Para-literary Authorship: Colonial Education and the Uses of Literature

Colonial classrooms in French West Africa introduced literary studies to negotiate the perils of teaching colonized students to express themselves in their “own words.” Elite colonial schools became hotbeds of what can be called para-literary modes of authorship: students were obliged to draw on literary models, but could not appear to be writing literature. The central example is an archive of some eight hundred auto-ethnographies produced by elite West African students at the William Ponty School from 1933 to 1950. In order to graduate, students wrote ethnographies of their communities over their summer vacation. While students were urged to avoid “false literary descriptions,” in practice they were encouraged to mine literary techniques to produce accounts of their break with tradition and socialization as modern subjects. This chapter explores the impact of para-literary writing on literary production in French and vernacular languages and reflects on the terms in which literary history is imaginable.