Brent Hayes Edwards’s wonderful translation of Michel Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme (hereafter referred to as Phantom Africa) comes at an especially propitious time. The history of French anthropology and studies of the discipline’s relationships to empire, literature, and fiction in the Francophone world are fast becoming an established field, as recent books by Vincent Debaene, Alice Conklin, and myself attest.1 Leiris’s sprawling and enigmatic Phantom Africa is in the thick of this constellation of issues: the 1931–33 Mission Dakar-Djibouti crossed colonial Africa and independent Abyssinia, but although Leiris’s travel journal offers a real-time account of the expedition it also famously meanders into stylized reflections on literature, selfhood, and the fraught nature of anthropological knowledge production. With Edwards’s translation, Phantom Africa looks set to find new, English-language audiences who will position the work within emerging twenty-first-century contexts.

Thanks to its density, ethnographic detail, paratextual framing, colonial resonances, and affective turbulence, Phantom Africa has long fed critical work that engages with the paradoxes that proliferate in the hundreds of pages Leiris devotes to the mission. One of the most important involves the question of genre, as the text straddles anthropology and literature in Leiris’s journal intime whose prose does not allow readers easily to disentangle these two modes of writing. And in fact they need not be disentangled: although Leiris would go on to write more conventional social-scientific studies like Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe (1956) or La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Éthiopiens de Gondar (1958), in this earlier text he highlights the poetics of ethnographic knowledge production long before anthropologists addressed this question in the “writing culture” moment of the 1980s and ’90s.

Other paradoxes spring from this epistemological and stylistic knot. The affective tenor of the book is unstable and shifting, as Leiris moves from impatient excitement at the kinds of “contact” anthropology might foster to morose introspection and gloomy boredom that keep him forever focused on the mission’s next stops. The same goes for his relationship to colonialism. For one thing, Leiris punctuates Phantom Africa with statements of exasperation at the colonial situation but at the same time he welcomes the fact that colonial politics makes the mission and its object collecting/thievery possible in the first place. For another, in his paratextual preface and preamble (written in 1951 and 1981, respectively) Leiris distances himself from both the man who wrote Phantom Africa initially and from certain naïve remarks about the colonial situation that the original text contains. What results is a mise en abyme of selves, different versions of Leiris (Leiris 2.0 or 3.0, we might say) who critique the political positions of earlier iterations and cause the journal’s original self to recede and become phantomlike.

Edwards’s translation and critical introduction highlight and wrestle with many of these paradoxes. On the colonial question, for instance, he notes that although Phantom Africa does not record on any macro level Leiris’s coming to terms with an anticolonial consciousness (this would come later), the day-to-day pacing of the entries “[capture] in slow motion . . . the process by which a rather callow and disaffected poet was first forced to confront the problem of colonialism in his life as well as in his writing” (24). This observation allows Edwards to point out that much of Leiris’s frustration with colonialism in Phantom Africa springs from a generalized “misanthropy” (23) rather than from any solidifying political position. But it also allows him to suggest that much of the journal is given over to more micro-level engagements with empire, even if these confrontations do not tell the story of an emergent anticolonialism.

Edwards also addresses the literature/anthropology question, rightly arguing that Phantom Africa “creates a bifurcation between anthropology and literature, a split that comes to define [Leiris’s] entire career” (13), even though the journal itself blends anthropology with literary effects. And on the question of selfhood the translation offers a new, intriguing layer: Edwards quotes from the letters Leiris wrote during the mission to his wife, Zette. These excerpts appear as notes to the right and left of the main body of the text, so that readers can easily move back and forth between the journal and these more private reflections. The effect here is at once visual, geographic, and ontological: these letters draw our eyes from Leiris’s real-time recordings to his epistolary metacommentary, reminding us that Leiris remained inescapably focused on Zette in Paris just as he wrestled with anthropology on the ground in Africa. Similarly, in the letters we observe a self who was reflecting on the “first-take” impressions that comprise the journal’s main text but at some degree of remove from the entries’ immediacy.

This play of distancing and layering, filtered as it is through anthropology and the colonial project, is what attracted me to Phantom Africa in the first place. I have lived with this book for a long time, first as an undergraduate interested in anthropology and literature and later as a graduate student working on a dissertation about anthropology, fiction, and empire. The conclusion to the book that grew out of this dissertation meditates on what twentieth-century experimental anthropologies have to tell us about the politics of knowledge production today. Having finished this project, I remain struck by how Leiris and Phantom Africa might intersect with twenty-first-century debates about how knowledge in and about Africa can revitalize planetary perspectives on politics and cultural production. Leiris himself might approve of this convergence, since as he distanced himself from the colonial project in his 1951 and 1981 paratexts he highlighted the ways in which ethnographic knowledge had to leave behind its colonial trappings if it was to link up with “those emerging from that black world who were struggling against oppression and asserting their cultural particularity across the globe” (59–60). As he distanced himself from the self who wrote the journal in the first place, then, Leiris inserted Phantom Africa into global perspectives on politics and blackness.

Michel Leiris and Africa-World

In a recent essay from his coedited collection, Écrire l’Afrique-Monde (Writing Africa-World), Achille Mbembe raises related questions about how to conceive of knowledge produced within and about Africa and the diaspora from planetary perspectives. This essay, “Penser le monde à partir de l’Afrique” (Thinking the world from Africa), consists of twelve propositions for moving beyond what he calls “modern regimes of knowledge” that position Africa as a cloistered geopolitical/epistemological space and whose hallmark is the idea that “humanity does not share a common world.”2 With these propositions Mbembe tries to imagine now modes of thinking from Africa and the diaspora that would require instead a “politics of sameness” that speaks to our shared planetary condition—here his political epistemology takes on an ecological cast. Mbembe turns to figures like Frantz Fanon, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Édouard Glissant in order to reimagine an “African paradigm for the social sciences” that relies on the opening of worlds onto each other, and that rejects the closure inherent in older nationalist projects. The broad question guiding these interventions is “How can we make the present and African life . . . an event for thought for people of African origins of course, but also for our world?”3

Despite their global inclinations, Mbembe and Leiris are of course working in very different contexts. On the one hand, the paratextual Leiris of the preamble and preface to Phantom Africa is trying to read his earlier self in terms of Third-Worldism and anticolonial nationalisms that, as Edwards stresses in his introduction, he came to believe could be fostered with the help of ethnographers (23). What is more, the fact that these paratexts cause the Africa that appears in Leiris’s “first-take” journal entries to recede even further only reinforces Mbembe’s claim about how modern knowledge regimes have highlighted the continent’s fundamental difference. On the other hand, Mbembe seeks to move beyond the nationalisms toward which Leiris was turning: he focuses instead on circulations, openings, and the question of relationality.

And yet, I want to propose that Leiris and Mbembe are not necessarily speaking past one another, and that reading Leiris in terms of the planetary thrust of “Africa-World” opens up new ways to read Phantom Africa in the twenty-first century. From this perspective, Leiris’s desire for the kinds of “contact” that ethnography offers seems to resonate with Mbembe’s call for a politics of sameness, even though we cannot forget that Leiris always falls back into epistemological difference. This tension suggests that Leiris was working through the global echoes of his work even as his travel diary began to appear utterly foreign or “phantasmal” to him, as he put it in 1981 (61). Further, still in his 1981 preamble, Leiris raises the question of African futures that would break with the modes of knowledge with which he was working in Phantom Africa (61), a break that appears consonant with Mbembe’s call to go beyond what modern epistemologies have made of Africa.

Beyond this question of epistemological periodization, the experimental nature of Phantom Africa speaks to another point Mbembe makes about cultural production in and about Africa. He argues that in order to think world futures from African presents we must adopt a “postanthropological” perspective on the continent that privileges “literary and artistic archives” capable of imagining belonging, circulation, and “proximity” over and against the kinds of difference that the social sciences have historically reified.4 Mbembe only lets us glimpse what “postanthropology” might mean, but we can understand it as a provocation pitting artistic production against the human sciences, spurring the former toward future-oriented knowledges.

In Phantom Africa, Leiris is also wrestling with the entanglement of art/literature, anthropology, and knowledge production. Despite their divergent contexts (Mbembe goes on to reference postcolonial African fiction, for instance), both Mbembe and Leiris wonder about the viability of ethnographic knowledge, the question of genre, and about how African futures push us to redefine our analytic categories. It is on this terrain that we can see these two figures intersect, but it is also here that Leiris provokes us to reframe Mbembe’s argument. Doing so illuminates some of the stakes involved in reading Phantom Africa today.

