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- Title
Framing the Congo and the (Un)bildung of the Imperial State: De zwarte kost (1898) by Cyriel Buysse.
- Authors
DE MUL, SARAH
- Abstract
“De zwarte kost” can mean either “the black meal” or “the black cost”. Of these two metaphors of consumption, one refers to sexual relations between white men and black women, the other to the deaths of Africans under Leopold's regime in the Congo Free State. The standard view of Buysse's text as “anti-colonial” seems anachronistic and reductive. I read it as a narrative about the practice of framing the Congo Free State itself, and about the reception and production of these frames by Flemish people. Presenting us with a mise-en-abyme of framing practices, the novella is primarily a critique of the closed-off provincialism of the Flemish villagers, and their ignorance of how the Congo had, by the late 1890s, increasingly become a Question beyond the village, indeed right across Europe. The validity of this reading is supported by Buysse's contemporary polemical essays on the Flemish movement.
- Subjects
CONGO (Democratic Republic); AFRICANS in literature; LEOPOLD II, King of the Belgians, 1835-1909; NATIONAL self-determination; FLEMISH movement; NATION-state
- Publication
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2009, Vol 45, Issue 4, p390
- ISSN
0015-8518
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/fmls/cqp110