The Future of Postcolonial Studies

Chantal Zabus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138547407
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134690015
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Future of Postcolonial Studies celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Empire Writes Back by the now famous troika - Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. When The Empire Writes Back first appeared in 1989, it put postcolonial cultures and their post-invasion narratives on the map. This vibrant collection of fifteen chapters by both established and emerging scholars taps into this early mapping while merging these concerns with present trends which have been grouped as: comparing, converting, greening, post-queering and utopia.

The postcolonial is a centrifugal force that continues to energize globalization, transnational, diaspora, area and queer studies. Spanning the colonial period from the 1860s to the present, The Future of Postcolonial Studies ventures into other postcolonies outside of the Anglophone purview. In reassessing the nation-state, language, race, religion, sexuality, the environment, and the very idea of 'the future,' this volume reasserts the notion that postcolonial is an "anticipatory discourse" and bears testimony to the driving energy and thus the future of postcolonial studies.

Part I Comparing

1 Postcolonial Studies in French-Speaking Areas

France, Francophonie and the World¹

Jean-Marc Moura

DOI: 10.4324/9781315882796-2

Postcolonial studies got a late start in France; at first they involved elements that were well known in the English-speaking world (the decentering of English studies, the radical revision of the English canon, a new conception of literary studies adapted to postcolonial literatures as in Ashcroft et al, 196–197) but that were alien to French academia. They are now firmly implanted in the departments of French and Comparative Literature. A sure albeit ambiguous sign of such vitality is the frequently polemical character of studies that purports to contribute to the postcolonial debate. An example is the 2011 assessment of such studies in Etudes littéraires africaines, the journal of APELA (Association pour l’Etude des Littératures Africaines). Nicolas Martin-Granel refers to exchanges between proponents and opponents of postcolonial studies as a “dialogue of the deaf” (Fr: dialogue de sourds), and Anthony Maingeon expresses his own “frustration” with regard to such disputes (Maingeon 99). Both insist on the fact that these French-language academic debates are marked by confusion. I cannot entirely disagree.

In the French-speaking world, we are undoubtedly at a moment when postcolonial studies are being transformed, to wit, the number of seminars and conferences devoted to rethinking the contribution of this critique and the changes it calls forth. Colonial and postcolonial issues are visible in contemporary French society, which has become multicultural. When they are discussed, it is with passion and in polemical terms, as was the case in 2005, when the controversial law of February 23 on the positive aspects of colonialism was passed, or during the violent riots in the Paris suburbs, which could be interpreted as the return of the repressed, of France’s colonial past.

But today, the critique of Eurocentrism has become part of the doxa of the Social Sciences, and interdisciplinary influences have occurred involving many university departments carrying out research in sociology or the media. The influence of postcolonial studies is making itself felt, in at least an indirect way, in many areas of social science research. One possible conclusion is that the project of postcolonial studies has succeeded since the Social Sciences as a whole have adapted to the postcolonial context. However, in the Humanities and, more specifically, in literature, issues are not as clear-cut in so far as they result from a crisscrossing between aesthetics, politics, and cultural history that we must examine more closely.

Postcolonial studies favor the development of lines of questioning concerning the place of French-language literatures throughout the world. They help us understand the place of French-language literature within world literature at a moment when the continued use of French is in decline, and French literature has lost the privilege of universality it had claimed for so long. I will distinguish two such lines of questioning: one is linked to la francophonie as an institution, and to French linguistic interventionism, and the other has to do with a variety of comparative approaches in literary research. Both were part of the theoretical agenda presented in The Empire Writes Back, when the authors discussed the English notion of Commonwealth literatures and the “wider comparative models” for postcolonial literatures (Ashcroft et al. 23). They remain to be adapted to a French context and to become, to give a French twist to “more english than English,” the title of the concluding chapter of the book (195–197): “more english than English.”

The Institution of Francophonie in Question

In its own way, the Manifesto “Pour une Littérature-monde,” published in 2007 by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, was connected to the topic of francophone postcolonial studies. In fact, it dealt with all the questions I face regularly as a professor of “Francophone” Literature at a French university. The Manifesto touched upon the desire for a post-Francophonie, which would actually be a general francophonie in which France would be one French-speaking country among others, thereby raising the question of what scientific criteria would support the research of specialists in “francophone” literatures. What does it actually mean to study these literatures, or to create within a university a “Center for Francophone studies”? The logic of such a field remains to be thought through, as in recent attempts (Combe, Forsdick and Murphy, Beniamino), and reassessed along three types of questioning: (1)”la francophonie” as an institution that belongs to a long tradition of French linguistic interventionism, and its influence on literary conceptions; (2) the existence within contemporary French literature of a “Francophone literary system” (hereafter FLS) (Halen, “Notes” and “Le système”); (3) the participation of French-language literatures in a contemporary context, which determines certain of their forms and limits.

