Postcolonial Thought in the French Speaking World

365 Pages·2009·3.011 MB·English

by  Charles Forsdick (editor), David Murphy (editor)

Postcolonial Thought
in the French-speaking World
Postcolonialism across the Disciplines 4
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Postcolonialism across the Disciplines
Series Editors
Graham Huggan, University of Leeds
Andrew Thompson, University of Leeds
Postcolonialism across the Disciplines showcases alternative directions for
post colonial studies. It is in part an attempt to counteract the dominance in
colonial and postcolonial studies of one particular discipline – English literary/
cultural studies – and to make the case for a combination of disciplinary know -
ledges as the basis for contemporary postcolonial critique. Edited by leading
scholars, the series aims to be a seminal contribution to the field, spanning
the traditional range of disciplines represented in postcolonial studies but
also those less acknowl edged. It will also embrace new critical paradigms and
examine the relation ship between the transnational/cultural, the global and the
postcolonial.

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Postcolonial Thought
in the
French-speaking World
Edited by
Charles Forsdick
and David Murphy
Liverpool University Press

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First published 2009 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2009 Liverpool University Press
The authors’ rights have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission
of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 978-1-84631-054-6 cased
978-1-84631-055-3 limp
Typeset in Amerigo by Koinonia, Manchester
Printed and bound in the European Union by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow

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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Situating Francophone Postcolonial Thought 1
Charles Forsdick and David Murphy
Section 1: Twelve Key Thinkers
1 Aimé Césaire and Francophone Postcolonial Thought Mary Gallagher 31
2 Maryse Condé: Post-Postcolonial? Typhaine Leservot 42
3 Jacques Derrida: Colonialism, Philosophy and Autobiography
Jane Hiddleston 53
4 Assia Djebar: ‘Fiction as a way of “thinking”’ Nicholas Harrison 65
5 Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Violence Max Silverman 77
6 Édouard Glissant: Dealing in Globality Chris Bongie 90
7 Tangled History and Photographic (In)Visibility: Ho Chi Minh on the
Edge of French Political Culture Panivong Norindr 102
8 Translating Plurality: Abdelkébir Khatibi and Postcolonial Writing
in French from the Maghreb Alison Rice 115
9 Albert Memmi: The Conflict of Legacies Patrick Crowley 126
10 V. Y. Mudimbe’s ‘Long Nineteenth Century’ Pierre-Philippe Fraiture 136
11 Roads to Freedom: Jean-Paul Sartre and Anti-colonialism
Patrick Williams 147
12 Léopold Sédar Senghor: Race, Language, Empire David Murphy 157

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Contents
Section 2: Themes, Approaches, Theories
13 Postcolonial Anthropology in the French-speaking World
David Richards 173
14 French Theory and the Exotic Jennifer Yee 185
15 The End of the Ancien Régime French Empire Laurent Dubois 195
16 The End of the Republican Empire (1918–62) Philip Dine 205
17 Postcolonialism and Deconstruction: The Francophone Connection
Michael Syrotinski 216
18 Negritude, Présence Africaine, Race Richard Watts 227
19 Francophone Island Cultures: Comparing Discourses of Identity
in ‘Is-land’ Literatures Pascale De Souza 238
20 Locating Quebec on the Postcolonial Map Mary Jean Green 248
21 Diversity and Difference in Postcolonial France Tyler Stovall 259
22 Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Cultures of Commemoration
Charles Forsdick 271
23 Gender and Empire in the World of Film Winifred Woodhull 285
24 From Colonial to Postcolonial: Reflections on the Colonial Debate
in France Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard 295
Notes on Contributors 306
Bibliography 313
Index 349
vi

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Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank the following people for the ideas and assistance
they contributed to the preparation of this volume: ACHAC, Christine Dutton,
Elizabeth Ezra, Kate Marsh, Aedín Ní Loingsigh. Alec Hargreaves deserves
special thanks for providing various forums in which we were able to develop
the ideas that inform our introduction. Even more importantly, his comments
on an original draft of this volume were a model of academic rigour, and we are
very grateful for his constructive engagement with our project, which allowed
us to clarify our thinking still further. We take responsibility for any remaining
flaws in the volume.
We are particularly grateful to Anthony Cond, our commissioning editor at
Liverpool University Press, as well as Graham Huggan, the series editor, for
championing this project. Charles Forsdick completed his contribution to this
collection while he was in receipt of a Philip Leverhulme Prize; the support of
the Leverhulme Trust is gratefully acknowledged. We also acknowledge the
support of our friends and colleagues in Stirling, Liverpool and elsewhere, and
would like to extend a warm tribute to our contributors, whose innovative and
scholarly work made it such a pleasure to prepare this volume. Neil Lazarus and
Benita Parry also provided invaluable support and encouragement in the early
stages of the project. Finally, we would like to thank Aisling Campbell and Aedín
Ní Loingsigh for their translation of Chapter 24.
A note on translations
In cases where a French-language text exists in a readily available translation,
contributors have endeavoured to provide the title and other quoted material
from this; in order to preserve a sense of the time period in which these texts
were initially published, the date of publication of the French original is provided

