Poétiques et savoirs du polar d’Afrique francophone by Adama Togola (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Poétiques et savoirs du polar d’Afrique francophone by Adama Togola Jennifer Howell Togola, Adama. Poétiques et savoirs du polar d’Afrique francophone. L’Harmattan, 2020. ISBN 978-2-343-20854-1. Pp. 264. Modern crime fiction emerged in Western Europe and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Rooted in societal change, the early policier mirrored Western modernity. Not only did the Industrial Revolution transform national economies, it also catalyzed a mass labor migration from rural areas to large urban centers. As cities became more densely populated, crime increased, leading to the establishment of the first organized police departments charged with managing the ever-changing fabric of society. While also in constant flux, the policier is first and foremost a formulaic genre in which an investigator leads an inquiry to solve a mystery. This code, which had previously marginalized the genre with respect to the literary canon, has since inspired authors to creatively subvert the rules of the game, thereby elevating the status of the policier worldwide. French-language African crime fiction, the subject of Togola’s monograph, followed a similar trajectory in the wake of decolonization. Consequently, the crime novel represents a relatively recent literary development in Central and West Africa. Although the African policier did not grow in popularity or prestige until the late nineties, Togola rightly focuses on novels published just before. On one hand, the eighties were a defining moment in African literary history with the emergence of new epistemologies, ideologies, and esthetics. On the other, the nineties ushered in a period of vast political change initiated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union that led to the creation of multiparty states in Africa. Some, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, would ultimately prove volatile. This violence, political instability, and economic uncertainty also drove African youth to attempt the difficult migration north. Those who succeeded inevitably changed the cultural landscape of the European cities they inhabited. At the nexus of these sociohistorical and cultural contexts lies the African polar, a subgenre of the policier characterized by violence, sex, and obscene language. Togola proposes a contextualized reading of seventeen novels that explore the relationship between poetics and knowledge, both of which are crucial to our understanding of the polar and late-twentieth-century sub-Saharan Africa. He argues that while the African polar resembles its Western counterpart, it differs in significant ways. If the latter uses scientific reasoning to solve crime, the former navigates the porous frontier between reality and the supernatural, between modern and traditional ways of knowing. Throughout his study, the author identifies generic tropes that writers have adapted to the African context: the figure of the justicier, the role of immigration/exile, the coexistence of the rational and irrational, and the (re)valorization of African cultural identity. Rather than prioritize the sociopolitical framework of his corpus, Togola reads the African polar as a reflection of the continent’s sociopolitical and cultural dimensions, one [End Page 211] that prob lematizes contemporary discourses on violence, challenges generic distinctions, and constructs a pluralistic vision of African history and memory. Despite the narrow purview of this study, it makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the relationship between form and function in contemporary francophone literatures. [End Page 212] Jennifer Howell Illinois State University Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French