Mbembe’s postanthropological perspective seems to presuppose a fundamental incompatibility between the social sciences and artistic-literary production. But in Phantom Africa Leiris sees these modes of writing and of conceiving the world as curiously co-dependent: the journal is rich with ethnographic detail, and yet Leiris famously writes of his frustration with ethnography in prose that contains stylized, literary resonances. His writing holds together anthropology, literature, and critical distancing in ways that do not allow for any of these threads to be neatly isolated and considered apart from the others. This feature reaches a crescendo when, toward the end of the journey, Leiris goes so far as to reimagine himself as a fictionalized character in an “idea for a story” that reboots Joseph Conrad’s 1915 novel, Victory (671–75). Doing so removes him from his immediate ethnographic surroundings and allows for imaginative free play that the social sciences cannot admit, but it also shows how ethnographic knowledge production for Leiris floats between these different registers and relies on their interpenetration. And crucially, his exasperation and doubts about the viability or usefulness of ethnographic knowledge function in the same way.

All of this is not to offer an updated vision of Leiris as an afrofuturist avant la lettre. But it is to point out that he was reckoning with certain problems that Mbembe would go on to bring together in his call for a “postanthropological perspective” on Africa. Moreover, Leiris doubles down on his critical distancing from anthropology in his paratextual reframing, writing in 1981 that “I no longer believe that this testimony could be considered any better than phantasmal by those . . . on whom depends to a great extent the future of the new Africa where peoples are coming into contact” (61). What this play of layering and distancing suggests is that although Leiris and Mbembe are working through remarkably similar sets of problems, for the former this process does not involve provocatively leaving anthropology behind. Despite his frustrations with the discipline, Leiris is not imagining ways of knowing “beyond” anthropology (and not just because he went on to write more conventional ethnographic studies). Instead, he tackles what he perceives as anthropology’s epistemological shortcomings by opening up the discipline to art and literature. For Leiris these shortcomings might be addressed by embracing a sense of connectivity between anthropology and other forms of creative cultural production.

What this means, finally, is that Leiris’s experimentation has to do with forcing anthropology to open onto other modes of writing and of imagining the world. It does not, however, involve solidifying boundaries between the social sciences and literature in the same way that Mbembe’s postanthropology risks doing, even though its central thrust about surpassing epistemologies of difference is well-taken. In Phantom Africa and its paratexts, Leiris is in many ways thinking an early, even colonial, version of Mbembe’s Africa-World, one that interrogates anthropological knowledge production by postulating the discipline’s proximity to other creative outlets. And it is this experimental “proximity,” to borrow one of Mbembe’s key categories, that suggests new ways of thinking alongside Leiris and Phantom Africa today.

But at the moment of translation, everything is ruined.

—Michel Leiris, Phantom Africa (October 11, 1931)

 

I

Multiple and complex layers of translation separate the colonies and sovereign nations across the African continent Michel Leiris traversed in the early 1930s from the early twenty-first-century English-language reader of Phantom Africa. These layers are both temporally and spatially consequential. Between 1931 and 1933, several more-or-less competent and more-or-less willing African interpreters translated their world to Leiris, helping him to perceive, in real time, truths that otherwise would escape (and often nevertheless did) his French European eyes and ears. Largely reliant on these interpreters throughout his journey, and constantly frustrated by what he knew to be their insufficiencies, mocking deceptions, and willful refusals, Leiris sought to transcribe—also in real time—all that he “understood” into his journal. Thus did he set out to translate the accumulated experiences of his travel across the African continent—along with the African languages and cultures he encountered there—for a metropolitan French readership, endeavoring mightily all the while to avoid what Edwards calls the “inevitable distortion” (5) of exoticism.

Of the many fascinating dimensions of this process, one of the most compelling is the extent to which it hinges on the impossible bind of Leiris’s desire-effort to translate Africa. It is crucial to understand the mission as a whole as an ambitious overarching experiment in cultural translation. Ten Frenchmen sought to apply their diverse skills and competencies to making black Africa legible to white Europe. In effecting this translational process, they relied fundamentally on countless, punctual moments of interpretation wherein they could not be entirely sure to have understood anything essential or, at times, even true.

Leiris makes numerous references to his frustrations in the face of translational impossibility. Because he was so meticulous in reporting his interactions with his African interpreter-interlocutors, we readers bear witness to the sustained tension between Leiris’s desire for information that would reveal to him the human truth of the people whose world he temporarily inhabited, and the wariness of those people and/or their interpreters in trusting him with this information. This was, of course, the central bind of the entire expedition, and it saddened and enraged Leiris in equal measure.

Leiris’s affective response to the limits of translation and of his translators—his annoyance and resentment, his anger and his suspiciousness—expose the limits of his self-awareness at the time of the mission and suggest also the limits of the project as a whole. If, that is, a stated objective of the Mission Dakar-Dijbouti was to reveal and record—to translate—the humanity of the African “Other” to a European scientific audience, that objective required knowledge of the “Other.” It required comprehension in its most rooted sense—as understanding, yes, but also as a means of completely taking hold of or seizing.1 In order to serve as privileged intermediaries between the “Us” of Europe and the “Them” of sub-Saharan Africa—again, in order to translate—the men of the mission had to refuse the opacity of the colonial subject.

II

In this respect, Phantom Africa recalls another important mid-century French text that similarly sought to intervene in metropolitan-colonial relations and that similarly turned around questions of visibility and power: “Black Orpheus,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to the 1948 Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in French, compiled by Negritude poet-philosopher Léopold Sedar Senghor. Given that “Black Orpheus” is nearly fifteen years Phantom Africa’s junior, there are ways in which it may be anachronistic to compare the two. It is true that at the time of the mission Leiris had not yet come around to an explicitly anti-colonialist politics and that he was, in 1934, a far less sophisticated thinker of race and imperialism than Sartre. Nonetheless, the stakes underlying the two texts—the question of Europe’s imperial gaze, colonial resistance to that gaze, and the ambivalent positioning of the progressive French intelligentsia in the face of these changing dynamics—are remarkably similar. Phantom Africa and “Black Orpheus” exist on a continuum of European male (the question of gender is crucial and is taken up below) attitudes toward and presumptions about nonwhite subjects that are firmly anchored in the relational hierarchies of colonialism.2

The series of provocative question-declarations Sartre puts forward in the very first paragraph of “Black Orpheus” interpolate a white readership that he at once admonishes and acknowledges as his geopolitical kin:

When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground? Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you—like me—will feel the shock of being seen. . . . Today, these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind. (13)

The remarkable pronominal instability that runs throughout this introductory paragraph attest to Sartre’s self-positioning as liaison-interpreter. And as he proceeds in his pronouncements on the black poetic imagination, it becomes apparent that he is caught in a bind not dissimilar to that which underpins Leiris’s narrative. It is the bind Frantz Fanon, writing critically about “Black Orpheus,” identifies in his fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks (1952), notably, the extent to which the role of sympathetic European intermediary-translator is de facto and inevitably corrupted by the relations of power that mark the colonial era. The European’s right and capacity to know is never disputed, nor is the presumption of universal human movement toward a common goal; Europe’s desire to com-prehend through a rendering transparent of the Other—through a translation of the Other into French metropolitan terms—stands as the legitimate and ultimate objective. That is, while Sartre begins “Black Orpheus” with a forceful claim for reversing the colonial gaze and accepting “the shock of being seen,” he nevertheless proceeds to define “Negro poetry.” He frames his translation within a Hellenic myth and then concludes by coopting black aesthetics into Hegel’s formulation of dialectical materialism—i.e., a universalizing German philosophical conceit.

To consider Leiris’s ambivalent narrative alongside the blind spots in Sartre’s categorical denunciation of white supremacy provides insight into the emotional contours of Leiris’s engagement with the African interpreters and translators he relied on during the mission. More than anything else, Leiris wanted to know—to com-prehend Africa and its people both broadly and in their specificity. This was his principle preoccupation, personal as well as professional. He wanted to understand Africa not merely for the sake of science, but in the interest of empathetic engagement. As Edwards notes, and as is evident throughout Phantom Africa, Leiris was interested foremost in the “human significance” of this African adventure. For reasons genuine if condescending, Leiris sought to appreciate and to document the humanity of the people he met. Yet, from the very outset, the extent to which Africa would remain “ultimately unknowable” (52) made this a near-impossible task.

