In his famous Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels, Jean-Paul Sartre describes the defining contradiction of Western bourgeois intellectuals: by culture and education they are necessarily products of the reigning ideology, yet their commitment to justice makes them implacable opponents of that same ideology. The position of postcolonial intellectuals reflects and radicalises this dilemma. They typically come from the advantaged, educated classes who benefited most from colonial rule. They are the products of the mission civilisatrice, yet they are, at the same time, its lucid but complicit opponents. Using the coloniser's language and a conceptual armoury underpinned by Western thought, they must somehow invent ways of thinking capable of combating a heritage which is not theirs, but which has nevertheless contributed to making them what they are. In this difficult context, they interrogate the very function of intellectual writing in all its diverse, potentially conflictual forms, and attempt at the same time a wholesale reinvention of Western conceptions of what it means to be human in the context of anti-colonial revolt.

This book examines the dilemmas and innovations of the francophone intellectual both as they developed in the dying years of empire and as they impact on more recent postcolonial criticism. France tried to uphold a policy of assimilation in its colonies with varying degrees of tenacity, hoping to impose not only political and economic control but also French culture and language on its colonised peoples, though the colonial system rarely succeeded in educating more than a select élite. In the lead-up to independence, that élite nevertheless sought to reject the identity that had been imposed upon them from the outside. In particular, francophone intellectuals took it upon themselves to redefine both the ‘humanity’ and the cultural specificity of their people in their political, literary and cultural writings, yet unlike the majority of the people, they nevertheless had to continue to negotiate the legacy of their French education and close cultural ties with France. In seeking to reimagine the culture and experience of the colonised at the moment of the empire's demise, these intellectuals produced both polemics and creative works that were supported and adopted to varying extents by their compatriots.