Illiberal Subjects - by Imane Terhmina (Paperback)

About the Book

A postcolonial reconceptualization of agency beyond emancipation from power.

Book Synopsis

How can we recognize agency when it refuses the familiar opposition between collaboration and resistance? Imane Terhmina argues that Francophone African aesthetics offers powerful and counterintuitive answers to this question. This book contends that subaltern actors often appear as "illiberal subjects" figures whose emancipatory aspirations remain entangled with their partial adherence to competing norms of state, capitalist, religious, or traditional authority.

Through close readings of canonical writers such as Ousmane Sembène and Tahar Djaout, alongside relatively overlooked literary figures like Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Illiberal Subjects identifies four forms of illiberal subjects: indigenous collaborators in colonial French West Africa, indebted proletarian workers in postcolonial Senegal, revolutionary traitors in post-independence Algeria, and unrepentant migrants at the French border. Rather than merely complicit figures, these illiberal subjects become privileged sites where Bamana and Fulani cosmogonies, Wolof social ethics, and Muslim-centered worldviews intersect with liberal debt economies, colonial domination, state authority, and border regimes. By attending to these ambiguous aesthetic figures in Francophone North and West Africa, the book recenters ordinary, yet often illegible, experiences of subalternity, and proposes a new framework for thinking agency beyond emancipation from power.

From the Back Cover

"Terhmina's powerful and ambitious study argues that aesthetic media from the African continent make visible and audible illiberal processes of subjectivation, processes that compel us to reconsider normative conceptions of ontology and agency. Illiberal Subjects represents some of the most promising work being produced in comparative literature."--Debarati Sanyal, University of California, Berkeley

"Terhmina's book focuses on a series of 'illiberal' subjects in African fiction and film whose ambiguous complicity with forms of domination raises questions about the legibility of resistance and shows how we can think agency beyond emancipation from power. Across five rich and insightful chapters, Terhmina patiently picks apart the desire for liberal modes of agency in African literatures."--Tobias Warner, University of California, Davis

How can we recognize agency when it refuses the familiar opposition between collaboration and resistance? Imane Terhmina argues that Francophone African aesthetics offers powerful and counterintuitive answers to this question. This book contends that subaltern actors often appear as "illiberal subjects" figures whose emancipatory aspirations remain entangled with their partial adherence to competing norms of state, capitalist, religious, or traditional authority.

Through close readings of canonical writers such as Ousmane Sembène and Tahar Djaout, alongside relatively overlooked literary figures like Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Illiberal Subjects identifies four forms of illiberal subjects: indigenous collaborators in colonial French West Africa, indebted proletarian workers in postcolonial Senegal, revolutionary traitors in post-independence Algeria, and unrepentant migrants at the French border. Rather than merely complicit figures, these illiberal subjects become privileged sites where Bamana and Fulani cosmogonies, Wolof social ethics, and Muslim-centered worldviews intersect with liberal debt economies, colonial domination, state authority, and border regimes. By attending to these ambiguous aesthetic figures in Francophone North and West Africa, the book recenters ordinary, yet often illegible, experiences of subalternity, and proposes a new framework for thinking agency beyond emancipation from power.

Imane Terhmina is Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies at Cornell University.

Review Quotes

"Terhmina's book focuses on a series of 'illiberal' subjects in African fiction and film whose ambiguous complicity with forms of domination raises questions about the legibility of resistance and shows how we can think agency beyond emancipation from power. Across five rich and insightful chapters, Terhmina patiently picks apart the desire for liberal modes of agency in African literatures."---Tobias Warner, University of California, Davis

"Terhmina's powerful and ambitious study argues that aesthetic media from the African continent make visible and audible illiberal processes of subjectivation, processes that compel us to reconsider normative conceptions of ontology and agency. Illiberal Subjects represents some of the most promising work being produced in comparative literature."---Debarati Sanyal, University of California, Berkeley

About the Author

Imane Terhmina is Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies at Cornell University.