非洲的“两种美学”——马克思主义在非洲文学中的一次论争

Two Kinds of Aesthetics in Africa--The Debate on Marxism in African Literature

索因卡和杰弗里·亨特的论争表明,独立后的非洲存在着两种基本的写作模式:一种是把过去和传统充分"浪漫化"的"神话美学",倡导回到非洲传统文化的"源头",从原始的宗教、仪式等口头文化资源寻求"纯净"、稳定、永恒的非洲文化特质,倾向于表现神灵、巫祝、预言或其他神秘事物,形成某种"神话直觉"式的写作风格;一种是现实主义的马克思主义文学,强调文学的现实责任,坚持以阶级理论分析社会矛盾,表现黑人大众反抗殖民主义和争取民族文化的解放和自由,是一种斗争的、革命的文学。这两种写作模式在文学的社会政治承诺、种族和阶级、文学的自由主义和大众化等问题上存在根本对立。

The debates between Wole Soyinka and Geoffrey Hunt showed that there were two basic writing traditions in Africa after independence. One was the mythological aesthetics that fully romanticized the past and the tradition,and advocated back to the source of Africa,sought pure,stable and eternal African cultural characteristics from the original religious resources such as religion and rituals,and tended to express gods,witchcraft,prophecies or other mysterious things,forming some kind of myth. With an intuitive style of writing,the other was realist Marxist literature,emphasizing the realistic responsibility of literature,insisting on analyzing social contradictions with class theory,showing that the black masses resisted colonialism and strived for the liberation and freedom of national culture,which was a militant and revolutionary literature. These two writing modes had fundamental contradictions on the issues of literature’s social and political commitment,race and class,literary liberalism and popularization.