Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post)colonial Expression 9780801467516

Table of contents :
Contents
Prologue
Part One: Phraseologies
1. (Post)colonial Possessions
2. Haunting and Imperial Doctrine
3. The Revenant Phrase
Part Two: Giving Languages, Taking Speech
4. The Languages of Empire
5. Interdiction within Diction
6. Today: Stigmata and Veils
7. Reinventing Francophonie
Part Three: Disciplining Knowledge
8. Formations and Reformations of Anthropology
9. The Impossible Colonial Science
10. Who Will Become a Theoretician?
After the Afterward
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

EMPIRE OF LANGUAGE

EMPIRE OF LANGUAGE

TOWA R D A C R I T I Q UE O F ( P OST) CO LO NI A L E X P R ESS I O N

Laurent Dubreuil

Translated from the French by David Fieni

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Originally published under the title L’Empire du langage, by Laurent Dubreuil. © 2008 by Hermann, 6 Rue Labrouste, 75015 Paris, France, www.editions-hermann.fr. English edition copyright © 2013 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2013 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dubreuil, Laurent, author. [Empire du langage. English] Empire of language : toward a critique of (post)colonial expression / Laurent Dubreuil ; translated from the French by David Fieni. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5056-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. French literature—French-speaking countries—History and criticism. 2. French language—Political aspects. 3. Postcolonialism. 4. French-speaking countries— History. I. Fieni, David, translator. II. Dubreuil, Laurent. Empire du langage. Translation of: III. Title. PQ3897.D8313 2013 840.9'358—dc23 2012048481 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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Contents

Prologue

1

Pa rt One: Phraseologies

13

1. (Post)colonial Possessions

15

2. Haunting and Imperial Doctrine

36

3. The Revenant Phrase

57

Part Two: Giving Languages, Taking Speech

81

4. The Languages of Empire

83

5. Interdiction within Diction

102

6. Today: Stigmata and Veils

119

7. Reinventing Francophonie

129

Pa rt Three: Disciplining Knowledge

145

8. Formations and Reformations of Anthropology

147

9. The Impossible Colonial Science

159

10. Who Will Become a Theoretician?

181

After the Afterward Notes

203

Bibliography Index

231

219

197

EMPIRE OF LANGUAGE

Prologue

Colonial! The word is everywhere. In newspapers, journals, and books; at conferences, lectures, and symposia. At times it seems as though the present has been invaded by the colonial past. And not just in Europe. What are we to make of the former colonial “possessions” that remain in thrall to an unresolved history, or to the nations of the Americas (from Brazil to the United States) that still resist complete repudiation of their former practices of domination? As for this most recent period of globalization, it sometimes feels as though we are currently experiencing the rebirth of the same imperialism that began in the Renaissance. And yet, while the colonial is being spoken of once again, the meaning and significance of the term are far from self-evident. In the virtual space that will be privileged throughout this book—that of “contemporary France,” whose very definition is so problematic and uncertain—this recent clamor over colonization contrasts sharply with the combination of silence and deafness that immediately followed the great wars of independence in the previous century. A Parisian, interviewed by Chris Marker in his film Le joli mai, would say of the moment in 1962 when the Evian Accords were signed, putting an end to the Algerian War: “Some events it’s best to keep quiet about” (Y a [des] événements qu’il est préférable de se taire [sic]).1 For the interviewee to say this was an implicit acknowledgment of the necessity of censure, and the anacoluthon in the sentence further suggests how deep the impulse was within 1

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the social order to pass over the “events” of Algeria in silence, and to merely “keep quiet” in general. Certain “events” stifle voices; others—in the metropole and elsewhere— encourage a new discourse about imperialism and its colonial remnants. But is it enough simply to speak of the colonies in order to undo the pain? Certainly not. Oppression had its own dedicated, manifest forms of expression that became deeply and stubbornly embedded, even in the texts of contemporary well-meaning writers and thinkers. If we want to talk about the colonies let us first look at how discussions of empire and even our very language habits are linked to this ancient usage, established in the history and politics of the past. Let us also be attentive to the contrapuntal speech that we know today as postcolonial francophonie. And let us not create too wide a gap between research relating to the imperial past and the critique of language that in fact allows for this inquiry. This is one of the major aims of this book, which develops a critique of colonial experience through an examination of its linguistic reality. The colony is also valuable as an example of other processes of domination and liberation, where the real is still grasped in words and meanings. To speak of the colonies can be a critical gesture and, at the same time, the means for moving beyond the specifics of one particular colonial case—the end goal being to steer us toward a broader consideration of the relations between speech and political society as a whole. Let me be even more specific. Language is not all there is to it; that which is said also acts. One forgets this, however, whenever “the time of action” is put in opposition to dialogue, to the soliloquy, to proclamations. Although it may appear to go against the grain, the hunt for improper turns of phrase, the desire to purify speech in order to adapt it to “modernity,” is in fact one more way of not understanding the empire of language in society. There is no predetermined destiny that has condemned speech to futility in advance; although, yes, all too often we engage in empty talk. Yet to assign equal value to things and to their verbal designations in general only creates a neutral space with an ineffective basis. Thus, replacing the French word clochard (hobo) with sdf (sans domicile fixe, i.e., “homeless”) might seem to be an improvement, but the fact remains that by stripping away precisely the improbable sublime quality of misérable (wretch) and replacing it with a technocratic abbreviation, we are left only with the notion of poverty in its place. We live the phrases we hear, repeat, and pronounce; we live on them, as well. In the so-called domain of scholarly knowledge, the impact of the “linguistic turn” has been widely felt since at least the 1960s. Philosophers, linguists, theoreticians, and critics have devoted endless energy to studying the verbal dimension of collective action and subjective subsistence. Endless,

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and perhaps excessive. Some might therefore say that it is time to “close the parentheses,” forgetting that in making such a statement they are using a typographical metaphor and that they continue to speak. The concern with language would only disappear with the arrival of extraverbal communication allowing us to accomplish as much as, or more than, verbal communication does. While we await the arrival of direct telepathy that will short-circuit our current discourses, it is probably best in the meantime to distrust the effects of transparency. The force of the fist, the humming of the city, the sight of the squirrel outside my window, the snow falling on my head, the polluted air I breathe, all affect me without speaking, yet the moment I speak of them they take place otherwise, and their effects differ. Others reckon that, to the contrary, everything has been affirmed, and thus all we need to do now is repeat. Most likely, newness is never anything but an unprecedented reordering of the old; this scarcely means eternal repetition. So, to come to the end of the first part of this prologue: the book you are reading concerns itself with its own act of enunciation. Research can have an object; or, more modestly, it can concern itself with a phenomenon. But scholarly work must also be cognizant of its own manner of speaking if it intends to touch on points where the real is spoken. Ultimately, it must speak up, instead of simply repeating ready-to-use phrases without attempting to comprehend them. This book is about how events, states, and individuals can alter established orders and existing connections in the world by means of a discourse that simultaneously describes and prescribes. It asks how it is possible to impose a situation while speaking to other people, how to construct a verbal trap from which there is no easy exit, how to build one’s life by resisting the customary jargon. If I must locate my work as it relates to established fields, if only to reassure readers, let me say now that what I am doing here can be called a critique of the power of language, one that is grounded in literary study as well as in other institutional fields, including history, philosophy, and political science. The goal is to grasp more fully the medium of our expression each time we designate what happens between the order of the world and that of language. It is necessary, therefore, to consider multiple genres and modes of discourse (legal texts, travel narratives, drama, poetry, folklore, etc.), and to account for differences among them so that we are able to recognize that not all tones are of equal value and not all words correspond. Variation exists according to who utters the words—when, how, and where. Simultaneously, my work is part of a more circumscribed field of study, that of colonization in the modern era, starting with France and moving overseas. Beginning with the “discovery” of the New World, the variable country that is La France constituted different expropriations, in America,

