Postcolonial Archives V.Y. Mudimbe's the Rift (Critical Essay‪)‬

Abstract This essay presents an analysis of V. Y. Mudimbe's novel, The Rift (1979/1993). I read this novel as an engagement with both the colonial archives of discourse about Africa, and also as an engagement with psychoanalytic attempts to create an archive of a discourse about identity and sexuality. I argue that desire and sexuality are often silenced topics in the critical responses to this novel, and that they should be made central to a reading of this diaristic text. This essay shows how The Rift problematises both psychoanalysis and ethnography as sciences of self and culture which must necessarily be seen as infinitely open to interpretation.