Towards Realism in French African Writing

Abstract

‘Blackness is not absence, but refusal’ said Aimé Césaire. The only trouble with refusal as a literary posture is that it is inclined to produce writing which is concerned with public gesture rather than with private and particular observation. Until recently, the great bulk of French writing by Africans could be fairly labelled as romantic, rhetorical, and directed at general rather than individual situations. That is to say, there was a preference for romantically revolutionary statements about ‘the situation of the negro’, rather than exploratory statements about the situation of the individual writer at a particular moment in space and time.

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