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in Asia, in Africa, in Oceania, that one usually calls “colonial empires.” The “empire of language” refers to the mobilizations of speech, usage, and discourses in the formation of this type of domination. Yes, the colonies were created with the help of new modes of exploration, by the voice of the canon and the language of the bayonet, but they were equally created by the repetition of formulas and verbal injunctions, the expressions of thinking in French. The empire of language both does and undoes the social fabric. Empire returns to itself, so to speak. The words and utterances of the language take on such a force that they authorize a response from other speakers. A debate presents itself otherwise; a confrontation is heard that uses parlances,2 disassembles them, and breaks the fortuitous yet tenacious captivity of readymade phrases. A theater of words, having been constructed through the accumulation of colonial discourses, can be disrupted when other voices come forth to smash the framework of the preceding representation. This process is that part of decolonization which happens through the advent of a rebellious francophonie, a voice expressing itself in French against colonial usage. Because literature is born from the transpiercing of ordinary languages, it plays a singular role in this defection from social prescription. So it was for French colonization, which quickly found itself attacked by books at the same time as by weapons and bombs. The trouble with language (which is also, of course, its oblique, menacing power) is that it does not allow anything to be said once and for all. What remains for us who speak French are the colonial lexicon and turns of phrase, the framework of thought that commandeered the place of domination through verbal expression. For this reason the word “postcolonial” should only be written with certain precautions, such as the form I most often use, (post)colonial. If one situates the historical and national event—which I am not sure exists in a pure state—in the colony, one allows oneself to refer to the “postcolonial” as to the end period of the empires assembled by the countries of Europe during the last several centuries. If, on the contrary, colonization is understood in light of the linguistic knot of power, any discursive resistance prompts us to admit that for the time being it is only a question of the (post)colonial: the afterward is announced as structurally prevented, impeded, disrupted. We feel this acutely in France. The recent presidential controversy regarding “national identity,” the commentaries on the “cry for help” or the “silence” from the banlieues, the idea of endowing a black person with speech so that she might read the news on television, the editorial or media debates about colonial amnesia or fracture, and even advertising about métissage or cultural dialogue: these are a collection of marks, of symptoms. (Post)colonial questions, sometimes considered by their very nature to be incompatible with

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French life,3 have in a very short period come to occupy an important place, in face-to-face discussions among friends as well as via new forms of digital communication, and in historical essays as well as political speeches. Critique has a reactive element, a present from which it is cut off by the evolution of its thinking, and which helps to inform it. The time of thought is not that of the moment, but it is nonetheless concerned with the present state of the world, the linguistic veins of the social, so we will not segregate our bel aujourd’hui. It is self-evident that the (post)colonial is not the only prescription that weighs on us; it is not necessarily the most lasting form of domination. A particular interdiction, however, weighs things down here, perhaps even more pervasively than the monitoring of gender and sexuality or the suppressing of the voice of the poor. As we shall see, it is an interdiction, in any case, whose rules have been examined and reproduced with a rare insistence for some years now. In the anglophone world, postcolonial studies have provided an academic response to these kinds of sociohistorical problems. Notoriously, France has had difficulty tolerating what is often perceived as a typically “Anglo-Saxon” mode or obsession. One might argue, however, that francophone writers of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Albert Memmi, and Frantz Fanon, were already writing (post) colonial works. One could add to this list names from the more distant past, such as those of Haitian political theoreticians Demesvar Delorme and Anténor Firmin, or from the recent past: Valentin-Yves Mudimbé or Edouard Glissant. Is it irrelevant that Glissant wrote, and Mudimbé and a number of others continue to write, from the American campuses where they work? In other words, there is no shortage of (post)colonial francophone studies; it is only in hexagonal France that they tend to go unrecognized.4 The situation, however, is gradually changing within the French intellectual and editorial scene. Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha are being translated into French. Historians of colonization, who not long ago could find only a very limited readership in France, now have access to the most powerful publishers. The problem, of course, is that the translation lag immediately obscures the debates that were triggered by works just now appearing for French readers; polemics developed on a larger scale will be restarted twenty years later at the local level. Then the French publication of Spivak or Bhabha is executed in the name of recognized values, and the absence of risk taking neutralizes their claims. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture will be the subject of discussions no more profound than those of the significance of Tom Cruise’s latest movie; recognition will not involve ideas but rather judgments about the star system of the American university. The result is a bifurcated situation, where essential texts in postcolonial studies are introduced in abridgments or adaptations,

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emptied of substance. The more important these works are in their original form, the more frightening is their theoretical flaccidity when that original form is lost, and they become, in their revision, a model for others to follow. In many respects, this book is different than much of what is published these days, and it will puzzle those who think that the colony should be studied in a single way. I consider the historical dimension, critical thought, and francophone pluralities together. The (post)colonial is neither a piece of evidence nor a mere speculative motif. Never mind that I am breaking with the habit of considering only one dimension of the subject: such is the price of the renewal of this field. To continue to speak about speech and the colonial, after Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, or Homi Bhabha, will only make sense on the condition of creating a singular approach. The (post)colonial is a category constructed by interpretation. The actuality of conquest and imperialism as historical events is not the issue. Categories do not exist in a free state. To speak of the construction of the (post) colonial according to the contours I present in no way means that I am neglecting history. On the contrary, a certain set of gestures, acts, and statements is articulated in such a way that the colony means something other than a vague label. My demonstration is governed neither by the “essence” of the (post)colonial nor by the events “alone”: it refers to the facts, by pointing out their artificiality (they are made, or facta in Latin). I have chosen to situate the (post)colonial in the moments where European agents and ideas meet people from other continents, beginning in the Renaissance. In the first section I will clarify that the experience of the colony is, for me, dependent on geographical expansion, on slavery, and on the social control of populations considered to be exogenous. My favorite examples throughout are those that depend on the history of “France”—France being the performative name of the specific set of linguistic, legal, and political practices that shaped a country. On occasion, I will depart from the French colonial empire to examine other sites, especially the American context of the anglophone world. These boundaries may well seem incidental, determined largely by my own history as a French citizen now working in the United States, but there are also important similarities and correspondences among the different (British, American, French) empires. Let me add a side note regarding this last point. People complain today about the mania of contrition and repentance.5 I for one believe neither in the innate virtue of formerly colonized peoples nor in the wickedness of European civilizations. What the Japanese did in Korea and China might rightly be called colonization. The spectacle of dictatorships in the Third World prevents us from thinking of any automatic goodness of the formerly

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oppressed. Even in the heart of Europe, I do not think France was “the worst,” insofar as the scale of values in this case simply makes no sense. In addition, I am not demanding contrition, if this is understood as a nice, tearful ceremony, as financial compensation teeming with ulterior motives, or as an apologetic preamble to every decision. That neither France nor Europe has a monopoly on imperial domination, that they did not absolutely exterminate Africans or Indians, must not drive us to minimize, leave to the side, or excuse colonization. Without making a moral issue of it, this book casts a keen eye on (post)colonial domination and on domination tout court. Colonization, then, will be able to speak itself here—especially in the French language, with obvious consequences for the idiom itself. The communication and competition among the European powers help us nevertheless to surmise that theories and solutions have been developed in response to one another, from one place to another. It is worth pointing out that, counter to the majority of current thinking on the subject, I take into consideration not only different positions within the colony (the colonist, the administrator, the commentator, the indigene, the soldier, the priest, etc.), but differences between, in particular, the first and second colonial empires. During the Grand Siècle especially, a manner of thinking about the colonial other came to be, enabled by a ready-made language. This language emerged not from the accumulation of texts; rather it was a phrase, a syntax of thought created by language, which concretized into phraseology. Every society is phraseological, transmitting statements and sets of ideas carried by ordinary speech, dominating us when we aren’t thinking, speaking in our place. The weather and our health—we hear ourselves talking of these things, perhaps with disappointment, but most of the time without major consequences. But when the male chauvinist, antiproletarian, or racist phrase nourishes our thinking, then the trouble grows. In every case, society prescribes what we speak and think; it is only the intensity and the scope that vary. Beyond the question of complicity, each empire has developed particular accents for its (post)colonial phrase, and I will focus on these nuances. One could be still more specific and deny that there is one phrase of the French colony. There is most certainly not simply one discourse. However, I maintain the importance of seizing a phrase that produces discourses, and then prompts adversaries, attentistes, and colonial servants and agents to speak in a comparable register. The historical centralization of France, dating from before the Revolution, gives factual support for this hypothesis. The fact remains, I confess, that all things being fragmentable, we may come to doubt the existence of “colonization” (as a single, unified concept), even in a limited space and time. Plurality exists, but it does not prohibit singularities. I find a