Within just a couple of months of being on the expedition, Leiris was confronted with the limits of his understanding—with the firm and deliberate impediments to carrying meaning across the barriers of language and culture.3 That he felt keenly these constraints is apparent, in the way he wrote about the mission’s hired servants, beginning with the interpreter Mamadou Vad. Often when Leiris noted down something that came to him by way of Vad’s intervention, he preceded the information with the clause “according to the tardjouman [interpreter]” or “according to Mamadou Vad,” subtly indicating the reserve of suspicion that marked his relationship with his informant. Other revealing journal entries—“I am angry with Mamadou Vad, apparently so devoted to our interests” (July 22, 1931, emphasis mine)—similarly affirm the boundaries of this mutually dependent, mutually vulnerable relationship between colonial administrator and colonial subject. The trickiness of their dynamic is articulated most explicitly less than a month into their time working together: “I explain to Mamadou Vad that his role is to get us information on this subject. What will he bring back? A definitive explanation, or one of those fantasies to which he alone holds the secret?” (July 28, 1931).

Such instances of mistrust, if not downright conflict, between Leiris and his “native informants” were numerous. Some of them, Leiris seems to have taken in stride: he acknowledges, for example, that “the natives often pass off as casual amusement something whose religious purpose they wish to conceal” (note to letter dated July 22, 1931); or, later, “it seems we are making little headway and the people, though they give up little secrets, carefully hide the essentials” (October 3, 1931). Others, he did not: “Livid with rage at a man who shows up to sell grigris and who, when I ask him the magical formulas that must be recited when using them, gives a different version every time I make him repeat one of them so that I can write it down, and, every time that one is to be translated, gives even more new versions” (September 27, 1931). Indeed, there were limits to Leiris’s tolerance for being kept in the dark. And in such moments, his patience sorely tried, he recognized just how unlikely it was that he would achieve any of the noble humanist objectives he had set out for himself. “On reflection,” he writes of an exchange with the father of an informant, “this all seems very artificial to me. What a sinister comedy these old Dogon and I have been playing! A European hypocrite, all sugar and honey, and a Dogon hypocrite, so trite because so much weaker . . . will not be brought any closer by the exchange of fermented liquor. The only link there is between us is a common duplicity” (October 4, 1931).

Despite his best efforts to contextualize his interlocutors’ stonewalling and misinformation, Leiris nevertheless could not help but take personally such failures of translation: “I despair of ever being able to get to the bottom of anything. Merely to have bits and scraps of information concerning so many things infuriates me” (October 5, 1931). Unable to abide an African humanity that might not only be illegible to his European consciousness but that might insist on and defend its illegibility, Leiris experienced these encounters as instances of treacherous translation. Beyond frustration, Leiris on many occasion felt betrayed: “I have been duped,” he rages, “furious and mortified” (October 28, 1931), “old Ambibe has lied to me from start to finish of my work with him, giving me a mass of details, certainly, but deliberately withholding the essential things. I could almost wring his neck” (October 30, 1931). Begrudging, ultimately, the limitations of the privileged metropolitan gaze, Leiris’s expectation of transparency, and the extremes of depression or outrage that ensued in the many instances of its unlikelihood, show just how and to what extent “translation (as a form of mediation between Europeans and Africans) is complicit in the exercise of colonial power,” as Edwards points out (46).

III

It is unsurprising that, faced with these instances of transparency refused, Leiris imagined sex or romance as the sole space of immediacy available to Africans and Europeans.4 By the time of the expedition’s arrival in Abyssinia, a sovereign territory whose rulers—relative to the inhabitants of the francophone colonies—could not be compelled to indulge the demands of the mission, Leiris had begun to frame intimacy in contradistinction to science: “‘I have never slept with a black woman. Thus I have remained European!’” (March 31, 1932). This shift in perspective, wherein “sex doesn’t complement ethnographic understanding but trumps science, or transcends it” (17), as Edwards puts it, allowed Leiris to regain his bearings—or, rather, to realign his bearings so to extract a different sort of value from the trip.

In this respect, there is yet another “colonial” text that sheds light on Leiris’s desire for translation of the non-European Other, one even more contemporaneous with Phantom Africa than Sartre’s essay: the 1935 feature film Princesse Tam-Tam. A striking example of interwar era colonial cinema, the film’s premise parallels the original impulse behind Leiris’s participation in the mission, that is, the quest to discover in Africa the purpose and passion that had been diminished in the Parisian metropolis. Princesse Tam-Tam tells the story of Max de Mirecourt, a Parisian novelist with a severe case of writer’s block. De Mirecourt is convinced that the life he leads in the capital with his party-hopping, socialite wife has drained him of all creativity, and so he has run away to Africa in search of inspiration. He finds what he needs in the person of Alwina, an impishly alluring and childlike shepherd girl played by world-renowned African American entertainer Josephine Baker. De Mirecourt proceeds to involve Alwina in a suite of adventures and misadventures, of fantasies indulged and disappointed, but ultimately leaves her to her mystifying and incontrovertible otherness—to her Africa—amongst the squalor and simplicity of her animals, unchanged by their encounter. He returns to Paris and to his beautiful blond wife, his love affair with both resurrected by his flirtation with the Other and, more importantly, his fortune assured by the success of the novel he writes based on his African journey.

Like the fictional de Mirecourt, Leiris had left to Africa bored and largely disgusted by the vie mondaine of 1930s Paris, and “increasingly riven by depression and anxiety” (4), as Edwards notes. Heady with African American music and “the ritualistic qualities of black culture” (6), like many of those in his Negrophilic intellectual circles, Leiris sought a dramatic change in environment that would facilitate an equally dramatic change in his personal relationship with a world he increasingly disdained. He was hoping to find, in other words, a cure for his misanthropy.

For the most part, Leiris was frustrated in this objective. Yet there is a way in which Leiris’s African experience mirrors the successful failure of de Mirecourt’s, right down to the unconsummated infatuation with a brown damsel in distress and subsequent return, one manuscript richer, to France and a French wife. Specifically, during the last leg of the mission, the period of engagement with the Abyssinian zar possession cult, Leiris found himself hopelessly captivated by a zarine named Emawayish, “who wants to go to Europe, or at least to Eritrea” (August 24, 1932). “Completely devoted” (August 26, 1932) to her, he indulged in a platonic sort of courtship, attempting to get to know her, bringing her gifts, and otherwise trying to improve what he perceived to be her tragic circumstances. As time passed, however, he became increasingly disillusioned—from believing that she alone allowed him to be “morally reconciled” (September 21, 1932) to a point where, not only was he “no longer dazzled” (October 31, 1932), but where her behavior made him “feel disgusted” (November 8, 1932).

Ironically, however, it is through this gradual disenchantment that Leiris arrived at a victory not unlike that of Princesse Tam-Tam’s de Mirecourt. Disillusionment became liberation: Leiris found himself freed, like de Mirecourt, to fall in love with his wife again—“I’m looking forward to hearing some jazz and going dancing with you when I get back. . . . When I get back, we’ll have to have fun, to dance. With you I’ll have to lead the life of a sailor finally back on solid ground” (letter to Zette, November 28, 1932)—and to return to Paris and the literary life, certain now that he had not been missing anything elsewhere. Like de Mirecourt, he came back to embrace Europe’s promise, cathected in his beloved, who, as Edwards notes in the concluding passage of his introduction, was in many ways the motive force behind his entire enterprise of journaling and self-searching. Like de Mirecourt, he came to see Africa as “poetry probably not quite as beautiful as [he] had believed” (September 1, 1932).

This said, and in a way not dissimilar to Sartre’s claims regarding the “Negro’s” capacity to rejuvenate a soulless Europe, Leiris ultimately did get what he needed from his journey across Africa. He got his mojo back. And he got a book out of it, albeit one that would be neither read nor appreciated by those it translates. Though unable to cross the barriers of culture and consciousness that would have engendered true empathy and understanding, Leiris was unblocked where it mattered. The Africa he encountered in its rawest form worked its magic on his European soul.

I have as little taste as I have talent for speaking of what I do not know, and the only thing I know well is myself.

