The historical “temporal turn,” following the “cultural turn” of the 1980s and 1990s, has built on the influential work of European theorists such as Reinhard Koselleck.1 Pierre-Philippe Fraiture's newest book, Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945–1960, stands in this line, attempting to understand human experiences of time in West Africa of the late colonial era following the Second World War. Fraiture explicitly sought “not to establish equivalences; it is to highlight overlaps but also tensions and points of friction between figures who marked the development of African studies in the post-war era” (23). Fraiture succeeds in demonstrating the rapid and significant changes in the theoretical underpinning of the study of Africa in the 1950s through a close and referential examination of the work and impact of French sociologist Georges Balandier, including varying engagements with the West African thinkers Cheikh Anta Diop, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, and Joseph Ki-Zerbo. The work's interdisciplinarity in pursuit of this disciplinary examination serves as both its greatest strength and greatest weakness, giving tantalizing hints of alternative African intellectual discourses but ultimately refracting African achievements through and with Balandier's Francocentric conceptualization of what he termed the “colonial situation.”2Fraiture organized his exploration of African studies into a preface, introduction, four detailed analytical chapters, and a conclusion. The preface serves as an argument in miniature, tracing the writing in a relatively obscure 1948 issue of Le Musée Vivant The Living Museum to understand the rapid shifts in perspective away from European control and exploitation and toward a more localized and sensitive reading of African difference. The first chapter, “Pasts and Futures,” echoes the argument of the preface, following what Fraiture helpfully terms, “the reparative logic which has characterized research in African history until today,” including a brief discussion of Ki-Zerbo's efforts to reclaim African agency and a useful analysis of the power of museums in authorizing intellectual alternatives to Europe through an accessible enshrinement of African artifacts (91). The next chapter, “Things,” continues that discussion largely through an analysis of select efforts by the famed publishing house Présence Africaine. Centered on the Chris Marker film essay Les Statues Meurent Aussi and related multimedia artistic and literary production of the early 1950s, the chapter explores the tension between the essentialism of thinkers such as Placide Tempels and the more specific and localized analyses of Diop and later V. Y. Mudimbé.3 Moving away from artistic production, chapter 3, “Words,” focuses on the use of language with a particular emphasis on Diop's elevation of Wolof as a descendant of Black Egyptian languages of antiquity. It is helpful that the chapter expanded to consider the rise of African-centered research structures through the work of Hampâté Bâ in partnership with Théodore Monod and Marcel Cardaire, probing these methodologies as connected to Balandier's wider decolonization of the discipline. The final chapter, “Customs,” stands as the book's most successful in the detailed examination of Balandier's efforts to overturn Eurocentric tendencies within African studies, performing what he saw as a critical act of cultural salvage.Fraiture's work thus operates in a multimodal fashion, working across methodologies as varied as history, film studies, literary analysis, linguistics, sociology, and anthropology. Such wide emphases allowed him to generate significant insight into the shifts marking African studies during what we now understand as a relatively rapid movement toward decolonization in the 1950s. That interdisciplinary strength, however, also limited the book's analytical reach. In the end, Fraiture did not analyze the processes that led to West African views on decolonization or the alternative African intellectual systems that emerged during that tumultuous process. Instead, he conducted a macroscopic view of shifts in the ways that analysts such as Balandier described sociopolitical change. Continued focus, particularly in chapters 3 and 4, on the “ubiquitous presence of a progress-based historical model developed during the modern era” placed the work squarely in European intellectual terms, assuming a linear chronology and a universal understanding of, and desire to attain, European-style “modernity” (19). Beyond brief mentions of Hampâté Bâ’s engagement with the Sufi leader Tierno Bokar, Fraiture included little mention of enormously influential Islamic practices and intellectual paradigms in West African anticolonial and postcolonial proposals for change. Based on Koselleck's insightful but resolutely Eurocentric analysis of temporality, Fraiture sought “to situate Africa within a specific chronology, rather than ascribing it a slot on a teleological line of progress” (78). Unfortunately, Fraiture's employment of a thin source base from Ki-Zerbo and Hampâté Bâ, neglecting much of their substantial publishing oeuvre and missing important thinkers such as Boubou Hama, Alfa Ibrahim Sow, and Bernard Dadié, limited him to a “problematization” of this temporal flow, one rendered almost entirely through Diop's work without resolution or specificity on potential African-generated solutions. Past Imperfect thus offers an interesting and compelling view of French efforts to steer and describe the study of Africa, best read in conjunction with the work of scholars such as Erin Pettigrew or Ousmane Oumar Kane, focused on African intellectual paradigms.4 Fraiture's book remains a useful reference for those interested in colonial knowledge systems and their early, tenuous links to African sociopolitical thought.
Douglas W. Leonard (Wed,) studied this question.