Pim Higginson  (Bryn Mawr College)
Yaoundé Comes to Harlem: Beti's Last Stand

Broadly speaking, the proposed presentation engages with one of the more intriguing manifestations of postcolonial Francophone African production, the crime novel. Indeed, if any one form challenges (but also beckons to) orthodox postcolonial paradigms, it is detective fiction and its diverse descendants. As a form, crime fiction is deeply embedded within Western literary traditions. At the same time, because of its diverse origins (within Arabian and Chinese literatures, among others) and its inherent participation in, and virulent critique of, Western modernity, it stands as a paradigmatic example of both the advantages and limitations of a postcolonial analysis of "non-Western" literary practices.

Indeed, it will be contention that is both because of its embrication within-and significant challenge to-the Western literary canon (and the ideologies that the canon vehicles and constitutes) that there has been, over the last twenty years, a growing body of crime fiction by Francophone African authors.

More specifically, I will investigate the last two works written by Mongo Beti (Trop de Soleil tue l'amour (1999), Branle-bas en noir et blanc (2000)) before his untimely death in 2001. In particular, my focus will be on the intertextual relationship between the Cameroonian Beti and African American Chester Himes. This particular pairing, made available by specific references within the former's texts, hints at a powerful new model for reading the African novelistic tradition. This relational approach follows an under-analyzed strand of African American literary history within the optic of what Binetta Jules-Rosette has called "Black Paris" into the particular project proposed by Beti that began with Ville cruelle (1954) and led to his turn to the popular crime form in his final years.

It should be clear that my approach, inasmuch as it brings together two authors from different countries and traditions, is comparative in nature. Just as importantly, the crime genre also immediately evokes many of the questions proposed by this conference: what is/can be the role of the literary to be in any revolutionary project? What is the relationship between the local and the global (economically, ideologically, ethically, esthetically)? What speech is possible in the context of global hegemonic forms of production and dissemination? These and other questions are at the heart of crime fiction and speak directly to Mongo Beti's particular-some might say peculiar-choice of genres at the end of his life. It will be my contention that in choosing this form, Beti offers, if not a solution to the problem, a brilliant display of where the most important questions must be posed.