouraging its study by European critics, but also in terms of establishing an endogenous critical discourse that assists the process of reading, understanding and interpreting a non-French text. The major question...