This, from the entry of April 4, 1931 in Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa, is as much example of Leiris’s tendency to contradict himself as of his confessional style. Leiris seeks repeatedly to position his journal as a reflection on its author more than as a commentary on “Africa”—since, as he tells us in the book’s title and in its preface, the continent presented in his journal is no more than a phantom. This has been taken as a forward-looking acknowledgment of the role of subjectivity in knowledge production. And indeed, it is a valuable counterpart to ethnographic work of the time, both because it depicts the conditions of that work and because it presented the possibility of a form of writing about “the other” that was more doubtful about the nature of identity or self and its relationship to otherness.

But the journal’s confessional mode operates to obscure as much as to reveal. In positioning his writing as being primarily about the search for himself—the elaboration of an individual subjectivity—Leiris opposes his approach (“half-poetic, half documentary”) to “objective” science with its detached view. But by “confessing” his subjectivity Leiris also holds it up as a shield obscuring the fact that he is very much—even obsessively—involved in the project of documenting otherness. How exactly, then, does “subjectivity” work here? I want to think about this through the lens of ethnographic desire, in order to try to articulate what may be misleading about the opposition of subjectivity and objectivity, or even literature and science. In fact, the obsessive form of Leiris’s narration reveals what his own analysis cannot—the ways in which he is drawn into the mission’s project.

Leiris clearly has a taste for speaking of what he does not know. More than a taste, a “passion,” one of his preferred words. It is clear from the early pages of Phantom Africa that Leiris is smitten with ethnographic desire; he wants to know—not himself, but the other. In his descriptions of his work as part of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, Leiris writes of a quest for knowledge that waxes and wanes like lust, fed by an attraction to precisely that which is not himself.

Sameness bores Leiris. His initial impressions of the mission are that it is an “insipid activity” to go to another continent in order to “buy in a systematic fashion” the “work tools” of people who are “hardly any more interesting in the end than the residents of Auvergne or any other lost countryside” (98). But after seventy or so pages in which he frequently bemoans his disappointment at realizing that he will not be able to escape himself through encounter with the other . . . the other appears. The ethnographic bug bites. As the mission prepares to leave for Dogon country, an atmosphere of anticipation arises in his writing: “Already we can think of nothing but the Habé whom we will soon see” (131). A few short days later, he is ardent. In a letter to his wife Zette he writes, “I continue to devote myself fully to my work and have even given myself over to it with real passion . . .  What gives me moral comfort, and confirms my conviction of the necessity of this voyage, is that it is truly impossible to meet people this outlandish in the metropole” (134).

And then, suddenly, he is jaded: “It seems we are making little headway and the people, though they give up a few little secrets, carefully hide the essentials.” This cycle repeats throughout the text—passion, even obsession, followed by a kind of irritated despair at his research subjects’ unwillingness or inability to give him access to their lives and secrets. Sometimes this despair opens into a critique of the mission itself,1 but most often it is expressed as disgust toward the people who initially seemed to offer precious insights but are then revealed to be lying, or inconsistent, or simply less intelligent than thought.2 The repetition of the cycle, over and over, is one of the things that clearly sets apart the journal form from the arc of a constructed narrative: there is no bildung here. At the same time, the repetition also makes clear the extent to which ethnographic desire is embedded in and produced by the mission itself. No matter how many times Leiris is disappointed, the mission continues, and obsession returns in almost exactly the same form. Even toward the very end of the book, Leiris is still telling us the same story. Having become infatuated with the possession cult of the zar, then once again disillusioned, he describes his reactions as the end of an affair: “Possession is over, my romantic reactions are over. The zar . . . are now no more than family relatives” (547).

Of course, the project of the mission—to collect and document—and that of Leiris’s journal were quite different. As Brent Edwards writes in the introduction to his English translation, Phantom Africa is not itself an ethnography, and indeed, Leiris offers little that could be considered properly ethnographic. But if the “findings” of the mission’s work are not presented here, the structures that supported that work are: Phantom Africa offers a remarkably clear account of both the material and the affective infrastructures underpinning ethnographic work in the 1930s. On the one hand, through the details of everyday life, Leiris allows us to see the money, the transport, the tents, and the entire administrative apparatus of officials, communications, and social life that made the mission possible. And on the other, through his accounts of his own changing emotional state and glimpses into that of his companions, he allows us to see what Edwards calls the mission’s “common sense” (19) as well as its cravings and compulsions, in a way rarely so freely admitted. It becomes evident that the Mission Dakar-Djibouti was built on both a politically-driven and a felt attraction to difference. This is useful not merely as a document of a discipline in formation, but also as an example of the kind of information one might want in order to think carefully about the co-constitution of institutional forces and seemingly individualized desires.

In her (2007; 2014) work on ethnographic refusal, Audra Simpson describes the impulse to produce knowledge about difference as “anthropological need.” This need is tied to the requirements of governance (administrative regimes need to know in order to govern, and their “knowledge” is organized around units of otherness) but is also driven by the fact that “those in the metropole” needed to “know themselves in a manner that accorded to the global processes underway” (2007:67). Thus anthropological need had to do with more than the administrative efforts of the colonial regime. It had to do with an entire affective structure surrounding the production of knowledge about difference that was embedded in museums, in academia, in literature, and in the arts, and which tied the colonies to the metropole through the gathering and circulation of information (see also Conklin 2013).

Ethnographic refusal is then a conscious strategy to make certain kinds of knowledge inaccessible, in the context of histories in which the knowledge of and the governing of difference are difficult to untangle. As Simpson writes, for the anthropologist to acknowledge and participate in a refusal to give information is to recognize the implications of knowing. Simpson’s work comes after a period of self-critique that anthropology had simply not undergone by the time of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti (in France at this time, anthropology was only just beginning to consolidate itself as a discipline). It is interesting nevertheless to consider the question of refusal, because Leiris himself writes about it so frequently, and because it tells us something about the nature of his ethnographic desire.

Leiris regularly encounters refusals but only on a few occasions does he recognize them as such. Such moments clarify both the form and the limits of his ability to see the project in which he is involved. Take this example from the entry of August 26, 1931:

The old woman barely speaks. She smiles maliciously, parries all my questions, and transforms everything into utterly harmless facts. . . . I discover over the course of the afternoon that the reason she is unwilling to say more is that the woman who preceded her as head of the sect was arrested fifteen years ago by the French authorities, beaten, imprisoned, and exiled in Kati where she died in horrible misery. . . . When I learn the reasons for the woman’s muteness, I am . . . incensed with the administration, that iniquitous organization that allows such things to happen under the pretext of morality.” (144)

Despite what he was later to learn, Leiris’s language describing the encounter—“smiles maliciously,” “parries,” “utterly harmless facts”—lets the reader know that during the interview he was angry at this woman’s refusal. Only further down the page do we learn that his anger was soon after transferred away from the woman and toward the colonial administration. In keeping with the immediacy that Leiris cultivates throughout the book, the reader follows the author’s change in mental state as though tracking the events as they unfolded. This strategy is intriguing as an example of Leiris’s confessional style; Leiris does not hide his own initial annoyance, even as he later sees the refusal to have been justified. He appears to be revealing the injustice of his own irritation—but the immediacy-effect also leaves intact the palpable sense of frustrated desire. And despite his “incensed” response to a colonial abuse of power, Leiris does not seem to perceive his own wish to acquire information as a product of the same context. The relationship between knowledge and power (indeed, oppression) that his interviewee can see so clearly remains somehow unseen or at least unspoken by Leiris himself. So he acknowledges the logic of the woman’s refusal, but as an exception.3

I’ve called Leiris’s interest in the other “ethnographic desire” because of the explicit parallels he draws between romantic obsession and the craving for information, but also because the idea of desire—as opposed to that of, say, the “gaze”—helps one better understand how anthropological need is deployed through the bodies and minds of ethnographers. The “detached gaze” that was cultivated and produced by scientific writing is also anchored in the work of individual researchers, whose desires have to be interpellated into the project. More, the very structure of desire seems well suited to describe some of the particular problems of self and otherness that lie at the heart of the ethnographic question. Desire, argues Judith Butler, is a pull toward the other through which one dialectically defines oneself. Appearing to arise from an interiority and yet shaped from without, desire is also at the heart of the paradox of the subject—because to be “a subject” is at once the precondition for agency and a form of subordination. Indeed, it is precisely by creating the interior space of subjectivity and shaping its desire that power operates on the subject (Butler 1997).

