'PARACOLONIAL' NETWORKS Some Speculations on Local Readerships in Colonial West Africa

Abstract

In studies of cross-cultural flows, postcolonial theorists often make reductive distinctions between the 'cosmopolitan' and the 'local', construing the cosmopolitan as an ideal value-free subject while the local is a parochial, conservative figure. This article attempts to historicize the concept of global cultural flows and to theorize the active role played by locals in the literary networks that grew up alongside British colonialism in West Africa. Concentrating on the years between 1870 and 1940, and focusing upon Ghana in particular, the article discusses a particularly intriguing group of local readers from the colonial period of West African history. Often labelled 'mimics', this group consists of newly educated but otherwise non-status-holding youths, mostly young men, who banded together in the southern, 'anglophone' belt of the region and, with increasing frequency as the twentieth century progressed, formed their own 'literary and social clubs' in order to debate moral issues and study English literature. The article traces the different ways in which this group appropriated anglophone literature and redeployed it to make statements about their own social authority and modernity. The final section suggests that the term 'paracolonial' appropriately describes cultural flows in West Africa during the colonial period. The neologism is useful if one wishes simultaneously to acknowledge the effects of colonialism and also to displace the Eurocentric and deterministic periodization of culture and history in the colonies as being precolonial, colonial and postcolonial.

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