“Even Crusoe needs a Friday”: the limits of senses of the dichotomy "universal / local" in African literatures

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the perverse opposition many critics – mainly from journalistic but also from "academic" criticism - set between local and universal in African literature, labeling as local those writers who bring to the literary scene the emergencies of the society they live in. This "maniqueist" thought might occur as a result of the fact that much of the criticism on African literature is till done through mediations from the "center" which, in essence, is still functioning as the "metropolitan center" and to whom pleases the rarefaction (or the fading) of the historic real and the disregard for "national identity." On considering as an equivocal criticism the establishment of any opposition between the universal and the local, the text defiantly proposes instead a combined articulation of dialectic effect in which the concealing of the local generates, by the dynamism of its symbolic significance, the universal. It is up to the literary critic, whose exercise is inseparable from his ideological options, and also as a participant of a memory of the literary system, to lighten the signs of an identity to be registered in the agenda of the universal literature through its segmented civilizing identities.