This is a long way of saying that I do not view Leiris’s explicit deployment of subjectivity as a writing technique to be separate from his passionate desire to gather information about the people he was encountering. Even the confessional mode itself, which he deploys frequently, is deeply involved in the issue of wanting to know. To think about this, I refer to Susan Sontag’s 1963 discussion of a different French ethnographer, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Sontag describes here a familiar contrast between the literary and the scientific. For Sontag, Lévi-Strauss’s vision of anthropology appears “literary” in its ambitions. Lévi-Strauss understood the anthropologist’s calling, Sontag writes, as a “systematic déracinement,” a self-alienation through the encounter with the other. Yet its methods (namely, structuralism) are dry and cold and “scientific.” In its effort at creating a totalizing structure, it seeks to “vanquish” its subject, to reduce otherness to “purely formal code” (1996: 77). Sontag points out that while these two tendencies seem to be at odds they are in fact linked, because the anthropologist is in control of, and even consciously exploiting, intellectual alienation. Thus, she writes, anthropology is characteristic of a modern sensibility, one which “moves between two seemingly contradictory but ultimately related impulses: surrender to the exotic, the strange, the other; and the domestication of the exotic, chiefly through science.”

Lévi-Strauss begins to be an influential scholar about a decade after the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, and he is the most important French figure in the consolidation of anthropology as a discipline with a canon, a method, and a theory. His brand of anthropology is therefore different from the more fragmented approach of Griaule and co., who represent anthropology before structuralism became the triumphant framework that it was to become. But Sontag’s description of structuralist logic helps to articulate how one might be misled by the question of the literary versus the scientific, or of the subjective versus the objective. Leiris mobilizes the confessional mode to argue that the work makes no claims to total representation, that it is literary/essayistic rather than “scientific,” and that its gaze is turned inward. This is complicated, however, because the shaping of Leiris’s desire reveals that subjectivity itself is what draws him so powerfully into the mission, indeed into the entire complex of “anthropological need” in the interwar period. At least in the context of French intellectuals’ engagement with the colonies in the interwar period, we can see that both the poetic and the scientific are modes for elaborating this dialectical movement around the question of otherness.

Phantom Africa has had a far greater impact as an example of literature than as a work of anthropology, and within anglophone anthropology it is virtually unknown. The book’s bordered circulation both speaks to the deep cleft between francophone and anglophone anthropology and reveals French anthropology’s much closer relationship with the arts, both literary and visual.4 What then can Leiris’s obsessive narration offer those of us working in something called “the humanities” and grappling (in English) with the position from which we apprehend the world? On the one hand, it might ask us to pause and reconsider a contemporary trend—visible across the social sciences as well as in museums—of outsourcing the work of ethical positioning to artists. On the other, as a document of an emergent and fragmented discipline, one drawn to the exotic but also interested in the diversity of the human, it points to the ongoing and difficult entanglement between the desire to know beyond ourselves and the still-narrow frames we have inherited for doing so.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Conklin, Alice L. 2013. In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France 1850–1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures 14: 67–80.

———. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sontag, Susan. 1996. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell.

I was wary of Phantom Africa when I first learned of it. The title alone (and, in all transparency, its juxtaposition with the author’s French name) suggested trafficking in the tropes of a dark, exotic, unknowable Africa. Brent Hayes Edwards’s introduction in this new, translated edition of the book went a long way towards allaying my concerns. In an extensive and deeply thoughtful discussion of how Michel Leiris’s text has been taken up by commentators (including Leiris himself) across the fields of history, literature, anthropology, in the United States and in France, from its first publication to the time of this translation, Hayes Edwards establishes that the complexity, multiplicity, and ambiguity of Phantom Africa form the basis for the book’s enduring relevance and value. He convinced me that the book was worthy of serious engagement, rather than the dismissal towards which I had initially been inclined.

Phantom Africa interpellates so many parts of my being—as a black woman, as a West African, as the child of people who grew up as subjects of the French Empire, as someone obsessed with understanding my inner worlds; and of my experience—as a recently minted anthropologist, moreover, one who works on the idea of Africa and whose first fieldwork experience is still quite fresh. It isn’t difficult to see how this book, a compendium of hundreds of entries often blurring the lines between field notes and journal entries that chronicle a white French man’s journey on an ethnographic expedition through West and East Africa to collect art and artifacts—sometimes by force—at the height of European colonialism on the continent would trigger a great deal of aversion within me. But it also sparked resonance. The dozen or so drafts of this essay on my computer attest to how difficult I have found it to reconcile these two reactions.

On one hand, I found Phantom Africa violent. At the most fundamental level, in the very premise of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti it documents, in the assumption that the members of the expedition had the right to access people, spaces, objects, and knowledge in the various locales they visited. The mission, and other ethnographic voyages like it, were premised on the conviction that collecting and documenting artifacts from colonies, by whatever means necessary, would ultimately benefit the populations from which these objects were taken. Indeed, one of Leiris’s stated motivations for taking part in the mission was the possibility it presented for helping to “dissipate” and “undermine” racial prejudice (Leiris 1930, quoted on p. 5). And yet, as Edwards notes, “there can be no doubt that [the expedition] was undertaken explicitly in the service of the French colonial empire” (3).

One of the most egregious examples of this violence and the ways it intersected with colonial regimes of oppression is the case of the mission’s acquisition of a kono, a sacred ritual object, in Bla, a village along the mission’s itinerary in Niger in 1931. When despite their initial approval, villagers ultimately refuse, through a variety of stalling techniques, to turn over the kono to the anthropologists, Marcel Griaule, eminent anthropologist and expedition leader, threatens to have the police take them before the colonial authorities. Once the village chief’s “permission” is thus secured, Griaule and Leiris enter the hut and remove the kono, “creeping out like thieves while the devastated chief flees” (154).

The text’s violence also manifested in Leiris’s observations, in the banal ways that an otherwise sensitive description slipped into painful tropes. Here, the trope of the African-as-child:

A great religious emotion: this dirty, simple, elementary object whose abject quality is a terrible force because it holds in concentrated form what these men consider to be absolute, and because they have stamped it with their own force, like the little ball of earth a child rolls between his fingers when playing with mud. (147)

Here, that of the African-as-animal lookalike:

Baba Keyta takes me to an old sorceress, literally as pretty as a monkey . . . We find her with a group of other women . . . One is lying on a mat and looks quite nasty; the other is lolling on her mother’s bed, next to her, and either watches me or gazes off into space, as beautiful, literally, as a beautiful cow (it is no laughing matter). There is also a young Toucouleur girl who comes and goes from time to time and who also sits on the bed, as pretty as a common gazelle, literally, and again it is no laughing matter.1 (143–44)

Or again in the expression, however self-reflexive, of his power and status as a white, French man: “I realize in a dazed stupor, which only later transforms into disgust, that you feel pretty sure of yourself when you’re a white man with a knife in your hand” (156), Leiris writes about his part in the theft of the kono.

Leiris became increasingly aware, as the mission progressed, and certainly by its end, that he had been not only implicated, but complicit, in the very structures of oppression that he had believed himself to be challenging through his ethnographic work. In the foreword to the 1934 edition of Phantom Africa, he observes that his journal reveals him to be, among other things, “biased—even unjust—inhuman (or ‘human, all too human’), an ingrate, a false brother, who knows?” And in the foreword to the 1951 edition, he describes the publication of his journal entries even though do not reflect his current perspectives as “a sort of confession.” But Leiris himself seems to recognize that there are limits of the redemptive powers of contrition:

If I put forward in my defense, as I did sixteen years ago, the precedent of Rousseau and his Confessions, it is with far less assurance, for I am now persuaded that no man living in this iniquitous yet indisputably modifiable—in at least a few of its most monstrous aspects—world we live in should be able to get in the clear by means of a flight and a confession. (65)

I am inclined to agree.

***

And still, as I read through it, Phantom Africa brought about (to my dismay!) moments of intense recognition and resonance. These moments centered on the text as a record of a first-time ethnographer’s experience—still fresh in my memory, being just a few years removed: the overwhelm; the beginner’s faith in the promise of ethnographic research as a mode of and means to definitive knowing; and—not unrelatedly—the sometimes unacknowledged personal agendas that can graft themselves onto this initial (and initiatory) experience.

