文学与政治之辨:非洲文学批评的转身

A Problematization of Politicality in African Literature and Political Turn in its Literary Criticism

政治性议题在非洲文学批评中被问题化,这反映出了西方的一种知识特权,是西方批评家与非洲批评家之间在文学批评领域的思想交锋和话语博弈。凭借某种政治性的转向,非洲文学批评中的新经验被问题化。文学与政治之间不是“再现”或“指涉”关系,而是一种“介入”行为,是一种言语行为。非洲文学作为一种“表达平面”通过“政治机器”的配置不断介入“内容平面”,解域了非洲文学和作家的生产方式,介入了非洲去殖民化浪潮,加速了非洲政治变革的进程。

The problematization of socio-political concern in African literary critical practice is a reflection of the ideological and dialectic confrontation between Western critics,with its presupposed and self-acclaimed intellectual privilege,and their underprivileged African counterparts.Such a socio-political turn in African literary criticism would enable a problematization and foregrounding of this seemingly irrelevant and therefore new critical experience as discussed in this paper.It is claimed that literature and social politics do not relate to each other as a matter of“representation”or“reference”,but as an act of“intervening”,or rather as a speech act.By means of the assemblage mechanism of“political machine”,a key Deleuzian concept,African literature as a“plane of expression”keeps intervening into the“plane of content”,thereby deterritorializing the mode of literary production of African writers and,furthermore,deterritorializing the decolonization drive and political reformation in the continent.