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value, if only a heuristic one, in constructing the (post)colonial, in seeking out differential repetitions, from the time of Jean de Léry (1534–1613) to our time. The construction of the (post)colonial is valuable for what it allows us to think, whereas its rejection, by means of a discontinuous relativization of people and periods, serves the caricatural return of the past. No thought comes without risk. Reservations about the longue-durée approach, about the linguistic turn, and about comparative analysis are innumerable. If I were not sympathetic, at least to a degree, with these reservations, this would itself be a bad sign, or the symptom of a risk-free approach. It is not in anyone’s best interest to carve research up into specialties where habit and prudence chip away at the necessary peril that must exist for thinking to occur. Without this intellectual peril it would be better to enter a corporate office than to venture into books and archives. Nor is it enough to locate patterns, motifs, or tropes and then to simply denounce the effects they produce (deprecation of the Oriental, racism against the Other). It is still necessary to show that a prescriptive diction, the usage of which was once commonplace, is still capable of speaking (to) us. In this case, it is not the unconscious expressing itself, even if it sometimes takes advantage of the already-said. That which makes itself heard is neither ourselves nor others, but the worst element of a society that we allow to become an external and objective force: the “general in the head,” as they said during May 1968. The good news is that language, by all the measures of its empirie, its empiricism (utterance, phrase, discourse, langue, tone, style, voice, speech, text, discipline, literature, etc.), can do a service or a disservice to the empire that it undergirds. One must study the trap before trying to dismantle it. The demonstrations in this book also interrogate how the emergence of an unexpected word, one that explodes interdictions and apparent limits, contributes to the weakening of domination. Literature, above all, which finds itself a kind of guarantor of meaning, both decomposes ordinary languages, and more often than political declarations, law, or conversation, produces singularities that repel the effects of coercion. My goal in this book, therefore, is to interrogate the general connections between human verbal language and the social or political order, without identifying these different elements a priori, or considering them to be fortuitously paired. The specific category of the colonial, and of the postcolonial, is our explicit problem. Within this existing framework, I opt for the long historical view, going from the territorial expansion of Europe to the “New” World up until today. This inclusion of the first colonial empires, of the conquest of America, of slavery, and of the first battle for independence (with the striking example of Haiti) is to my mind indispensable and salu-

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tary—especially so given that postcolonial studies, and especially postcolonial “theory,” have for so long confined themselves to the last two centuries. I am more concerned, as it will become clear, with the corpus in the European vernaculars, particularly but not exclusively French and English. This is a way of focusing the study on common languages, whose elocutionary practice affected domination as emancipation—whereas Arabic, Bambara (or Bamanankan), Khmer, or even the Creoles were not used both pro and contra to the same extent. This refusal to ignore languages with contradictory usage is thus an epistemological decision that correlates with my desire to consider together the words and works of both colonizer and colonized, in order to better understand a past that is not past. To deny or attempt to erase the phenomenon of colonialism is neither viable nor is it even possible, and this is why I try in these pages to reconfigure our vision of the world from the perspective of a difficult liberty, acquired through an intense and particular kind of domination. However, to consider the “postcolonial” as an infinite era succeeding the wars of independence (that is, turning this category into a new eternal, unitary horizon) would quite simply be to continue anew along the same old path. There can be no postcolonial moment without taking into account the still living and unfolding fullness of the colonial; yet as soon as the instant of this after comes, it will be high time to open an aftermath, to which I hope this inquiry will be able to contribute. It is my goal to prepare and specify the composite mode of a neo-global experience, facing the tensions between anachronism and event, between the singular and the promise of the universal.6 This book is divided into three parts, which approach the francophone (post)colonial through three successive examinations of the experience of language. Part 1, entitled “Phraseologies,” considers the articulation of the discourses of colonization and finds within their boundaries the practice of a possession. The dark side of the Enlightenment is affirmed once again; moreover, before and after the era of the philosophes, the colonial empire is described and controlled as the land of enchantment—of magicians, phantoms, spirits, ecstatics. Beyond the effective appropriation of resources, of labor and of bodies, the description of savages as possessed, and their transformation by texts into magical primitives, serve the illusory design of civilization—that fallacious process that would banish the supernatural while trying to propagate its practice outside the closed field of Europe. The colonial phrase of possession organizes imperial politics. Coexisting in a contradictory manner, doctrines of domination find a meaning in the improbable coexistence of colonists and indigenes. The contemporary treatment of immigration is still partially articulated based on the syntax of thought that the Code noir con-

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solidated, on the narratives of Jesuit fathers, or on the pedagogical treatises of the Third Republic. Even the term métissage is not quite the positive category it is sometimes thought to be, and an investigation into its success (from its use by black African intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s to contemporary phraseology) demonstrates a solidarity with the hybrid, which is the westernized autochthon. None of the positions are identical in the cases examined; Frantz Fanon is neither Victor Schoelcher nor René Depestre. The fact remains that a textual collectivity reestablishes the phrase of possession, helping us to think how to speak from this place without letting the predicted ventriloquism become a reality. Confronted with prescription, as with colonial enchantment, speakers emerge to cancel the well-understood partitions and to allow the advent of other thoughts. This hijacking was already in the works at the end of the eighteenth century when a black poet writing in Latin lifted up the voice of an “African Muse” in Jamaica. Part 2 focuses on the indigenous7 work of speaking up (prise de parole).8 With the structure of colonial possession in place, speech was made extremely difficult for the colonized. Under the ancien régime, slavery, by its very nature, denies even the possibility of black discourse. Yet in 1789, through alterations made to the theological and political control exercised by Catholic Missions, the unheard-of occurs. During the course of the Revolution, particularly in Saint-Domingue, black voices will resound in French. As a result, the censure of indigenous speech will be accomplished chiefly by means of control over the national language, which is occasionally granted to the “primitives” by the advocates of the second colonial empire. The polemics about the teaching of French, the gaps in school enrollment rates, and the celebration of the apprenticeship in language are tied to a concretization in the language itself. Colonial usage was spread by newspapers, songs, books, and teachers, which operated by and large independently of political changes. Modern censure would thus prohibit the extraordinary from happening by programming the indigene’s French, in which the options were to speak either pidgin French or the language of the whites, and by determining a structural deafness to the indigene’s French. Francophonie, if we can use this term in a maximal way, may designate the operation that consists, for the one who speaks, of designating himself or herself as colonized, while at the same time transpiercing prescriptive conventions. The pioneering writers of the 1920s opened a second voice. Yet the event must always start anew. All those who speak French today still have to disengage themselves from colonial usage. Citizens from the banlieue who grab our attention through words, writers for whom francophonie must be only a convenient term, journalists who too often remain within its parlance, people and passersby

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who speak among us, must bear witness to a beyond of the linguistic social field in the life of a word. Scholars have a task of primary urgency here. If one is going to use the discourses of the academy to speak about colonies and colonialism—a project I undertake in this book—a special examination of these discourses inside the disciplines is absolutely essential. The languages of erudition have participated in the phrase, in the usage I analyze. They have done more than this, all while anchoring the colonial argument in reflexive thought. The third section asks which discipline(s) are most capable of speaking about the (post)colonial. Anthropologists are not in the ideal position they perhaps imagine themselves to be. It would perhaps be saying too much to point out that ethnology is not intended to educate colonists. Yet from its first formations to its successive reformations, the discipline bears a troubled relation to the colony. It needs the colony so it can alter itself, and it tries to make the colony disappear from its own image: by rejecting “the Occidentalizing process” in order to better study the “natural savage,” by fighting against white power for the benefit of a phantasmal autochthon, by declaring the colonial rupture complete. Postcolonial studies, which integrate the problems of discontinuous disciplines confronting empire, should provide the opportunity for an improved academic language. Yes, but on the condition of not restarting, or even of trying to reverse the unitary project of a “colonial science” that the principal European powers encouraged at the beginning of the twentieth century. To return to this failed ambition paradoxically highlights the current failures of a French-style anticolonial history that involuntarily repeats a theoretical censure that it did not know how to circumvent. I evoke the divergent example of Anglo-American “studies,” which with their deep concern for method, sometimes excessively attempt to found knowledge in the (post)colonial. But not everything should be deduced or reconfigured from the experiences of the colony alone. Theory itself remains to be remade, from the remnants of the disciplines, in the furrow of negative knowledge that literature brings to the social and to language. The real “post” of “postcolonial” will arrive through a displacement of this kind of order, far from repression, repetition, or obsession.9

