True to its referencing in the title of Chinua Achebe's Another Africa, which mixes Achebe's own verses with Robert Lyons’ images in attempting to demolish western stereotypes of Africa, the reviewed bilingual collection of essays, AnOther Africa, has a very ambitious task, namely breaking with the notion that post-colonialism as a discipline belongs only to the west. Situated against the background of postcolonial theories, AnOther Africa, which emerges from a conference hosted by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences in 2012, delves into the cross-cultural differences from Russian, Polish, and German cultural perspectives with respect to African imagery and colonial references (7). This volume's broadly-conceived collection of papers uses an ambitiously-diverse palette of scientific as well as cultural perspectives and forms of analysis in utilizing historical, ethnological, and discursive phenomena to explain how countries with a relatively limited prior exposure to Africa understood its foreign setting. In so doing, the authors aim to contribute to the recent broadening of the scope and context of postcolonial studies, hitherto reserved to the former western colonial powers, and which previously neglected central and eastern Europe from postcolonial debates and discourses. Therefore, the volume concentrates on three philologies, Russian, Polish and German, which have only relatively recently opened up to the originally Anglophone-dominated postcolonial discourse.
The fifteen essays in this volume attempt to amalgamate the study of African representations with the central and east European context, which is currently replete with intensified discussions of east-south interactions, despite the initial skepticism and circumspection. The cases of Poland, Russia, and Germany, however, are not as homogeneous as they may seem at a first glance, regardless of their non-western spatial and cultural positioning, as part of the “Other Europe” during the Cold War. One of this volume's major contributions is that it demonstrates the differences in the way the three countries with non-existing direct colonializing experience during the nineteenth century's scramble for Africa interpreted African imageries, histories, and experiences. For example, the German academia, in general, and German philology, in particular, have long been strongly opposed to the recognition of the relevance of postcolonial studies for Germany's own national context. AnOther Africa, however, follows up on recent developments in the German literary domain, by interpreting recent works by Thomas von Steinaecker, Urs Widmer, Alex Capus, and Arnold Stadler (see Jana Domdey, Michaela Holdenried, and Nadjib Sadikou's essays) through postcolonial analytical optics. Polish literary discourse on Africa, on the other hand, is somewhat different. As Justyna Gołąbek's essay claims, the Polish ruminations over Africa are conceptually predicated on the figure of the colonized colonizer (skolonizowany kolonizator), which describes Poland's entanglement as having been dominated by German and Russian hegemonic powers at home, on the one hand, and its experience as a hegemonic power in its eastern peripheral regions, on the other. There is also a double perspective for the Russian Africa discourse. Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union were both imperial powers in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, while Moscow's outward-looking political modus vivendi became notable in Africa during the Cold War despite its ideologically anti-colonialist arguments.
The volume is divided into four parts. The four essays in the first part are interpreting African discourse in Soviet, Polish, and East German travels, tracing the colonial-romanticism in Soviet adventure literature (Matthias Schwartz), Africa-discourse and history politics in recent German novels (Dirk Göttsche), modernity, race, and images of Africa in Soviet cinema (Irina Novikova), and postcolonial reflection in Polish popular travel books (Justyna Tabaszewska). The second portion of the book looks into various shifts and projections of multi-coding and decoding of Africa's realities by looking into the literary discourses developed in Polish writings on Africa in the nineteenth century by Rehman and Sienkiewicz (Paweł Zajas, Dirk Uffelmann) and the ways of transforming postcolonial discourse into aesthetic forms in German literature (Sadikou, Domdey). The four papers in the third part delve into socialist and post-socialist reflections of Africa in the Soviet Union from the point of view of those looking out into Africa, such as Soviet scholars (Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova) and students coming from Africa (Svetlana Boltovskaja). This segment also broadens the volume's scope by focusing on West German perceptions of South Africa (Ingrid Laurien) while acknowledging modern literary discourses dealing with GDR's past (Carlota von Maltzan). Finally, the last three essays cut across historic layers by alternating visions, originating from Rogoziński's nineteenth century Polish expedition to Cameroon (Justyna Gołąbek), through contemporary German narrative strategies of inversion of colonial past (Michaela Holdenried), to deconstructivist aesthetics of Russian-Soviet postmodernism in Efrofeev's Pyat΄ rek zhizni (Gesine Drews-Sylla).
In sum, looking for faults in conference proceedings resulting in a collaborative volume for the sake of completeness is a dubious exercise in academic indulgence. Granted, this volume will unlikely score with the completeness of its case studies, however eclectic and multidisciplinary they are. However, this book's main virtue is that it boldly places the postcolonial discourse into national literary domains originating from nations unrelated to the colonial scramble for Africa. In its modern multipolar approach, the collection not only pays tribute to the intellectual heritage of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhaba, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose influence is felt throughout the volume, but also boldly attempts to decode Africa's colonial past through the lens of Germany, Poland, and Russia, previously unlikely actors in postcolonial discourse. While this premise might seem synthetic to some die-hard purists, it is not without scholastic merits. Accordingly, in moving postcolonial discourse not only into new pastures but also into the twenty-first century, by employing a bricolage of modern interpretative techniques, this collective exercise succeeds in demonstrating that in the postcolonial world there is always room left for yet Another, even if less expected, Other.
