Ethics of Description

The Anthropological Dispositif and French Modern Travel Writing

Matt Reeck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780367858643
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000926064
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ethics of Description: The Anthropological Dispositif and French Modern Travel Writing follows the development of a minor tradition in French literature where metropolitan authors traveling abroad demonstrate their awareness of the ethical conundrums of representing world peoples. During the colonial–modern era, currents of anthropological thought and representational practice are identifiable throughout society, and across literature, the arts, and the sciences. Collectively, they can be theorized as belonging to a dispositif, the anthropological dispositif. The modernization of anthropology serves as an ambivalent interlocutor for the realizations of the writers studied in this book about the difficulties of describing cultural realities that lie largely outside their ken. Anthropology motivates new literary representational strategies that are, alternatively, in keeping with scientific mandates or operate against them. Forty images are analyzed alongside literary works. A postcolonial chapter shows how the ethical awareness of the colonial–modern authors studied have impacted minority self-representation in contemporary France.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Authorial Stance, Minor Traditions, and Ethics
• Interchapter 1 : Cordier and Fromentin: A Case Study of Ethnographic Art
• 1 Ethnographic Aesthetics: An Order of Subjects Called the Document
• Interchapter 2 : The Arche-Principle in Turn-of-the-Century Anthropological Images
• 2 Segalen’s Arche-Writing
• Interchapter 3 : Visual Memory in the Dispositif
• 3 The Paradox of Description: The Tableau and the Note in André Gide and Marc Allégret’s French Equatorial Africa
• Interchapter 4 : Double Exposure: Photojournalism in 1930s Ethiopia
• 4 Information Ethics in L’Afrique fantôme
• Interchapter 5 : Travel in Rachid Djaïdani’s Film Sur ma ligne [On My Line] (2006)
• 5 French Minority Writers and Polyvocal Auto-Ethnography in Métisse France
• Index