For Leiris, part of the appeal of the mission was the methodical, scientific nature of ethnographic research, and its promise of rigor; rigor that could produce facts, and facts which could in turn help fight prejudice against blacks and Africans. But there was also the lure of dépaysement, that untranslatable French term for being out of one’s familiar context, losing one’s bearings, on which so much of the learning that happens in fieldwork is taken to depend. And its promise of greater clarity, both outwardly—onto the research subject, and inwardly—as if we are able to access a core, elemental version of ourselves once what is familiar is shaken off. The deep dive of fieldwork presented Leiris with the possibility of leaving parts of his self behind, the hope that “this long voyage in remote lands—and true contact, via scientific observation, with their inhabitants—would transform him into a different, more open man, cured of his obsessions,” as Leiris noted himself (59). Further, as Edwards points out, by undertaking this voyage in Africa specifically, Leiris also sought to satisfy his own fantasies of “the dark continent.”

Leiris was clear on his personal agenda for the voyage; it was a quest to forget. In my case, however, it was only a couple of years after completing my dissertation fieldwork—for which I had returned to Togo, my home country, to conduct ethnographic research after a twenty-plus-year absence—that I realized that subtending my research’s interrogation of the aesthetic and material renegotiation of Dutch Wax cloth designs’ “African-ness” as its manufacturer remade itself into a global brand was a personal interrogation of my relationship to Togo, of the extent to which it was still, could still be “home.” In Togo, Dutch Wax cloth designs are memory objects par excellence, commonly referred to as “our grandmothers’ cloth.” During a follow-up fieldwork trip to Togo after graduating, I wrote to my dissertation advisor:

I’ve been in Lomé for the past month. It’s been good work-wise, with lots of ideas and writing, and I’m finding being here much more manageable than I did during the dissertation research. I’ve been thinking a lot about how my research seems to be running parallel to some sort of quest to understand my own personal history better; that hadn’t been as apparent to me before as it has become during this trip.

And to a dear friend back in the United States:

[I’m realizing] that a big part of my wanting to come to Lomé is about not wanting to be afraid (anymore). As I think I mentioned, since my family left, Lomé has been shrouded in a lot of fear in my family. Mainly because of what the conditions were when we left, when the country was on the brink of a civil war, disappearances were happening left and right, bodies kept getting pulled out of the laguna by the dozens, there was a curfew, and incessant reports of arbitrary uses of violent, often lethal force. Clearly life has gone on, and things are nowhere near as tense as they were at that time, but the feeling of fear has remained, for me at least. And I think I’m tentatively trying to conquer it, to settle on a different story.

My personal agenda for this research, it turned out, was a quest to remember. And like Leiris’s, my personal agenda demanded, took over, space in my writing. I struggled with writer’s block when I was writing up my dissertation until I gave myself permission to incorporate more personal, memoir-type writing into the text.

Which leads me to my favorite part of Edwards’s new edition of Phantom Africa: the inspired decision to include excerpts from Leiris’s letters to his wife, Zette, back in Paris throughout the voyage. The juxtaposition of the missives with his journal entries made palpable (and immediate) Leiris’s vulnerability, his loneliness while in the field (“I no longer have the least affection for any of my companion and I feel so alone among them . . . The only thing that connects me to life is your letters,” he writes to Zette about five weeks into the mission [87]). The letters help to make him a more sympathetic character.

Anyone who has carried out fieldwork will attest to the crucial role that your community back home—friends, partners, graduate school cohort mates, dissertation committee members when you’re lucky (I was)—play in the fieldwork experience. They sustain you through the inevitable meltdowns, they give you a space to air out your frustrations, they anchor you. Further, the correspondence also allows you to process what you are seeing and experiencing in the field, to give voice to the emotional experience of it all. When I was leaving for dissertation fieldwork, my graduate school advisor encouraged me to keep track of the emails I sent to loved ones while in the field, and to return to them when the time for writing came; the casual and conversational nature of those exchanges can make for particularly insightful and sharp analysis. Indeed, in his letters to Zette, Leiris tended to take a more pronounced, reflexive distance from the project he was embarked on, and was most transparent about his own ambivalence about it all.

***

Despite these moments of recognition, I remain ambivalent towards Leiris and Phantom Africa. For if resonance there is between our experiences as first-time ethnographers, the points of disjuncture, centered on our respective situated positionalities as ethnographers in the field, our different historical contexts notwithstanding, are momentous. It might seem unreasonable to situate Leiris’s voyage in the 1930s and my own experience in the 2010s within the same time-space frame. But the account relayed to us in Phantom Africa are hardly ancient—or even distant—history. After all, a commission established at the sustained behest of African political and cultural actors is at this very moment examining the terms for returning objects taken during colonial era ethnographic expeditions like the Mission Dakar-Djibouti to their places of origin. The story is ongoing. Maybe the kono will find its way back.

Further, in a recent article in one of anthropology’s flagship journals, five black, brown, indigenous, and queer female anthropologists (Maya Berry, Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada) poignantly relate the ways in which their gendered and racialized embodiment has punctuated their field research (Berry et al. 2017). Despite existing writing on the specific challenges that female anthropologists face in the field, Berry et al. tell us, “the notion of engaging in fieldwork is often approached by activist anthropologists [and, I would argue, in the field more broadly] in a gender-neutral way, one that still assumes an unencumbered male subject with racial privilege, to whom the field means a space far from home that can be easily entered and exited” (539). Through accounts of harrowing situations they each found themselves in, the authors cast a light on the ways that inhabiting their black/brown/indigenous and female bodies rendered them vulnerable to the very power dynamics, the very violence, that their research as activist anthropologists sought to engage. Taking the field experiences of anthropologists who are not white men seriously, they contend, requires rethinking the premises of fieldwork and of its place in anthropological praxis. Here too, then, the story—and the work—is ongoing.

It might seem unfair to read Phantom Africa through the lens of the present, but the enduring relevance of place, history, race, and gender in anthropology today—from the ethnographer’s positionality in the field to the projects of knowledge production that ethnographic research is and has been complicit in—make it almost impossible not to.

Works Cited

Berry, Maya J., et al. “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology 32.4 (2017) 537–65.

Leiris, Michel. Phantom Africa. 1931. Translated by Brent Hayes Edwards. New York: Seagull, 2016.

Recently I taught Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the classic 1941 collaborative experiment in documentary by writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. In the midst of their unsparing and impassioned portraits of three white tenant farmer and sharecropper families in rural Alabama in the 1930s, there is a short chapter titled “Near a Church.” Agee and Evans had come upon a modest, rough-hewn, but breathtakingly beautiful country church and, in awe at “the subtle almost strangling strong asymmetries of that which has been hand wrought toward symmetry,” they decide to photograph it.1

Wanting to take shots of the interior as well as the exterior, they briefly consider forcing the locked door, but hesitate when they notice a young black couple coming toward them up the road. The man and woman glance at Agee and Evans, “without appearing to look either longer or less long, or with more or less interest, than a white man might care for,” and take in the scene of the two strangers lurking by the house of worship with their tripod and camera. Unceremonious greetings are exchanged, and the couple continues on their way. Without the slightest accusation, Agee writes, the couple “made us, in spite of our knowledge of our own meanings, ashamed and insecure in our wish to break into and possess their church, and after a minute or two I decided to go after them and speak to them, and ask them if they knew where we might find a minister or some other person who might let us in, if it would be all right” (36–37).

