Ethics, Conflict and Re(-)presentation

Abstract

The impetus to view the African literary text at the intersection of the aesthetic and the political gives rise to an ethical imperative at the site of representation.1 As Gilroy reminds us, in approaching discursive constructions of the black Atlantic it is essential that ‘we reread and rethink this expressive counterculture not simply as a succession of literary tropes and genres but as a philosophical discourse which refuses the modern, occidental separation of ethics and aesthetics, culture and politics’.2 These arenas of meaning, so often received in isolation, remain intimately intertwined, blocking the efficacy of partial perspectives which give pride of place to one above the other. The literary work cannot, with this understanding, be seen in fragments or by slices. Rather, the totality of value for the literary text comes from its articulation of the political and the aesthetic, and the ethical meanings which arise from this articulated approach. Because the literary work operates through what may be seen as a doubling of representation, both in the ‘aesthetic appropriation of reality in the work and the appropriation of the work’s aesthetic reality by the recipient’,3 the aesthetic object plays a central role in linking cultural re-presentation with the construction of ideological horizons. As Tobin Siebers has noted, aesthetics, like ethics and politics, represents ‘the repetition of experience’ through which communities and value systems are formed,4 a crucial aspect of what Terry Eagleton refers to as the ‘project of reconstructing the human subject from the inside, informing its subtlest affections and bodily responses with this law which is not a law’.5