Pa rt I

Phraseologies

One may kill without a word; so they say. But every colonial empire speaks, and speaks of itself. The colony is also a site within language, often a topos. Writing both describes and alters it. This book is itself an addition to the seemingly innumerable texts already produced on this site, bookish continents. It thus interrogates, reflexively, the fact of speaking the colonial and the postcolonial. We have seen a growing body of research in recent years on the history of empires, as well as much theorizing about the effects of this colonial history. Literatures in European languages are still established in the formerly conquered territories and the remaining colonial sites. This long-standing phenomenon, whose invention will occupy us in part 2 of this book, may be confronted with the multiple legal provisions, scientific evocations, or political dogmas that the great powers issue in their control from afar. A murmur also rises up, mixing eloquent declarations with barroom talk, pedestrian conversation with lyrical song. Utterances are produced in language and languages, which of course are made up of countless discourses. I want to grasp these utterances over the course of this book. Part 1 of the book is devoted to distinguishing specifically the colonial phrase from among these discourses. In Greek, phrasis means a “way of speaking.” The term thus designates the configuration of words, the articulation of linguistic elements in an utterance—the sentence, the text. Through the discourses that we will read, we will construct the lineaments of a phrase that in turn constructs 13

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meaning and gets repeated from one speaker to another. Sometimes this will mean quotations that are transmitted, such as the emblematic French phrase “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois” (Our ancestors, the Gauls).1 However, even when repeated verbatim, a syntagma can change value. The phrase thus designates the variance of its invariance. Something is said of the colonies, which gets amalgamated into one composite but contradictory entity even as it changes. I mark tendencies, habits shared by the colonist and the indigene, by orators, smooth talkers, and dictators. I don’t deny it: I am indeed constructing the reality of the colonial phrase, yet I am able to do so only because voices and texts have responded to each other; encountered, battled, and missed one another. The phrase is a sum of utterances and a subtraction from discourses. The latter exist, moreover, in their differences from each other. The constitution of the phrase is a relatively homogeneous block of meaning where one associates motifs, more or less independently from illocutionary specificities. This initial step in my critique is necessary in order to interrogate the other of logos—rationality—which sanctioned Europe’s overseas expansion. Nevertheless, understanding these languages requires a new division, demands that the unity of the phrase—at first untenable—again be cleaved by way of differential critical attention. Part 2 of this book will, through the study of imperial language and its propagation, sunder the practice of speech from the verbiage of usage where censure becomes fixed. Part 3 will explore the distances between discourses of institutional knowledge in their attempts to understand the (post)colonial. Before this, we will have occasion to uncover a few literary singularities in the ready-made formulas disseminated by science and politics. The usual way a phrase comes into being, whether or not it is colonial, is in effect a phraseology: a stasis of enunciation, or rather, a slowing-down of meaning, which displaces almost nothing in the possibilities of its language. “Ideology” has nothing to do with this process. This word has been rendered nearly unintelligible today by its shrill overuse. The term ideology refers, especially for the inheritors of the Marxist tradition, to forms of expression that are alienating, to the dissimulating veil that has fallen over the brutality of society. Ideology is still a system, a vision of the world. I have chosen, on the contrary, the phrase in order to insist on the operation of language in the invention of the real; I do not believe for a moment in the divorce between objective data and their translation (whether deceptive or veracious). Even phraseology carries with it its own failure. It is not that it fails when it gives itself away and contradicts itself; on the contrary, phraseology is all the stronger for finding coherence in its formulation, despite the hollowness in its proofs. Yet constituted as a dense body, its matter can cut against itself.

Ch a p ter 1

(Post)colonial Possessions

The colonial phrase that we are assembling will speak first in French. We may then see how our examination might be extended to other languages. This choice of language is clearly a function of the space I am privileging in this work. The concern with discrepancies among languages will make extrapolations possible. We will have the opportunity to remember that language is not irrelevant when it comes to colonial politics; it, too, commands configurations and positions of discourses. One word will detain us and contain other words: possession. Possession is a common synonym for colony during the ancien régime. Like “colony,” the word “possession” is well attested during moments when France extends its empire overseas; both words are used to describe this new expansion, as well as the control and the settlement they imply. The French conqueror, in the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, is often an explorer who arrives on an island, a land he decides to take charge of, in his own name or that of the king. In doing so, he is said to take possession of the colony, that place he annexes.

The Meaning of Possession In 1620, Samuel Champlain returns to North America, to the “New France” he had previously penetrated (between 1604 and 1618), this time equipped 15

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with royal orders. The day after his return to Quebec he has Mass celebrated. “The Récollet father delivered a sermon of Exhortation” to obtain the obedience of all to the king and the nobles. After this exhortation we left the chapel, I assembled all the people, and commanded Commissioner Guers to read the King’s commission aloud to the Viceroy, and that of his Grace the Viceroy. This made everyone shout “Vive le Roi,” the cannon was fired as an expression of joy, and thus I took possession of the habitation and the country, in the name of my Lord the Viceroy. The aforementioned Guers stood as witness to the time and place. (Champlain, La France d’Amérique 211)1 The political novelty here resides in an act of appropriation that is determined by a delegation between the king, the viceroy, and Champlain. Champlain had crossed a small part of the continent, named places and built structures, engaged in commerce and created alliances with the “savages.” He can now legally arrogate to himself his discovery during a ceremony where speech is transmitted. The discovery is declared by the Word of God incarnate in the Eucharist and in the sermon by the priest, followed by two readings of edicts and the cries of the assembly. The cannon then speaks, and Champlain “takes possession” in the “name” of the sovereign; all this will be archived on paper. In addition to expressing “joy,” the cannon fire indicates military force and specifies the nature of its language. There is no space to oppose the verbal operation of the colonial declaration made through the use of weapons. I am not masking the other side of this violence. On the contrary, the striking summary Champlain gives us inscribes violence, with its voice, in a process of diction, in a system of echoes. I only want to highlight the interlacing knots that Champlain ties between the public exhortation and reading, and the proclamation and the inscription in a register—a narrative. This knot is exemplary of what we must look for. At least in this material, I do not find an uncrossable chasm between the two putative orders of the oral and the written. This is also why, in this book, “speech” (parole) and “text” do not refer in a systematic way to one of these two poles rather than the other. Of course, the majority of utterances we will analyze—the majority, but not all—will derive from printed material. Yet an orality (that of the slogan, for example) can be heard there, which is itself worked over by writing, if only in the Derridean sense. The colony is possession achieved through a performative gesture. Placenames sometimes guard the memory of this. In La Réunion, there is a city called La Possession. An Ile de la Possession figures in the Crozet Archipelago.2 In all these cases, “possession” corresponds to the commandeering of

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a country. The register does not entirely coincide with a polemical lexicon: it is less about conquering an already-existing state than about managing what is found there. In contrast to the classical wars against established powers, what we see in colonial wars, more than anything else, is the taking of a territory—which is inhabited, as if by chance. In his descriptions, Champlain scarcely seems hampered by the presence of Indians. They are “our savages,” since they happen to reside in a new portion of the kingdom of France. Champlain’s imperative is “to attract a small number of savages near to us” in order to do business with them. One asks them for beaver pelts, and they will go away “very satisfied.” “This is a step in the right direction” (Champlain, La France d’Amérique 231). If the Indians resist, it will suffice to force them to obey, to crush them, if necessary, to play one side against the other (Algonquins against Iroquois, for example). From this point of view, colonization plunders the local riches, despite the autochthonous peoples. The phrase develops as soon as this legal possession communicates with the description of the indigenous people as “possessed by an evil spirit” (Champlain, La France d’Amérique 231). In the passage I am citing, Champlain makes the distinction among the different savages and describes “our own” (183) as more ignorant of God than perpetually demonic. He glimpses their successful conversion. However, he also notes that in the absence of God, these people “have some respect for the devil” (197). Shamanic rituals are a matter of the “possessed”: “They would say . . . that the devil Oqui or Manitou (if we must name them thus) possesses them” (201). Four decades before these descriptions, in Brazil, Jean de Léry says of the Tupis: “These poor people throughout their life are just as afflicted by this evil spirit . . . as I have seen on multiple occasions, they even spoke to us in this way, feeling tormented, and crying out suddenly as if enraged, they would say, ‘Alas! Defend us from Aygnan who beats us!’” (Histoire d’un voyage 386).3 This omnipresent cliché from the conquest of the New World, of which I have cited but a tiny number of examples,4 will amply serve the missionary activity that accompanies the rapid development of commerce and power. It joins a specific meaning at the heart of the phrase that justifies possession by possession, and it is not surprising that authors who are more skeptical about the imperialist right over the “savages” refuse to give credit to the demonic thesis, as is the case with Baron de Lahontan, who will declare in 1703: “I say this about the devil, with whom one claims that the Savages are acquainted. . . . All these suppositions are ridiculous, since the Devil has never manifested himself to these Amériquains” (Nouveaux Voyages 126). The collusion of terms of possession definitively marks the imperial language of the colony from the second half of the seventeenth century onward.

