Research in African Literatures (2010) - Patrice Nganang's "L'invention du Beau Regard" and "Dog Days": Three Phases of Capitalism with Two Dogs and One Devouring Pig
Details
- article: Patrice Nganang's "L'invention du Beau Regard" and "Dog Days": Three Phases of Capitalism with Two Dogs and One Devouring Pig
- author(s): Kenneth W. Harrow
- journal: Research in African Literatures (2010)
- issue: volume 41, issue 2, pages 55-73
- DOI: 10.2979/RAL.2010.41.2.55
- journal ISSN: 0034-5210
- publisher: Indiana University Press
- keywords: 1900-1999, African literature, Alfred Hitchcock, Authoritarianism, Cameroon literature, Capitalism, Contes citadins, Father and child, Fathers, Ferdinand Léopold Oyono, French language literature, History-Africa, Independence, L'Invention du beau regard, Literary criticism, Literature-Africa, MacGuffin, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, New York City, New York, North by Northwest (1959), Novel, Novels, Patriarchy, Patrice Nganang, Portrayals, Postcolonial novel, Psycho (1960), Shamley Productions, Slavoj Žižek, Temps de chien, The Birds (1963), Une Vie de boy, United Nations, New York City, New York, Universal Studios
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Abstract
Western epistemologies about Africa that have become dominant in the past decade focus upon Africa as a site of death. The alternative "Shrobenius" proposition sees in Africa the source of life. From the late 1970s on, it is the Afro-pessimistic paradigm that has been on the ascendancy. In Oyono's Une vie de boy (1956), the commandants and the Pères blancs (white fathers), displaced the African fathers, erecting an unbridgeable barrier between the African sons and the ruling colonial fathers. With the end of the Indepen-dences, those white fathers were replaced by the Autocrats whose imperial or presidential aspirations posed equally daunting barriers between themselves and the children of the Independences. We need to assess the passage from the 1950s to the present fiction of Nganang where the losses of the father are now occurring under globalization, with its shadows that are cast over the current African autocracy. This paper approaches this question of the changes from then to now by working through a model offered by Žižek that joins together the figures of the fathers, and their relations with their that joins together the figures of the fathers, and their relations with their women and children, with the dominant ideological and economic orders, thus providing us with a meaningful relationship between the kinds of subjectivities that are embodied in the protagonists and their respective symbolic/economic/political orders.