The couple had advanced about fifty yards down the road, and Agee hurries to catch up with them. The man and woman notice him following them: “they turned their heads (toward each other) and looked at me briefly and impersonally, like horses in a field, and faced front again; and this, I am almost certain, not through having heard sound of me, but through a subtler sense” (37). He tries to wave at them but they turn away so quickly they do not notice. A few seconds later, impatient, and realizing that he is not advancing fast enough to overtake them, Agee breaks into a trot. He writes:

At the sound of the twist of my shoe in the gravel, the young woman’s whole body was jerked down tight as a fist into a crouch from which immediately the rear foot skidding in the loose stone so that she nearly fell, like a kicked cow scrambling out of a creek, eyes crazy, chin stretched tight, she sprang forward into the first motions of a running not human but that of a suddenly terrified wild animal. In this same instant the young man froze, the emblems of sense in his wild face wide open toward me, his right hand stiff toward the girl who, after a few strides, her consciousness overtaking her reflex, shambled to a stop and stood, not straight but sick, as if hung from a hook in the spine of the will not to fall for weakness, while he hurried to her and put his hand on her flowered shoulder and, inclining his head forward and sidewise as if listening, spoke with her, and they lifted, and watched me while, shaking my head, and raising my hand palm outward, I came up to them (not trotting) and stopped a yard short of where they, closely, not touching now, stood, and said, still shaking my head (No; no, oh, Jesus, no, no, no!) and looking into their eyes; at the man, who was not knowing what to do, and at the girl, whose eyes were lined with tears, and who was trying so hard to subdue the shaking in her breath, and whose heart I could feel, though not hear, blasting as if it were my whole body, and I trying in some fool way to keep it somehow relatively light, because I could not bear that they should receive from me any added reflection of the shattering of their grace and dignity, and of the nakedness and depth and meaning of their fear; and of my horror and pity and self-hatred. (37–38)

It is an indelible portrait of the visceral terror of what it meant to be African American in the US South in 1936, when the most innocuous interaction could suddenly turn life-threatening. Agee’s wrenching, drawn-out rehashing of his own guilt at finding himself implicated in such a dynamic (“The least I could have done was to throw myself flat on my face and embrace and kiss their feet,” he agonizes pathetically) only serves to underline the precariousness and horror of the racial regime: an ever-present, silent undercurrent of potential violence that could erupt into bloody view at the slightest provocation.

There is no question that, not unlike—although not identical to—the volatile racial climate in Alabama, colonized Africa in the 1930s was suffused with systemic terror to a degree that affected every register of human interaction, from the most official and “impersonal” protocols of governance, to the fundamental civil institutions of work, worship, and learning (as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o once put it, as a schoolboy in colonial Kenya even his relationship to the English language “was based on a coercive system of rewards and terror”),2 to the most mundane, everyday encounters among individuals. And, as reassuring as it might be to pretend otherwise, if to write a history of the present means to confront “the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence,”3 then we must revisit—and indeed, insist on revisiting—the bibliography of that terror, whether that means returning to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, or Nervous Conditions, or Phantom Africa.

In addition to documenting the terror of the colonial context in Africa of the 1930s, however, Phantom Africa teaches us something else, too. Even in a situation where terror is systemic and all-pervasive—a cauldron of subjection that operates below consciousness: a stirring in the bowels, a tension in the sinews—the most remarkable thing of all is that the affective palette available to the terrorized is not circumscribed by terror. It is not all panic, distraught bawling, and cowed genuflection.

We might describe this uncircumscribed affective palette as a product of an anoriginal dereliction, a fugitivity that exceeds and, more importantly, precedes and anticipates the modes of regulation that would constrain it. In Foucault’s famous formulation, “it is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them.”4

What do we do with that unruly, unclassifiable range of response inventoried in Phantom Africa—that proliferation of unpredictable and sometimes enigmatic interactions where Africans refuse to be reduced to terror? The children on the beach at Ngor, sailing little toy pirogues and running after the ethnographers’ car yelling “Sunday! Sunday!” (83). Or the two smiling young women who come up to the vehicle as they depart and launch into “a few dance steps, clapping their hands,” leaving Leiris puzzled as to the “exact meaning of this display of coquetry” (86). Or the lamido of Ray Bouba, in northern Cameroon, who receives Griaule’s team with a ludicrously extravagant feast (277–79). Or the inhabitants of Kita (in present-day Mali), who tell the ethnographers that a nearby mountain is teeming with “dangerous and sinister devils,” possibly in order to keep them from stumbling across the many grottoes filled with graffiti of unexplained origin (126). Or the Shilluk men the team encounters at a Syrian trading post by the Nile in Sudan who, when the ethnographers try to photograph them, “move away or turn their faces with expressions like little girls simpering” (332). Or the “elegant” balambaras Gassasa, head of customs at the border in Gallabat, who receives the Mission Dakar-Djibouti wearing “a big revolver on his hip” (356) and obstructs their passage into Ethiopia with an endless stream of paperwork. Or the alternately imperious and ingratiating Malkam Ayyahou, “cackling with laughter” as she singes the hair off Leiris’s forearms and eyebrows with an exuberant explosion of gunpowder during a ceremony in Gondar (475). Or the “dandy” (267) Toucouleur interpreter in Poli (Cameroon), who regales Leiris with “comic imitations of a schoolmaster satirizing a dunce” (268). There are too many to catalogue: indeed, the texture of the book as a whole is this diverse litany of ambiguous human interaction.

In rereading Phantom Africa, I have come to realize that in my introduction I was too dismissive when I wrote that Leiris “has little to say” in the book “about the Africans who served as translators for the Mission” (44). On the contrary, some of the most nuanced portraits in Leiris’s journal are his discussions of the African interpreters who accompanied the Mission Dakar-Djibouti. They are not intimidated or subservient, but complexly human, sometimes mercurial or truculent, and often erudite. Leiris dwells for instance on the “warm and light-hearted” atmosphere in their compound one evening when their Senegalese interpreter and assistant Mamadou Vad, a former railroad mechanic who worked on the expedition for four months in the summer and fall of 1931, “rises with his freshly shaven head from the mat where he has been stretched out and scrupulously records some good story (in Wolof, transcribed not only into French but also into Arabic script) in the little notebook Griaule gave him” (138). Earlier that day, in the car, Mamadou Vad tells “dazzling” and humorous anecdotes: “In Kayes, going to fetch some milk, he surprised a man copulating with his cow; ever since, when he runs into him he asks: ‘How’s your wife?’” (137). Even in this minor example over the course of a single day, what is notable is the complex dynamic between “work” and “play”; if some of the stories Vad records and translates for the team might fall under the instrumental task of collecting information for ethnographic purposes, some clearly do not.5

There is obvious affection in the way Leiris habitually describes the interpreters and informants working with the Misson Dakar-Djibouti, men such as Mamadou Vad, Dousso Wologuem, Ambara Dolo, and Ambibe Babadyi. At times they are resourceful, at times they are disinterested, and at times they are capricious or recalcitrant. In November 1931, on a day trip to Yougo, Leiris records that one of their principal Dogon contacts, Ambara Dolo, “who is sporting his ever-present earrings, forage cap, black frock coat with green buttons in the back, breeches, and umbrella, refuses to carry anything but our storm lantern and the big bundle of personal effects he is wearing slung over his shoulder bandolier-style, like a peasant returning from the fair in Fouilly-les-Oies” (207).

When another interpreter, the idiosyncratic former telegraph operator Baba Keyta, a “bearded giant with completely albino legs and forearms” (131), joins the team in Mali, Leiris is enthralled by his charismatic personality and his “sumptuously garbed” appearance (133). One day Baba Keyta turns up wearing “white sandals, an impeccable white suit with a high collar, officer-style, a colonial helmet a bit too large for him—which he adjusts using strips of paper torn from an old issue of La Dépêche Coloniale—and, to complete the image, a narrow-waisted European winter overcoat and a freshly shaven head” (134). Leiris tells his wife that he finds Baba Keyta “comical,” but “deeply moving,” too, because (as Leiris puts it) Keyta possesses “true candor, true fantasy” (135). There is certainly obfuscation in Leiris’s invocation of “true fantasy” here—just as in his effusive descriptions of Africa as an “ocean of poetry” (as I discussed in my response to Kaiama Glover)—and yet there is a quality in the detail of the description of Baba Keyta that goes beyond the instrumentalism of stereotype.

It may be worth reflecting on the fact that so many of the enigmatic interactions in Phantom Africa involve the African translators on the Mission Dakar-Djibouti. As both Kaiama Glover and Amiel Bize discuss in some detail, Leiris and his fellow ethnographers encounter a good deal of hedging, prevarication, and misdirection on the part of the Africans from whom they attempt to extract information. Leiris remarks at one point that “the natives often pass off as casual amusement something whose religious purpose they wish to conceal” (123). Bize comments, “Leiris regularly encounters refusals but only on a few occasions does he recognize them as such. Such moments clarify both the form and the limits of his ability to see the project in which he is involved.” Even if Leiris remains oblivious to their full implications, these moments in Phantom Africa are traces of overt resistance, where the only available strategy for a “native informant” conscripted into the information-gathering drive of colonial anthropology is silence and opacity. But there is something else going on when the resistance is coming not from the “native informant” but instead from the translator—that is, emanating from the very factotum who is meant to ensure the linguistic transparency of the “native” to the anthropological understanding. As I mentioned in my response to Glover, Leiris is particularly annoyed when faced with this impedance (a resistance within the mechanism of mediation). Given how often it happens in Phantom Africa, we might even need to consider the way the book stages the specific opacity of the translator.