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With the increased recognition of a necessity for expansion, along with the growth of the triangular slave trade, colonization becomes even more a question of possession. Individuals are also transformed into goods. The slave is a “property-being” (un être meuble). It is the Code noir, written by Colbert and signed by Louis XIV in 1685, that expresses this notion in this way (in article 44).5 The edict determines the legal practices of slavery (that Louis XIII had previously reestablished). Some historians think that the Code was little applied by merchants and owners, but the text is no less essential in its systematicity and the colonial philosophy it develops. The black person whose work is compulsory in the decimated islands becomes, through slavery, an acquisition transmitted through inheritance (Code noir, art. 44). Dispatched to the overseas possessions, he enters into the property of this or that person. Then in article 2, it is made obligatory for masters to baptize the Nègres. The Christian faith must be imposed on the slaves. Like that of the Indians the conquerors torture, their life naturally takes place in the company of Satan. The sacrament and a rudiment of religious instruction will assure the salvation of their souls. After their salvation, it is only a question of the body of the slaves: fed, cared for, clothed (arts. 22–27), whipped (arts. 15–17), mutilated, marked with shame, assassinated (arts. 36–40). The article on baptism textually achieves a legal ecstasy. Once it is uttered, the black people will have become organic machines, transformed by instinct, apparently deprived of all capacity for judgment.6 With the case of the emancipated slave a possible moral intention reappears, indistinguishable from the command to respect the former master (art. 58). After an absence lasting as long as slavery, the Nègre would recover a soul that the Catholic Church had already entrusted to God, as after death. Geographical possession is thus accompanied by human possession— slaves, for example, which one buys, ships off, buys back again. The act of human ownership is understood as a delivery from paganism, a weakening of demonic possession. The king drives the evil spirit out of the body of the Nègre. In response, he in turn enchants: he becomes a ravisher of souls, located next to God.7 The colonial slave-master needs to rule over people who are possessed in order to authorize his own act of taking possession (over places, bodies, and spirits). A new semanteme is created that will exploit the different values of possession, the material seizure underwritten, more or less explicitly, by a spiritual act. The configuration of motifs and meanings forms the phrase that I have announced, and which most colonial and anticolonial texts up through the twentieth century will reprise and modify. To reiterate, it is indeed the interweaving of these meanings and figures that allows for the phrase. Neither state possession nor demonic possession is the unique

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property of this colonial speech. However, something particular is invented in the crossing of these two schemes. The contradictory meaning of possessions becomes elevated in a way that we will unfold later. Hostility to slavery or to imperialism in no way signifies that one has moved outside its phrase of possession. Instead, one will blame the centralized power for usurping an absolute, inhuman, and extraordinary control. Victor Schoelcher calls for the second abolition of slavery in the 1830s and 1840s. His insistent activism is done in the name of equality, which is demanded in the name of reason. This activism also describes servitude against a magical background where haunting is connected to seizure. Schoelcher affirms that black people “do not have possession of themselves” (Abolition de l’esclavage 5), and that they “deal with their possessors, [who are] irritated that their property should elude them” (156). Schoelcher does not confuse them with proletarians: “Among us, the rich man still exploits the poor man: this is criminal; but he does not possess him” (Des colonies françaises 61). Each time, “property,” “possessor,” “possess,” are in italics, as if Schoelcher were seeking the unspeakable truth of these terms. The author considers one psychological effect of slavery that he names abrutissement (literally, “a mindless or brutish stupor”),8 a state marked by apathy and the renouncement of all personal will. The symptom exists “among these poor people who do not themselves understand their desire to escape,” who “believe their fate has been cast” (Schoelcher, Des colonies françaises 111), and who demand “exorcism” masses so they will not succumb to the temptation to escape (le marronnage) (99, 111). So, Schoelcher notes, abrutissement does not cease at the same time that the master’s “ownership” of the slave ends: “The deadly effects of servitude make themselves felt a long time after it has been abolished, like the ravages of a long and disastrous illness” (De l’esclavage des noirs 41). It is as if the will remains in chains; slavery “strips the soul of all vitality” (Des colonies françaises 111). Possession persists after the end of property. Another thought was imposed on the mind of slaves, then substituted for it. We are now fully in the realm of the most clear-cut instance of haunting, with the transfer of souls and the annihilation of wills. All this is what is meant by abrutissement. A century later, Frantz Fanon, in Peau noire masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), will prefer the medical and political term “alienation.”9 The great Martinican thinker situates the aftereffects of colonial heritage within the individual complex, which brings subjects to self-destruct and present themselves as strangers. “Alienation” translates Entfremdung, which Hegel puts into place in the dialectic of Lord and Bondsman.10 Fanon aims for a “disalienation” of “blacks and whites” (Peau noire 203). In this FreudoMarxist operation, the share of social and economic freedom corresponds to

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the psychic work required by each person (with more urgency, perhaps, for blacks). The importance given to language is crucial, a point made clear in the first chapter. In fact, Fanon declares that “in the possession of language, there is an extraordinary power” (201). According to the author, the Antillean context prevents people with black skin from speaking freely. Martinicans are put in a double bind. If they speak Creole, they give the impression of recognizing what whites see as their deep-seated inability to master a language that is not a patois (35). If they speak a language that is not a patois, they confirm the cultural and linguistic superiority of the colonists. It is even true that an Antillean “who possesses the mastery of the language is excessively feared; one must keep an eye on him, he’s almost white” (35); one form of possession calls forth another form. “Le Noir et le langage” does not supply the explicit surpassing of the contradiction; the last word of the chapter (continuons, “let us continue”) has the effect of something like a suspension. At the individual level, it is in the act of writing the chapter that one must seek the exorcism of the Antillean Frantz Fanon. The fact of writing this linguistic impossibility is a way for the author to escape the alternative between a Creole that he devalues and a conventional and polite speaking up (prise de parole). “A man who possesses language possesses as a result the world expressed and implied by this language” (35). Thus the “disalienation” rejects confinement within a diminished and debased ego but wastes no time in reproducing a reified alterity; and despite everything, it is inscribed in the (post)colonial fact by its wish to possess “the white world.” These discontinuous yet decisive examples (Colbert, Schoelcher, Fanon) help us to constitute a phrase among the discourses, situating the colony in relation to possession. We take a fact of speech beyond the imbrication of motifs because one word serves as a pivot. Ultimately, these texts demonstrate the importance of language for acting in society. Like Champlain in Quebec, they speak to change reality. Thus must we also consider the resources of the phrase of possession in the evocation and understanding of colonial experience. In its movement, colonial possession brings with it a potent resource: a truly concrete dispossession. Whatever old systems of property may have existed (sacred, collective, etc.) in the territories acquired, the indigenes of the empire must henceforth accustom themselves to new economic laws that put them at a disadvantage. In a work of philosophical fiction published in 1951, Tran Duc Thao outlines a mystical history of appropriation. The author discovers an “originary mystification that will justify the entire ulterior process of exploitation” (Thao, Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique 6). In the societies that Tran Duc Thao qualifies as primitive, “the exclusivity

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in the possession of the object entails the negation of its effective reality and its absorption into the transcendence of a pure self-consciousness where the mystical union of the owner with his property takes place.” Thus, an aborigine “is the kangaroo he possesses” (6; my emphasis). The succession of eras depicted by the author shows how this mystical ferment is subsequently concealed. With capitalism, “the exclusivity of private appropriation . . . is revealed as trickery and alienation” (35). No legitimation can again allow for the violence of appropriation to be contained. The supernatural participation in mana or philosophical conceptualization can no longer mask reality. Tran Duc Thao is quick to confirm the progressive Marxist narrative, scarcely questioning the categories of the primitive and the savage. About this—the socialism he advocates—we would decidedly have much to say. Yet it is interesting that this thinker, who mentions “Western thought” on several occasions, clearly sees in it an attempt at a perpetual revival of mysticism. Tran Duc Thao does not understand that revolutionary messianism is but one more displacement into imaginary speech (la parole fantastique), and just how very difficult it is to escape it. I therefore suggest that we read these fragments for what is not given in evidence, as a description of the supernatural substrate at work in colonial appropriation. Tran Duc Thao—beyond his hasty acceptance of one Western discourse—highlights possession in the act of imperial ownership. Colonialism is also his colony, according to the ambiguity of the word, which designates the territory, the autochthonous population, and the new arrivals. The mystical union transforms all the ordinary rules of property. At the end of the 1880s in Algeria, the French bemoan “the instability of indigenous property” (l’instabilité de la propriété indigène) (Recueil des délibérations du Congrès colonial international 84). Let us agree that this way of parceling out property is not identical to that of modern France. In the new incarnation of possession, it will be a question of dispossessing the inhabitants of their own system of property. Thus in Algeria, the administration endeavored to remedy the problem by entrusting to an army of land surveyors the task of limiting and establishing individual property for the indigenes. This illusory operation (for it still has not been restarted) cost in 1887 the enormous sum of 11,395,594 francs, provided by the Arab Tax. (84) Foncin, the author of the report I am citing, is being critical here. He declares himself in favor of more radical solutions, such as the extension of francisation (frenchification), which would bring an end to indigenous property by making specific ways of calculating and other such conceptions disappear.

