René Maran’s «Batouala»

The polemic excited by Batouala ’s controversial Preface has conditioned an enduring, near-universal acceptance of a disjunction of Preface and novel. This is the first book to challenge that premise. The fallacious underpinnings of the origin persistence of this view are shown to lie in Western, dichotomously structured thinking. Through offshoots of the civilised- versus -savage dichotomy, namely oral- versus -written, form- versus -content and music- versus -narrative, Batouala ’s Signifyin(g