Foreword In focus: a comparative reading of Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle

       Anthony Mangeon

Seeing double

      Let us warn the reader right away: while browsing the pages of these discussions, he or she will often see double, and for many reasons. Firstly, the two interlocutors, Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle, often look at the issues they are addressing from different angles, and are not always concerned to reach complete agreement; secondly, they frequently take up views that they have developed elsewhere, in their previous books and articles; and, finally, their discussions regularly juxtapose and assess two theoretical and critical currents – postcolonial studies and decolonial thinking – whose outlines, and, above all, concrete differences, are sometimes difficult to discern.

      The preliminary remarks in my foreword are not an attempt to replace this ‘seeing double’ with a synthetic image, nor do they aim to show how, as they put forward their arguments, our two authors often glance sideways towards other points of view. I will merely note the framework in which postcolonial and/or decolonial studies have grown and developed, and explain that, while they follow their own paths, Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle are ultimately quite close to such studies; this will make it easier to see what brings them closer to each other, and this book of discussions may help the reader to develop not an overview of all the questions tackled here, but simply a nuanced point of view that goes beyond traditional black and white distinctions.

Looking through cultural spectacles

      The day will come – perhaps, indeed, in some academic or activist circles, it came a long time ago – when we will talk of postcolonial studies and decolonial thought in the past tense. However, they have been a subject for discussion for only a score of years in France, and no doubt they could be seen, in the recent history of ideas, as part of a perspective specific to the early 2000s.

      It was with Jean-Marc Moura’s Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Francophone Literatures and Postcolonial Theory), first published in 1999 and later reissued,¹ and the collection of articles that he co-edited the same year with Jean Bessière, Littératures postcoloniales et représentations de l’ailleurs (Postcolonial Literatures and Representations of Elsewhere),² that this area of research started to cause a stir in the French academic world. As these two titles suggested, this new field was an offshoot of literary studies, establishing as it did a close link between literature, representations and ‘theory’.

      In fact – and the many genealogies drawn up since then have continued to insist on this point –, what is still called ‘postcolonial theory’ first saw the light of day in literary studies departments, initially in the English-speaking world.³ Whether we take the pioneering work of the American-Palestinian critic and historian of literature Edward Said, Orientalism, first published in 1978,⁴ or the equally pioneering collective work co-edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, first published in 1989,⁵ the starting point and the critical issue remained the same. (Said’s work was translated into French in 1980, while The Empire Writes Back had to wait until 2012.) On the one hand, the question was how, in the era of European colonial expansion, a discourse on ‘the other’ developed, either seen from a scholarly point of view (the literature of ideas and the various human sciences), or envisaged in a more literary light (fiction, especially ‘exotic’ and then colonial literature) – a discourse that soon trapped that ‘other’ in a posture of radical difference from the Western world. But on the other hand, and more importantly, by a boomerang effect not anticipated by the colonizers, this very ‘other’ – or this ‘the same but otherwise’ – answered Westerners back in the very same languages and genres of discourse (literature,