There are even corollaries to this question, such as the intriguing fact that a number of these assistants and translators are so young. Leaving the Dogon region in November 1931, the team says farewell to their “best friend among the children,” the eleven-year-old Abara. Marcel Griaule gives him a watch as a present, but the boy is not satisfied: “I want to go with you, monsieur . . .” It is “impossible to take him,” Leiris comments; “he is too weak and small, but we’ll be back again. If he learns French well, he’ll be our head interpreter.”6 As the car drives away, Leiris writes, “we look back and see the child, who after a moment’s hesitation has turned around, weeping as he trudges back to Sanga” (215).

Or one might point to another of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti’s young assistants, the thirteen-year-old Mamadou Keyta, who joins the team in Bamako in August 1931 as an interpreter, against the wishes of his father (144–45). Impressed by his language skills and his enthusiasm, Griaule tells the boy that he wants to make “a great ethnographer out of him” (!), and they start actively training him and letting him participate in the fieldwork (157). Mamadou Keyta travels with the team for six months, but Griaule eventually concludes that he does not have the necessary aptitude for the profession and sends him back home in February 1932. Keyta is “crushed” by the news that he is being dismissed, Leiris writes, and the boy leaves devastated.

To return to the issues raised in Amiel Bize’s response, here is yet another sort of ethnographic desire. If one wanted to think about the complex and unarguably pivotal role of the African interpreter in the history of French colonization, in other words, Phantom Africa would not be a bad place to start. In fact, the first chapter of Justin Izzo’s forthcoming book is an eye-opening comparison of Leiris’s travel diary with the extraordinary work of Amadou Hampaté Bâ, the towering Malian writer and ethnologist whose writings are in part a profound reflection on his own training in the field during the colonial era.7

The historical character in Phantom Africa who has stuck with me the most is one mentioned by none of the respondents in this dossier: Leiris’s most important African collaborator during the Ethiopian portion of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, the Eritrean diplomat, former priest, librarian, teacher, and linguist Abba Jerome. Two decades older than Leiris, Abba Jerome was a highly accomplished yet self-effacing intellectual whose career has been lamentably eclipsed because he published very little during his lifetime. He played a crucial role as a representative of Haile Selassie after World War I during multiple diplomatic missions to Europe, helping especially to negotiate the conditions under which Ethiopia would be admitted to the League of Nations in 1923. After the end of the Italian occupation, he was appointed conservator of manuscripts of the National Library of Ethiopia, where he served until his retirement in 1964, when he was asked to join the faculty of the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales in Paris, where he taught Amharic until 1977. (Amazingly, Leiris and Abba Jerome renewed their acquaintance when the latter moved to France, and even returned to their collaboration on some of the research they had pursued together on the zar in Gondar more than three decades earlier.) Abba Jerome died in Cannes in 1983, at the age of 102.8

There is not space here to reflect in depth on their collaboration, or to provide a full portrait of Abba Jerome himself. I will only include a few words from Leiris’s tribute to his old colleague, written for a Festschrift edited by the scholar Joseph Tubiana just before Abba Jerome’s death.9 Without Abba Jerome’s role as an “initiator” and “go-between” during Leiris’s research with Malkam Ayyahou’s possession cult, Leiris admits, the zar might have remained nothing more than a “cold object of study” to him. To Leiris the women and men around Malkam Ayyahou became less ethnographic “informers” than “friends or relatives to whom I was attached (at least in some cases, and going by my own, perhaps unilateral, impressions) by a strong affective bond.”10 He describes the time he and Abba Jerome spent living largely at Malkam Ayyahou’s house as “research that was less a procedure undertaken in a scientific spirit than an impassioned attempt to find out what was going on in the heads of these people (women, for the most part) whose words and modes of action fascinated us.”11

Reflecting on Abba Jerome, Leiris writes:

A figure too protean for it to be possible to sketch his silhouette for once and for all, this tightrope walker without a wire or a balancing pole—whose dress, free of any exoticism of country or era but slightly haphazard, was that of a European of the period—seemed to take pleasure as much in adopting (with the aid of his black beard and sparkling eyes) the expressions of a comic opera Mephistopheles, as in taking on the mysteriously grave allure (while he confided some piece of learning, whispering in your ear) of some hermetic philosopher.12

In one of the entries in Phantom Africa, Leiris remembers, he had described Abba Jerome as “a man with a poetic instinct for information, which is to say, a feeling for the apparently insignificant detail that puts everything in context and gives a document its stamp of truth” (466). Looking back fifty years later, Leiris muses that “the praise I gave him then strikes me now as all too timid: it still considered him from the angle of ethnographic practice rather than that of poetry.” Abba Jerome was a man with a deep “literary” sensibility, Leiris concludes, in a way that went deeper, and beyond, the practicalities of his collaboration in the research:

Beyond the tasks imposed on him by his official role as my translator and scribe, he seemed to find a keen satisfaction in pinning on paper (without thereby transforming them into dead butterflies) the words worthy of attention that we heard in the course of a discussion or that he simply caught out of the air during a ceremony or interview session with one of the possessed among whom we were working . . . I remain profoundly attached to Abba Jerome, a man whose character borders on the phantasmagorical, and who allowed me to discover the mythical world of the zar in a more vibrant way than I could have dreamed.13

Although I am not an anthropologist by training, I recognize in my own relationship to Phantom Africa as a translator the strange and at times troubling dialectic of repulsion that Edoh describes. Having spent so much time with the book, I’ve thought a great deal about what it means for an African American translator to render this particular volume into English. As a scholar whose work focuses especially on the emergence of black radical thought in circuits of exchange and translation among African diasporic intellectuals and artists in the Americas, in Europe, and in Africa, I’ve also pondered the significance of translating a renegade classic that is the inimitable product of the fraught interface between European anthropology and colonialism.

In 2016, the writer and translator John Keene published a much-discussed manifesto on Poetry Foundation blog Harriet titled “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness,” in which he makes a forceful argument that “we need more translation of literary works by non-Anglophone black diasporic authors into English, particularly by U.S.-based translators.”14 I wholeheartedly agree, and I would say that this has been the driving commitment behind much of my other work as a translator (of works by writers including Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Sony Labou Tansi, and Monchoachi).

But I feel strongly that we need to be able to stake a claim to the core of the Western literary tradition as well, especially when it is a matter of monumental works by white writers grappling so directly with the place of Africa and Africans in the world. Given the triangulation that brought Leiris from a dilettante’s fascination with African American jazz in Paris of the 1920s to the Mission Dakar-Djibouti and the African continent,15 it seems only appropriate that an African American translator should bring Phantom Africa into English. Turnabout is fair play.

Although none of my generous interlocutors for this dossier have mentioned it, the element of Phantom Africa where I feel that this self-consciousness about my role as a translator had a palpable impact on the form of the English version is something I discuss in the section of my introduction called “Traces of Translation” (43–50). Translating the book, I sensed a resonance between my labor and that of the African interpreters who played such a key part in the entire Mission Dakar-Djibouti. Their scrupulous mediation preceded mine and, in a sense, formed the foundation of the entire enterprise. I was determined throughout to listen for their presence as they patiently ferried language not their own. When I realized that Leiris—in his obsession with immediacy—repeatedly elides the presence of the African interpreters around him with a sly grammatical contortion (using passive formulations such as lui font dire or “have it said to him,” without specifying who is doing the telling) (46), I decided both to describe the effect in my introduction and to keep, wherever I could, the translators in view in the English version, adding brief contextual phrases (e.g., “I have it said through the interpreter…”) (247) to highlight the agency of linguistic mediation. It’s a small thing, admittedly—another pursuit of phantoms. But it was my quiet way of doing justice to the legacy of black translators: my way of keeping Dousso Wologuem and Abba Jerome from slipping out of sight.

Abba Jerome, Emawayish, and her son Guietatcho in the camp of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti on the grounds of the Italian consulate, Gondar, Ethiopia, August 1932.