Eleni Coundouriotis
Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel
New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Pp. 211. $16.50 paper
Reviewed by Ode S. Ogede

Claiming History is an extremely stimulating study that should appeal not only to literary scholars concerned with Africa, but also to anthropologists, historians, and philosophers of ideas interested in the general field of what is now known as postcolonial studies. It is a highly engaging work to read not only because it has been written with admirable elegance and economy of expression, but also because of the discerning insight with which it has been composed. Evident is the fact that the author of this work has done her background reading quite well in what is obviously a new field to her. While the author occasionally argues from a blind spot (some readers might think that she has presented a good portion of her case with much passion, though I for one do not), she definitely brings to the study of African literature an enormous understanding of literary theory that makes for a very lively reading.

When writers from Africa and the Caribbean have attempted to create a distinctive body of literature which not only explores new areas of experience but also utilizes unique modes of expression, Eleni Coundouriotis claims, it has been exceedingly difficult for skeptical (usually Western) and largely conservative (mostly African and Third World) audiences to grasp both the scope and the significance of the initiatives involved. In Claiming History, Coundouriotis aims to place in context three key texts from this tradition in which, the author believes, that ambivalence and misjudgment express themselves in the canon of the scholarship that has responded to these writings: Paul Hazoume’s Doguicimi, Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence, and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.

Coundouriotis uses material background to demonstrate how African writers have produced uncommon literary masterpieces by working through and adapting or repudiating ideas and literary conventions borrowed from both Europe and Africa. This approach is not as original as she would like to think, since it has been used successfully in numerous studies on two of these writers (Ouologuem and Okri), including A. E. Ohaegbu’s “An Approach to Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de Violence” (African Literature Today 10 [1979]: 125-33), Yusuf I. Maiangwa’s “The Duty of Violence in Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound To Violence” (New West African Literature, ed. Kolawole Ogungbesan [London: Heinemann, 1979]), Emmanuel Obiechina’s “Perceptions of Colonialism in West African Fiction” (Literature and the Modern West African Culture, ed. Donatus I. Nwoga [Benin: Ethiope, 1978]), and also Olatunbosun Ogunsanwo’s “Intertextuality and Post-Colonial Literature in Ben Oki’s The Famished Road” (Research in African Literatures 26.1 [1995]: 40-52). Coundouriotis, however, provides a tough-minded interpretation that throws new light on these texts and that sharpens the insights of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and other theorists of postcolonial studies that she applies. The major contribution of the book is that it is the first comprehensive effort to bring all three African writers together in one place for illumination within a single theoretical framework.

While making the effort to situate her subject of research within the general field of Third World resistance literature through the sustained glances she casts at writers such as Chinua Achebe and Rene Maran (whom she presents as the fathers of modern African and Caribbean literatures), Coundouriotis systematically reappraises traditional terms that have been employed in the discourses in the field, and proposes the word “dissidence” as a new and more appropriate term to describe the temper captured by the authors whose works she investigates. Through her close attention to specific key episodes in the works, she succeeds in widening the appeal of her study considerably. She not only draws support from, but also corrects, adds to, and updates where necessary, significant portions of some of the intricate arguments that have been previously advanced on the same matters by such well-known critics as Abiola Irele, Simon Gikandi, and others.

The breadth of her scholarship, the enviable clarity of her prose, and the lucidity of her presentation make Coundouriotis’s Claiming History a major cultural study: the book is thoroughly researched, well argued, and deeply moving.