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Beyond this individual position, imagine the scene of a country striated, plowed by surveyors undoing the old borders. In this scenario, the entire process will be paid for by a tax collected precisely from the very people who are to be stripped of their fields. In this case, the colonizer takes possession of a country without immediately requisitioning the entire expanse of the land. Yet from the indigenes he takes more than their property; he wants to deprive them of their theory of property. He identifies himself with the new measure of wealth at the expense of the colonized. Such a position is revealing in terms of the multiform attack against indigenous property. Even though it did not lead to the total ruin of codes and practices predating colonization, it is uttered from the depths of the possession that dispossesses. The republican empire, with its own expressive forms and vocabulary, reproduces in this sense the royal interdiction of all Nègre property: “We declare that slaves shall have nothing that is not their master’s” (Code noir, art. 28). The size of the possession holds an erotic value as well. To possess is also used to describe sexual relations, generally indicating a masculine “possession” of the feminine. During the ancien régime, métissage in particular is the result of this type of ancillary sexual activity, or of rape. However much the scholarly bibliography tells us about this question, it would be difficult to estimate the extent of these kinds of relations. The Code noir, which dedicates several articles to marriage (arts. 10–13) and the freeing of slaves (arts. 55–59), also responds to the multiplication of relationships that would today be called interracial or mixed. In the time of the second colonial empire, the sexual component is clear. The attraction to the Oriental woman—this Other, who is prone to do everything, as the deformed image of the legitimate spouse—becomes part of the colonial adventure. Exoticism celebrates the easiness of women from “over there” or, more directly, alerts the foreigner to the number of brothels that will be accessible to him there. Prostitution has often undergone colonial reformations, as in India or the Maghreb. The westernization of commerce corresponds to its normalized expansion. It also responds to demand, so to speak. The colonial country, seen from the metropole, represents a world of phantasmatic frenzy. Popular song recorded this movement of desire. An army is also led by chants, as all who have had the misfortune of being a soldier for even a day cannot forget. In 1895, a certain Colette (no relation to the author) accompanies the military efforts of France while belting out “Les Bleus à Madagascar.” Included among the many charms adorning the couplets is the opportunity to “sip some negress milk / For two cents a liter, it ain’t expensive” (sirot[er] du lait d’négresse / A deux sous l’litr’, ça n’est pas cher), and to see “in Adam’s suit / Venuses black as shoe-shine” (dans l’costume’d’Adam / Des

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Vénus noir’s comm’du cirage). Of course, “it’s a dishonor over there / For a young lass / To be virtuous” (c’est un déshonneur là-bas, / Pour un’jeun’fill, d’être rosière) (Ruscio, Que la France était belle 127). The same year, the singer Reschal promises on the subject of the “Z’hovas”: “They’ll all be cuckolds!” (125).11 Erotic rhetoric is recurrent in the greatest hits of colonial song.12 Possession in the name of France is incarnated, on the individual level, by the eventual emergence of an alternative sexuality. This is so notorious that Alphonse Daudet, beginning in 1872, will ridicule Tartarin of Tarascon, newly disembarked in Algeria. The great lion hunter “seeks his Moor, he must have his Maghrebine!” (cherche sa Mauresque, il lui faut sa Maugrabine!) (Daudet, Oeuvres 517). Incorrigible, Tartarin will subsequently feel deep passion for the Kanak princess of the colony he founded, Port-Tarascon.13 Daudet’s cycle is revealing in terms of its inflection of colonial exoticism, whose point of departure is the distance between the preconceived dream and the sordid reality. This world is degraded because of colonial (and civilizing) activity, which nevertheless allows for the presence of the Westerner in these lands. Pierre Loti also laments the “bastard of the beach and the morals of the colonized city” in Tahiti (Le mariage de Loti, pt. 1, chap. 20). Loti is another Tartarin, but without the slightest trace of irony. In his first two works, where the author remains anonymous (“Loti” being the first name of the main character), the story is similar. A naval officer comes to a distant land (Turkey, Tahiti), takes a wife, then abandons her. This narrative scheme will be repeated ad nauseam by the writer who ends up taking the name of his protagonist. He makes known the possibility of this extension of masculine desire toward an exciting feminized foreignness, stripped of remorse. This taste for physical overseas possession also informs contemporary sexual tourism in the Third World. A tourist guide from 1943 could encourage its readers to visit the red-light district of prostitutes under colonial control in Casablanca, “[who are] cloistered behind impenetrable walls and . . . living in a scene not lacking in poetry.”14 To go “over there” is a transgressive act. The idea of the colony as a “safety valve” (soupape de sûreté) for metropolitan society, which would vent elsewhere its deviances and violence, was, after all, theorized from the beginning of the conquest of Algeria and increasingly affirmed at the end of the nineteenth century.15 In addition to the sexual commerce between men and women, better documented now, attraction also comes from practices outside the norm, suddenly rendered commonplace. Masculine-masculine desire is found directly in the homosexual legend of Tangier, which leads to the Moroccan world described today in the works of Rachid O. In 1900, the

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marching chant of the troops marshaled against Igli, in western Algeria, sums up erotic ambivalence in these coded terms: “The Arabs in this place / Brought us what we needed / To wash our heads / In exchange for la galette / And so for a few rounds / Easily we found / Women and even onions” (Les arbis de l’endroit, / Nous apportaient de quoi / Pour nous laver la tête / Moyennant d’la galette / Et puis pour quelque ronds / Facilement nous trouvions / Des femmes et même des oignons) (L’Afrique française, 1932, 187). “La galette,” like the “round,” designates money that buys alcohol (“to wash our heads”) and prostitutes; and true as it may be that the onion is a plant found in Algeria, I think that the hierarchy suggested by the adverb “even” leaves no doubt: oignon means “anus” in slang, and Aristide Bruant’s dictionary explains oignon as a synonym for the expression “the world of pederasts.” Situational bisexuality enters into the desiring fable of colonialism. I am not making the colony into a pure enterprise of sexual exploitation, but it is difficult to separate imperial expansion from the pursuit of pleasure. Motive, or reward? When the French begin conceptualizing the exercise of power during the Third Republic, the vocabulary becomes eroticized. In 1884, Louis Vignon, an architect of French colonial policy, sees two irrefutable advantages to the expeditions to the new world: alongside the “growth of industry” he mentions the “increase in pleasures” (Les colonies françaises 5). In 1897, Jean-Louis de Lanessan, the former governor-general in Indochina, finds in the first colonial temptation the culmination of “natural curiosity,” of the “desire that all peoples have to increase their sphere of influence,” and of “the pursuit of physical and intellectual pleasures” (Principes de colonisation 1). Later, “the desire to procure such pleasures becomes dulled or rather gets transformed” (2). Desire and the pursuit of pleasures are then “converted” into the exercise of ordinary power. While waiting for the day of their hypothetical obliteration, these desires remain part of the administration of the territory. Sometimes they surface, and a colonist lets himself “caress the sweet little faces that please him, often to abuse them in the most odious manner.” Lanessan, who was an important influence on practical doctrine, preaches in favor of a redirection of libidinal forces. The latter should be transformed into a “desire for less brutal satisfactions” (59). Physical craving metamorphoses into missionary necessity. If I may use Freudian vocabulary for a moment, Lanessan provides us with a description of sublimation, where raw desire becomes civilizing desire. But desire it remains. To prolong possession, to pursue pleasure: we will rediscover this imperative in various parts of this book, where colonial hysteria will still be understood as a desiring claim. It is not surprising that the major theoreticians of colonialism, such as Octave Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, and Homi Bhabha, developed their ideas while

