Minor Miracles: Toward A Theory of Novelty in "Aya of Yopougon"

This essay undertakes a reparative reading of Aya of Yopougon, a multivolume graphic novel by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie. Setting Aya alongside other African comics and prevailing interpretations of African and Diasporic literatures, this interpretation coins the term “novelty” to describe the unique mode of representing subjects, space, and time in the text. This “novelty” situates Aya at the intersection of tendencies in African, European, and North American comics art, and it juxtaposes subtle renditions of everyday life with overdetermined representations of African societies and Africans in Diaspora. The essay also articulates the relevance of novelty for feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, comics scholarship, and Diaspora Studies. Aya of Yopougon is a bande dessinée (BD, or graphic novel in North American parlance) in six volumes. Originally published in French in 2005, it is the story of a young woman and her peers coming of age in the West African nation of Côte d’Ivoire at the end of the 1970s, during a period referred to as the “Ivorian Miracle.” Originally published in France by Ivorian-born author Marguerite Abouet, with artwork by her husband, illustrator Clément Oubrerie, Aya has since been translated into over a dozen languages. It was the rst work by an African author to win the Best First Album Award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France, and it has also been adapted into an animated lm This article aims to contribute to a relatively recent move in feminist and queer approaches to literature and popular culture that value “weak” rather than “strong” theoretical priorities. Amid strong theories of postcolonial and queer diasporic cultural production that identify newly ascendant historical forces as the causes for emergent patterns in narrative, I appraise Aya as a popular text of a different color—its representation of postcolonial Africa and Africans in diaspora portrays “novelty” rather than determination. I coin the term novelty here to describe how Abouet and Oubrerie’s work contrives impressions of everyday life whose aggregate effect is comparatively humble: its imaginative vision works toward the potential to surprise observers and interpretants. This orientation toward potentiality is an alternative to a more systematic, knowing agenda invested in determinacy; whereas the former lends itself to theories concerned with poesis, the quotidian, and concrete description, the latter tends toward global and prescriptive theories that correlate cultural forms with historical developments in more decisive terms. While “correlationism” has come under scrutiny in contemporary philosophy, my interpretation of Aya as a text amenable to weak theory is agnostic toward these debates. The contrast between a weak theory of novelty and a strong theory of political ef cacy echoes Isaiah Berlin’s classic treatment of the parable of the fox and the hedgehog: the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Novelty appeals to the multifarious, cosmopolitan aptitudes of contemporary African diasporic authorship as a discursive formation that eludes the power of nation and capital in subtle ways but does 1 not altogether escape them. Rather than realizing the impact of decolonization or neoliberalism on the medium of the graphic novel, Aya synthesizes conventions from a variety of visual and narrative traditions to address a heterogeneous readership. In keeping with the tendency of market-watchers and cultural critics who cite the fox/hedgehog distinction, my interpretation of Aya “does so in order to celebrate the virtues of being a fox.” The analogy operates here to distinguish my weak theorization of novelty in Aya from the systematic approaches to postcolonial African and diasporic literature that apply to various moments in the graphic novel. Aya facilitates the elaboration of an eclectic repertoire for contemporary African diasporic authors and artists who are learned in many traditions rather than inaugurating a new school. This article discusses how Aya of Yopougon eludes the “symptomatic” reading strategies characteristic of strong theories. A deterministic model of the relationship between textual forms and their conditions of possibility would trace features of the African diasporic graphic novel to the post-Cold War realignment of African governance characterized by the rise of multi-party states and multilateral agreements, the decentering of colonial legacies and neocolonial discourses by new media practices and postcolonial critique, and the proliferation of new relations to national identity. Although these hypotheses pertain to some qualities of Aya that it shares with other texts, they are founded on a certainty about the present that Aya disavows by turning to the past. Strong theories and the reading practices to which they give rise “confer epistemological authority on the analytic work of exposure . . . which gives the critic sovereignty in knowing, when others do not, the hidden contingencies of what things really mean.” Reading Aya according to the hypothesis that no single epistemology of language, mediation, or subjectivity subsumes its signi cance is this article’s means of ceding authority back to the intellectual milieu out of which it emerges. As an object lesson in the value of a weak theory of cultural production, Abouet and Oubrerie’s rendition of the past outlines an alternative to the challenges of the present that it cannot currently enunciate in the form of a political objective. Instead, it recalls a speci c, “no longer conscious” moment at which a way of life beyond the contingencies of the present seemed possible. I argue that the narrative does not lend itself to a program of interpretation or action that can bring about that way of life. It does not indict the forces that have made desirable realities from the past unattainable in the present, but it stages an intervention into the historiography of postcolonial Africa, nonetheless. Emphasizing its diversionary and ludic aims, my reading of Aya questions how the text redeploys facets of its setting to inspire plural ways of knowing the past rather than recommending particular directions for future action. Like vernacular speech, performance, self-fashioning, and other weakly articulated but familiar everyday knowledge practices, African comics “literally can’t be seen as a simple repository of systemic effects imposed on an innocent world.” I describe the text’s production of novelty as an elusive rather than resistant strategy in order to specify its mode of addressing the political. I argue that Aya’s diversionary agenda rehearses a utopian tendency in culture akin to what José Esteban Muñoz terms “queer futurity.” Aya foregrounds the time and place called the “Ivorian Miracle” to divert the reader’s attention away from the urgency of the here and now. It focuses instead on a “then and there” at which the most salient questions of the moment in which we live are markedly absent. This small-scale utopianism staves off the “ossifying effects of neoliberal ideology and the degradation of politics brought about by representations of queerness in contemporary popular culture.” Unlike what Muñoz terms abstract utopia—in which an ideal way of life emerges out of changes in social structures that can be understood at a high degree of abstraction—concrete utopia, a genus in which I argue queer futurity and 2