Obviously, the Manifesto added fodder to this debate, which could be objectionable. First, it is difficult to consider literary prizes, one of the most opaque and most controversial of French cultural institutions, to be the signs of a renewal. Besides, the authors who won prizes in the fall of 2006 or 2008 belonged to very different literary trends. Further, the conception of a littérature-monde which affirms that travel narratives (and the literature otherwise inspired by the journey) represent a healthy antidote to the rarefied air of contemporary novelistic and structuralist research appears anachronistic to me. The Manifesto talked about opening up readers’ minds to “a certain idea of literature, a common desire for freedom, a desire for worlding,” thereby opposing a literature of experimentation to a literature of consecration: it is deemed that the traveler really writes, while the sedentary writer only re-writes and otherwise suffocates among too many texts. However, many literary journeys play on intertextuality, while a literature that has “no other object than itself” would be hard to come by these days. If the Manifesto was targeting the “Nouveau Roman” or other experimental attempts in writing, these are very far from dominating the current literary scene.

The sharpest opposition appears to me to exist not between “laboratory literature” and “literature of the world” or “worldly literature,” but rather between writing emanating from an “ironic consciousness” and writing that tries to root its discourse in reality. Richard Rorty defines “ironic consciousness” as “that which forces the modernist to think that he has to do with texts rather than with things” (Rorty 268), the limit-position being summed up in the famous sentence: “There is nothing outside the text” (Fr: “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”).

There is a certain tension between literatures of the ironic consciousness, also called “laboratory literature,” and those of the real world (Fr: “du fait-monde”). The latter type of writing is motivated by a desire to escape the space of representation in order to come up against “the thing itself,” or the world itself, that which Jean Hatzfeld calls “le nu de la vie” (“the nakedness of life”), an expression borrowed from a witness to the Rwandan genocide: a vision of reality without makeup, without a veil—life in its terrible nudity.

In the area of contemporary French literature, one can detect a tension between these two opposed attitudes—between the irony that reduces almost everything to a text and the desire to confront the world’s reality without any representational shock absorber. Are we to imagine French literature on the side of irony, and Francophone literatures on the worldly side? It is very difficult to take a clear stance.

“Ironic consciousness” can be the linchpin of beautiful narratives such as La Vie mode d’emploi by Georges Perec (1978), which is a purely text-driven construction yet a marvelous novel. Francophone authors for their part draw inspiration from a rich intertextuality, whether it is Aimé Césaire or Léopold Sédar Senghor, whose entire work is built on African, especially Serer, culture; French literature; and Greek and Latin Antiquity. The tension between these two mindsets may thus prove quite desirable.

If a danger for French literature does exist, it seems to have less to do with literature concocted in “a laboratory” and thus as something that has lost much of its luster than with recent changes in the world of publishing. A few giant houses are causing independent publishers to disappear; they are banking on immediate financial return, a culture of books on subjects “that sell” and the fact that books are becoming a type of support for audiovisual media. In a world where the directors of literary publishing houses act more like commercial agents, editorial and financial resources tend to go to books with the greatest potential for financial return at the expense of literary diversity. The biggest problem appears to be related to changes in publishing strategies whereby marketing specialists call the tune and the books that are produced are standardized in several ways (Schifrin 1).

The questioning of such an institutional context overlaps with the exposure of what Halen called a “Francophone Literary System” or FLS. All non-French or non-Metropolitan productions concerned with the attractive pull of the Franco-Parisian center belong to this System. Within the FLS, competition and other constraints are rife among “Francophone writers” of different cultures and regions. Various Francophone regions are linked to “imaginary zones of identification” (Fr: zones imaginaires d’identification), that is, semiological pools that provide the necessary cultural ingredients for acceptance of a Francophone author into the central field: e.g., the mountain for the Swiss Ferdinand Ramuz; canals and fog for the Belgian Georges Rodenbach; and the rhythm of the tom-tom for L.S. Senghor. These genetic, stylistic, thematic, and topographical markers can conjure up within the targeted public the image of the zone thus referenced but without a substantial connection to the real zone: Flanders is not contained in images of a dead city where fog floats over canals; reason is no more Greek than emotion is part of Negritude à la Senghor; and Moroccan readers do not particularly recognize their country in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Moroccan imagery.