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Acknowledgements
when a text is cited for the first time in each chapter. In all other cases, quota-
tions are printed in the original French, with a translation provided by the
author of each individual chapter.
viii

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introduction
Situating Francophone
Postcolonial thought
Charles Forsdick and David Murphy
on 26 July 2007, less than three months after his election to the French presi-
dency and on his first post-election trip to Africa, Nicolas Sarkozy stood before
an invited audience of students, scholars, dignitaries and political leaders at the
Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar in Senegal, and delivered a speech that was
directed at ‘la jeunesse africaine’ [African youth].1 The speech was awaited with
a mixture of expectation and trepidation, for Sarkozy had adopted a strangely
dualistic discourse on France’s colonial past and postcolonial relationships
during the preceding campaign: on the one hand, he had expressed a desire to
break with the corrupt practices of the previous fifty years, frequently dubbed
la Françafrique, a netherworld of corrupt oil, arms and trade deals designed
to maintain France’s global ‘sphere of influence’, a process charted as early
as the 1970s in texts such as Mongo Beti’s scathing polemic Main basse sur le
Cameroun (1972), or Ousmane Sembene’s witheringly satirical film, Xala (1974);2
yet on the other hand, he had emphasized in several pre-election speeches the
positive effects of French colonialism and had evoked his desire for a vision of
history that French people could celebrate rather than one for which they were
obliged to repent (see Liauzu, 2007a). If the call to break with the practices of la
Françafrique was cautiously welcomed in Africa, the attempt to move away from
the gradual acknowledgement of certain ‘crimes’ of the colonial past (a process
begun by the previous president Jacques Chirac) created deep disquiet; this
anxiety was compounded by the creation of a highly contentious Ministry for
Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development by the Sarkozy
1 The full text of Sarkozy’s speech can be found at http://www.elysee.fr/elysee/elysee.
fr/francais/interventions/2007/juillet/allocution_a_l_universite_de_dakar.79184.html
(consulted 3 October 2008). One of the few informed and immediate responses to the
speech came in a special dossier in the magazine Jeune Afrique (see Colette, 2007).
2 one of the most vocal critics of la Françafrique is the investigative journalist Xavier
Verschave (2003).
1

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Postcolonial Thought in the French-speaking World
government, a development that inherently posited immigrants as a ‘problem’
for national identity.3 (For eloquent critiques of this new ministry, see Glissant
and Chamoiseau, 2007; Liauzu, 2007a; Noiriel, 2007; Todorov, 2007.)
Sarkozy began his speech with an unexpected acknowledgement of the
negative aspects of the French colonial project: ‘Le colonisateur est venu, il
a pris, il s’est servi, il a exploité, il a pillé des resources, des richesses qui ne
lui appartenaient pas’ [the colonizer came, he appropriated, he took what he
wanted, he exploited, he pillaged resources, riches that did not belong to him].
However, as Pascal Blanchard, among others, has argued, the recognition of
colonialism’s exceptional ‘errors’ is designed primarily to underline more clearly
the overall positive effect of France’s colonial ‘mission’ (Blanchard, 2007); as
bavures [unfortunate errors], they are the result of individual incidents of wrong-
doing and thus do not constitute a systematic policy of oppression. Following
this logic, the subsequent lines of Sarkozy’s speech absolved French coloni-
alism of any malicious intent, and he detailed the benefits of France’s civilizing
mission:
Il a pris mais je veux dire avec respect qu’il a aussi donné. Il a construit
des ponts, des routes, des hôpitaux, des dispensaires, des écoles. Il a rendu
fécondes des terres vierges, il a donné sa peine, son travail, son savoir. Je veux
le dire ici, tous les colons n’étaient pas des voleurs, tous les colons n’étaient
pas des exploiteurs.
He took but I would respectfully submit that he also gave. He built bridges,
roads, hospitals, dispensaries, schools. He made fertile land that had been
barren, he gave his effort, his work, his knowledge. I want to say this here
today that not all colonizers were thieves, not all colonizers were exploiters.
Albert Memmi had denounced, over fifty years previously, the bad faith that
underpinned any such notion of the ‘good colonizer’, but Sarkozy also refused
any responsibility on the part of France for Africa’s current social, economic
and political predicament.4 instead, and to the dismay of his audience, he
proceeded to lay the blame at the feet of Africans themselves – and in particular
the mythical figure of the peasant – who were denied coevalness with the West
and deemed to be living outside history, guided by an innate sense of time and
space that made it impossible for them to develop modern societies:
Le drame de l’Afrique, c’est que l’homme africain n’est pas assez entré dans
l’Histoire. Le paysan africain qui, depuis des millénaires, vit avec les saisons,
dont l’idéal de vie est d’être en harmonie avec la nature, ne connaît que
3 Similar moves towards a strict legislative framework for national identity have been
witnessed in many European countries over the past decade: see Huggan (2008). For a
discussion of France’s position in a wider ‘postcolonial Europe’, see Forsdick and Murphy
(2007).
4 The British historian Niall Ferguson has similarly attempted through a series of publica-
tions to present the British Empire in an almost uniquely positive light (Ferguson,
2003).
2

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