NATIONALISTS AND NOMADS: ESSAYS ON FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE.

Miller, Christopher. 1999. NATIONALISTS AND NOMADS: ESSAYS ON FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 258 pp. $46.00 (cloth) $19.00 (paper).

One of the many objectives of Nationalists and Nomads is to remedy what it sees as a major weakness of contemporary francophone literary criticism--its "distortion" of French-speaking Africa's literary history. This task is meticulously pursued in Chapter 1. Published here for the first time, the chapter brings to light fascinating new material on the origins of French-language African literature: literary texts, newspapers and essays. Drawing on his own research and that of such scholars as Iba Der Thiam, Miller argues that writing in French from Africa did not begin in the 1930s (the standard version), but in the 1920s. Over a decade before the negritude movement, men like Lamine Senghor (1889-1927), Kojo Tovalou Houenou (1887-1936) and, writing in Arabic, Sheikh Musa Kamara (1864-1945) were already penning down more radical critiques of colonialism than were to be produced in the 1930s. More …