In this System, recognition of a writer can take place at different levels (local, national—for instance, Belgium, or regional—for instance, Maghreb), which have a tendency to mutually exclude each other. At the local level, the author can claim some legitimacy in the form of prizes or awards, and sometimes stipends. At a second level, that of the FLS, the same author might claim the same advantages, but claim them in Paris or from major institutions, including that of Francophonie, that allow circulation within the wide francophone space (festivals, conferences, and the like). At a third (international) level, the author may find some recognition from the “world republic of literature” (Casanova La république mondiale des lettres, 1), foremost in the form of multiple translations.

Such a conception of the FLS makes it look like a competitive, dynamic field. Cultural belonging (being assigned to a zone of imaginary identification) is presented as a constructed discourse, which results from a constraint determined by the modes of entry into the System. Far from being the product of the System’s generous recognition, this difference is the result “of an injunction from which it is not easy to escape” (Halen, 2003, 29). But the “entrants,” i.e., those who were allowed into the FLS, often succeed in this, when they happen to manage to play the rules of the System to their advantage.²

According to this conception of Francophone literatures, the texts are no longer conceived of as representations of cultures that are preliminary and real, but as loci of inventiveness and games played by the available codes. This implies renouncing the conception of the author as the generous spokesperson of a group. It must be recognized that writers (like critics, for that matter) are seeking legitimation, and in that search they have to cross a sort of obstacle course to which they must adapt. Their works give the readership what it expects, that is, a potential strangeness that is not too off-putting.

This study is directly related to the study of yet another group, that of authors who write in French but who come from non-Francophone cultures. These are writers for whom French is a “choice and an adopted language” (Nadeau 1273). This transnational group includes such well-known writers as Samuel Beckett, Emil M. Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, Milan Kundera, and Andréï Makine.

A few studies (Delbart, Jouanny) have begun to explore this corpus of writings in French. Véronique Porra’s 2011 book is devoted to authors who originally wrote in their native languages, but who “decided” at some point to write in French. This phenomenon is not particularly recent, as illustrated by Jean Moréas, Marthe Bibesco, or Tristan Tzara, but it has increased in importance since the 1990s. These authors place their work within a common literary space while accepting being confined to a particular set of readers.

The foreign author thus observes a number of tacit rules: first and foremost, respect for the grand niche that France, a “literary nation,” has carved for itself; and second, a certain care taken not to frighten readers with excessive exoticism. Thus, the works in this category are examples of a controlled heteronomy, and Porra’s work has the merit of describing this in a systematic fashion. In this way, Porra reveals the strategies of positioning which these works often make use of, and this helps one read in a more knowledgeable way this group of works that is seldom explored within contemporary French literature. Porra’s study covers some of the same ground as does postcolonial research, but its primary concern is with the place of French-language literature in the world. Thus, this amounts to querying what François Provenzano calls “ francodoxy,” that is, “the rhetorical matrix (stock of arguments, figures of speech, representations, ways of saying things) that generates a discourse about self-evidence and authority, whether it be on “French civilization,” Francophonie, or “French national identity” (9).

As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin remarked in the late 1980s, “[a] range of different ways of engaging with texts from the English and European canons have emerged in recent years” (191). Today, in French academe, these ways are mainly comparative and concern three major critical models: “imagology” (the study of the images of “other cultures” in literature); the history of Western literary exoticism; and the identification and study of transnational literary groupings.

Issues in Comparative Studies

1. Imagology

Studies of “imagology,” which correspond to the “history of ideas” (Fr: histoire des idées) concerning cultural otherness, explore the literary interpretation and construction of the “Other.” The study of the notion of “Third World” in intellectual life and in contemporary literature is an example of such work today. For instance, the importance of a novel such as Le Camp des Saints by Jean Raspail has been stressed in an article by Pierre Assouline on his blog, La République des livres, in 2011. This novel, which has been reprinted continuously since 1973, was re-edited in February 2011 by the French publisher Robert Laffont, with a preface by the author entitled “Big Other.” Some 70,000 copies of this book were sold over a period of 37 years. The novel is regularly referr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Future of Postcolonial Studies
• PART I Comparing
• PART II Converting
• PART III Greening
• PART IV Queering
• PART V Utopia
• Contributors
• Index