European perceptions of black Africa after empire: the case of Patrick Grainville

What is it about?

While some critics of Patrick Grainville’s 'Les Flamboyants' (1976) and 'Le Tyran éternel' (1998) have underscored the metropolitan French author’s celebratory response to the black African world he depicts in the two novels, other critics have expressed uneasiness about the Eurocentric quality of that very response. This articles seeks to examine why the two novels have generated such conflicting critical reactions. In doing so, it discusses the cross-cultural implications of the roles Grainville assigns his black African protagonists and raises the following issues: If both novels celebrate through their protagonists an Africa of colours, sensations, life and vitality, are these attributes to be seen as unique to the continent? And are the attributes then to be preferred to others presumed to belong elsewhere and the depiction of which serves to underline the primacy of the former? But does such contrastive approach to cultures and continents not end up replaying rather than bridging in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, binaries of a cultural order and the supremacist assumptions and motivations that often underpin such cultural binarisms? In seeking answers to these questions, the article demonstrates how, writing in a post-imperial European historical context of the mid-1970s and the late 1990s and in the spirit of promoting cross-cultural understanding, Grainville breaks with and reinforces at the same time colonial modes of apprehending cultural difference.

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