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Forum for Modern Language Studies Advance Access originally published online on August 19, 2009
Forum for Modern Language Studies 2009 45(4):390-400; doi:10.1093/fmls/cqp110
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© The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.

This article appears in the following Forum for Modern Language Studies issue: SPECIAL ISSUE: Perspectives on Africa [View the issue table of contents]

Framing the Congo and the (Un)bildung of the Imperial State: De zwarte kost (1898) by Cyriel Buysse

Sarah De Mul

Research Foundation Flanders (FWO)
Subfaculty of Literary Studies
Catholic University of Leuven
Belgium

sarah.demul{at}arts.kuleuven.be

  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.

Key Words: Congo • Congo Free State • Belgium • Belgian imperialism • Leopold II • Buysse, Cyriel • Flemish identity • frame • fin-de-siècle


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