ABSTRACT
Within the West/Central African epic habitus, the strength that comes from deformity motivates the narrative performance and simultaneously defi nes a genetic feature shared by all of humanity. But is this so for the African Diaspora? Owing to the deformation from slavery, the colonization of Africa, and the evolution of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the MOS-epic trickster, starting with Banyanga, Ijo, and Mandingo, Bamana, and other related ethnic groups in the Mande, became “African” and then negro (“black”). In short, once extracted from the recuperative space of Africa, and re-located in Western modernity, the indigenous trickster fi gure was e-raced, “blackened,” and deformed by the epistemological and other historical forces that marred its entrance into a New World. Hence, Hegel’s rhetorical move, in the “Introduction” to The Philosophy of History, to
leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it-that is in its northern part-belong to the Asiatic or European World. . . . What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History. (99)
This erasure is a bleak gaze at African culture, and a total black-out for the African Diaspora in the “European World.” Fortunately, West/Central African epic performances were greater than the sum of their parts, just as allegorye is not containable by modern European philosophy and history.