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passing through psychoanalysis. Before them, psychology was everywhere present in the colonial manuals, but in a diffuse state—as in contemporary management treatises. Psychology, half hidden in Lanessan, or impoverished (as in the isolated Psychologie de la colonisation française, by Léopold de Saussure), recalled the interest in the mental interiority of the indigene. But it did not focus very much on the motifs of the colonist, which Albert Memmi or Mannoni compare during the period of the disintegration of the empire. Against the grain of a habit that has become deeply rooted in postcolonial studies in particular, I will often suspend the analytic route in considering the phrase. It might seem strange to insist on desire and jouissance and to appear to not make more systematical leaps to Freudianism. Allow me here to give the two main reasons that I opt for the quasi-archaic conservation of force of haunting, possession, and enchantment. First, regarding the level on which this reflection is unfolding, we quite simply have no need to interrogate the establishment of the support that would be the subject of analysis. My hypothesis is different. Written and spoken words aggregate what exists before us—and what, ready-made, offers itself to us and can serve for us as thought. This is the nature of every phrase in general. One of the particularities of the colonial phrase resides in the fact that it articulates a possession that, moreover, resembles the process of its appearance. Here, we discover an imperative: it is necessary to colonize, that is to say, to dominate, to seize flesh and language (prendre corps et langue), to subjugate, to penetrate without ceasing. The exploitation of slavery or the civilizing mission is revealed as a fit of violence, a pursuit of power that could not stop itself. Nothing prevents us from speaking here of Freudian “drives” or “libido.” Indeed, colonization exists through the people who live it and maintain it. So, perhaps, as Mannoni suggested in his Psychologie de la colonisation, the colonist is a child who takes himself for the father. Yes, perhaps. But to my mind one is not required to join speech to the subject in order to find a motivation that would be more profound because it is more individual. Whoever would like to venture further into the connection between my description of the (post)colonial verbal and psychic construction may do so. My point is not to explain the subjective reason for the “birth” of modern colonization—rather, it is to read how it is spoken, maintained, undone. One would have cause to point out that I neglect the psyche of the actors as much as the economic reality of the (post)colonial experience. Clearly, there is a need for men and women who feel in themselves the call of desire; and trade is organized as a function of mercantile exchanges, under the imperative of the financing and the rise of capitalism. However, I do not think that Oedipus or the economy explains the phrase of possession. Rather, the establishment of an un-thought in speech that becomes thought

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itself in its places of escape is another model, an alternative, for understanding this phenomenon. The phrase explains as much—or as little. At the same time, each type of approach—here: economy, psychoanalysis, critique of language—constructs and thus modifies that which it studies. It would therefore be illusory to want to correct one optic with another; separate images will not give a perfect panorama. The failure will remain, and it is about this in particular that we must think. The appeal to possession itself becomes an interpretive decision, which demands at least a temporary suspension of the analytical doctrine—because Freud tries to get rid of possession, in favor of a more phantomatic and less contradictory Unheimlichkeit. The enterprise succeeded so well (thanks to Freud and others) that today it makes the difference between unsettling strangeness and possession incomprehensible in the eyes of many people. I noticed this fact at my own expense during my research on literary possession, which was partially inaudible due to the spectral preconceptions it sought to combat. To be sure, bringing possession back into the discussion runs counter to Freudian scientism, which is not a simple accident of analytical theory but indeed one of its forces (and limits). If one would dissolve enchantment solely in favor of phantasms and transferences, it would be better to launch this operation after having examined what magical possession offers us. In this case, with possession, the (post)colonial phrase can be reorganized out of its words and utterances. It still tells us the history of a civilization that does not even bother with repressing magic—which, instead, recognizes it quite officially, but only in reserving an increasingly marginal place for it. In other words, (post)colonial possession is neither an unconscious motif nor an unconscious value. On the contrary, it was consciously and constantly planned, up through the differential repetition of the colony in our own discourses. Freud, to my mind, tries too hard to locate the supernatural in the unconscious or the pathological. He acts in such a way because he himself participates in the civilizing parlance that has resounded since the end of the nineteenth century. As it happens, this gives me a third reason to stall the analytical reduction of possession: I will be speaking about it again shortly.

Colonizing to “Civilize” the West I think it is worth conserving the extraordinary violence of possession or risk losing much in the current discussion. I am not in favor of colonial possession—this goes without saying—but, not believing in life free of haunting, I would be wary of an explanation that seeks to suppress the intellectual and vital register of the supernatural. What matters is knowing how to tame

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the event, how to keep it from destroying us, how to escape from the trap, how to choose our demons. Shamanism or literature is a means, practical and divergent, for changing the share of death at work in enchantment. So-called rationalization does not strike me as a desirable solution to the unforeseen nonrational; it is content to limit the field of experience. Rationalization then has no trouble secretly joining forces with a spiritual commerce that it hastily baptizes. My interest in the phenomenon of possession goes beyond the question of the colony, and I was initially chagrined to find the first in contact with the second. Since I think that interpretation establishes itself out of its own thought, the collusion did not really surprise me; still, I feared repeating myself. Whatever the case may be, I will let readers decide for themselves. Examining texts convinced me that there was a connection, after the Enlightenment, between the literary elaboration of a reading-writing of haunting and the phrase of colonial possession. This is not to say that one brings about the other. On the contrary, the two gestures correspond to a moment of great rational exorcism. Literature finds itself charged, in a certain sense, with speaking possession, which more and more tends to be lacking in the self-description of European society. It is pulled together by the very notion of possession it assembles. The figures of the vates, or the “inspired”—although never the exclusive privilege of poetry—authorize this idea, as does the antiquity of a nonrational literary discourse. The social body favors this placement of magic in literature, encoding it in the category of fiction. Possession, in the nineteenth century, gets pushed out toward the margins of rational society. When it is not impugned as superstition, or medically translated as hysteria, it ends up in literature. Whether this quota functions remains to be seen, and I have demonstrated in my work on Maupassant, Artaud, and Blanchot that the marginalization of possession instead restructured an unbounded literary life.16 The colony, at first just one site of the possessed (in the same way that certain parts of the French countryside were peopled with witches and demons), becomes the geographical location where enchantment will come to reign. With the concurrent concepts of magic, possession, and shamanism, ethnography never ceased speaking about the witches’ Sabbath of the indigenes. The attention paid to the extraordinary outbursts of others has its corollary in the refusal to consider our own rapture. However, the proof of colonization appears in language, like an act of possession carried out by the so-called West against all the Orients. The colony must be all the more possessed in all areas because it receives haunting and enchantment in the form of an exclusive present. Sigmund Freud begins his Totem and Taboo with the evocation of

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prehistoric peoples. “We” must try to “know” them, but how? Luckily, “there are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do” (Freud, Totem and Taboo 1).17 “We” are even to grasp that which separates “us” from prehistoric man, as from “these poor naked cannibals” (2). The repetition of “us” and of “our” (a dozen cases of uns and wir on the first page alone) will subsequently subside, but it serves the purpose of introducing the problem. “Our own development” (1) may be guessed from the study of those underdeveloped ones who believe in animism or magic. The division between peoples (civilized or not) is less notable than the book’s thesis about the psychic proximity between neurotics and savages. Although he finds, for “us,” mental processes that are comparable to those of indigenes, Freud takes advantage of this to localize such affinities in the childhood of history or clinical childishness. But the inaccessible “we” that is the modern Westerner, civilized and sound of mind, will always distance himself from primitive savagery—it is he, in addition, who needs the fact in order to socially deviate when the neurotics do not need it. And the savage finds himself henceforth the only “natural,”18 essential carrier of taboo and magic. For “us,” this will only be an accident on the journey, a mistake to correct, a stage through which we have passed that only certain events can reanimate.19 The works of historical psychoanalysis written by Freud are rooted in the affirmation of a great “process of civilization.” This term comes from Norbert Elias, although he did not invent all of its contours. Elias, however, even more than Freud, built up a good story into a doctrine that still holds sway. France and Germany—the two countries especially studied by Elias— contributed to the advent of “civilization,” which includes, among other distinct criteria, “psychologization,” and “rationalization,” as the extension of the sentiments of “shame” and “modesty.” The first edition of Elias’s book Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation appeared in 1939. Its argument always implicitly refers to the idle state of nature of primitives, for whom France or Germany provided the correct process. It is known that savages have no psyche; during the Renaissance, it was asked whether they even had a soul. They go about naked; they lack reason. Elias’s main points read like the daily affirmation of the colonists, the syllabary of their Coué method. We have civilization (and a soul, reason, modesty); they do not. The colonial implications of Elias’s book are admitted toward the end of the conclusion. The sociologist explains that the movement facilitates a passage from one state of civility to another, thanks to a parallel with “the Orient” and the “colonial territories” (Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation 436). From generation to generation, the process passes through a “phase of assimilation” (435). Europeans emerging

