Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny. By Cécile Bishop. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 41.) Oxford: Legenda, 2014. ix + pp., ill.

Baker, Charlotte (2015) Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny. By Cécile Bishop. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 41.) Oxford: Legenda, 2014. ix + pp., ill. French Studies, 69 (3). pp. 430-431. ISSN 0016-1128

Abstract

One might initially understand from the book's title that it focuses on the rather under-studied question of the representation of dictatorship in African literature. While this is to some extent true, Cécile Bishop instead uses literary and filmic representations of dictatorship to support her argument for a form of (postcolonial) criticism that foregrounds the complexity of the reader's or spectator's experience. The theme of post-independence dictatorships in Africa, Bishop acknowledges, is selected because it is ‘illustrative of themes and questions that have been central to the field of postcolonial criticism, and mobilizes very directly the entanglement between politics …