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from the Middle Ages and indigenes newly assimilated (to the European powers) thus find themselves staring at each other in the mirror. By focusing on possession, I am contesting this grand narrative. Elias records the self-hypnotic text of thought that seeks to convince itself that it has superseded that which troubles it—and consigns the others (ancestors, savages) to their own hauntings. Hans Peter Duerr has conducted an immense investigation into the behavioral chapter, in the form of a response to Elias. I do not share the fairly universalist conclusions of Duerr, but the cluster of facts that he assembles seems sufficient to demonstrate the interested partiality of Elias’s thesis. The conjoined absence of ratio and of psyche among the primitives was clearly affirmed by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. From this perspective, Elias is content to historically rearrange the elements of an analysis developed against savages at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lévy-Bruhl, out of his admitted respect for the differences of the people he studies, explains primitive mentality as a typically non-Western way of functioning. Early on, the scholar admits that the gap does not originate from any biological inferiority. Instead, he finds a rule to explain the breach between “us” and “them”: the “law of participation,” as distinct from the “law of contradiction” (LévyBruhl, Les fonctions mentales 112). The latter, as Aristotle described it, makes it impossible for one thing to be itself and its opposite; this law founds, according to Lévy-Bruhl, the logical attitude in the West. “Here is an inheritance of which no one in our society has been deprived, and which no one can even think of rejecting. The discipline of logic thus imposes itself, irresistibly, on the operations of each mind” (113). The rest of the book nevertheless joyfully disproves this thesis. Further on, Lévy-Bruhl in fact evokes “the faithful person who feels one with his God.” “This experience of intimate and complete possession of the object” (453) abolishes the barrier of contradiction and, according to the author himself, illustrates the law of participation, although it had been decreed exotic. Lévy-Bruhl uses this as grounds for seeing a vestige, in religion, of a state that is elsewhere outdated (444, 455). From this point of view, “participation” is in fact “prelogical.” Lévy-Bruhl’s study of “inferior societies” thus casts “our” world in a new light: it reveals our archaic depths. Like Norbert Elias, Lévy-Bruhl in fact seeks to free Western mental activity from its irrationality. The counterpart is the absolute making savage (ensauvagement) of the primitive. What is theirs by rights is this “law of participation,” the identification of opposites. “The mentality of primitives does . . . more than imagine its object: it possesses it and is possessed by it” (Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales 426). The ratio does not exist, since Aristotelian logic is not inherited. Nor is the psyche, in the

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great collective outburst of illusory forces. “The soul, properly speaking, . . . only appears, in my view, in relatively advanced societies” (92–93). Here is a credo whose “relativity” is measured against the yardstick of Europe, and which persists, alas, to this day. So strong a credo is it, that Lévy-Bruhl himself crosses the “line of demarcation” (66), which, it appears, is still respected in Western science. Similarly, in L’âme primitive (The Primitive Soul, 1927), Lévy-Bruhl devotes himself to showing methodically that for the indigenous, “the meaning of their own individuality”—what Elias names “psychologization”—has no meaning. The truth of the primitive soul is that it does not exist. Relating an anecdote about a false resurrection that he finds in the narrative of a missionary in South America (W. Grubb), the sociologist thus rapidly gets rid of the term “soul,” which he finds in his sources: In order to translate, to the degree possible, the thought of the Indian who . . . says in a solemn voice, “This is the soul of Yiphenabanyetik!” [Grubb’s Indian name], we will leave aside the word “soul,” which belongs to M. Grubb. The Indian most likely wanted simply to say, “Yiphenabanyetik who was dead, and who is resuscitated.” (L’âme primitive 349; my emphasis) As it happens, Grubb’s text reports an entirely different statement from the one cited by Lévy-Bruhl: the Indian would have said, “There sits the body of Yiphenabanyetik” (Grubb, An Unknown People 267). “Body,” not “soul.” In his obsession with the erasure of the primitive soul, Lévy-Bruhl ends up confusing opposites. After the exchange that he himself creates, he will have the even greater pleasure of revoking the possibility that the word “soul” could come from an Indian speaker. The savage has his words taken right out of his mouth. Lévy-Bruhl performs here what he elsewhere merely evokes. Logical judgment, the Western individual “receives it at the same time that he learns to speak”; his “demands” are “established, then confirmed in each individual mind through the uninterrupted pressure of the social milieu, by means of language itself, and of what is transmitted in the forms of language” (Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales 113–14). Sigmund Freud, Norbert Elias, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl constructed performative texts, speaking the logic and the civilization of the colonizer against the primitive pre-logic of those who are more indigenous. The process of rationalization is not a historical fact outside the incantatory speech that situates its advent in a period and a space. Yet language itself betrays this desperate attempt to circumscribe reason and the colonizing civilization. In a lecture entitled La mentalité primitive, which was published in 1931,

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Lévy-Bruhl devotes himself to a condensation of his hypotheses. In this most concentrated form, Lévy-Bruhl’s illocutionary site reveals itself. Speaking about others, he speaks only about us, in a troubling copresence. On twelve out of twenty-four pages “our” echoes ceaselessly: pages 7, “ours” (mentality); 8, “ours” (mentality), “our psychology and our logic,” “ours” (mentality); 9, “ours” (mentality); 10, “ours” (mentality), “one’s,” “ours” (mind/spirit, esprit) vs. “others,’” “primitive minds”; 11, “ours” (languages), “our admiration,” “ways of thinking different from ours,” “our psychology and our traditional logic”; 14, “our society”; 15, “his sense organs and his cerebral apparatus are the same as ours”; 20, “ours” (mentality), three times; 21, “ours” (mentality); 23, “minds like ours”; 24, “ours” (mentality); 26, “ours” (mentality), two times. The purpose of his research is indeed the establishment of a rhetoric of reassurance, which must speak and command us as much as it orders and commands the savages. However, if he is trying to eradicate excess, LévyBruhl can only miss his goal, and his own style tells us more: his thesis and its opposite. Let us examine the following passage, where the same, the other, and ours echo each other: Primitive mentality does not have the same mind [raisons] as ours. . . . However, it can] count in conformity with the principle of contradiction: when it is a question of bartering or wages, for example. In this same way, in its eyes, the image is a being [un être], the original is an other [un autre]: they are two beings, yet they are the same being. It is equally true that they are two and that they are one. It does not see in this anything extraordinary. We are of another mind [d’un autre sentiment]. (Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalité primitive, 24; my emphasis) “It is equally true” that “our,” through the insistence of the signifier, comes to reveal an other.20 As for the same, follow it: it wants to speak the principle of identity—and it ends up constructing a strange comparison. Let me summarize the trajectory of the same in this passage: the primitives do not have the same minds (raisons) as us, although, despite the reign of the principle of participation over them, they know about the principle of noncontradiction (phrased here, as it is ordinarily, in reverse, as the “principle of contradiction”), and just the same, they distinguish and confuse. The syntax, as much as the phonetic envelope, emphasizes the inflection points in the thought of Lévy-Bruhl and how he can no longer manage to distinguish “participation” from “contradiction” in the places where the absolute difference between ours and the others’ occurs. The development is contaminated by primitive logic, for it is just as much ours as it is theirs.

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Finally, Lévy-Bruhl achieves the proper undoing of his reasoning. That this hiatus is first heard in language makes a good deal of sense for the kind of investigation I am undertaking in this book. One can add that at the end of his life, Lévy-Bruhl, while still refusing the savage use of this concept, will reconsider the entirety of his project. In his notes written in 1938–39, the ethnologist admits: “[I] had concluded—wrongly, it seems—that these minds are more indifferent than ours are to contradiction. In fact, there is no distinction to be made on this point between primitive mentality and our own, if one rigorously considers the word ‘contradiction’” (Lévy-Bruhl, Les carnets, 159; my emphasis). Doubtless, Lévy-Bruhl still wants to maintain a difference, but he loses the opposition on which all his previous works had dwelt. We are also our own others. In every way, Lévy-Bruhl is possessed—captive to that grandiloquence concerning the primitive, obsessed by the enchantment of others, then had or confounded by the return that makes an other of the same. The recognition of a phrase of possession within the range of (post)colonial diction, particularly in French, has profound consequences. In the first place, the continuing effort of concentrating enchantments in the exception zone of the colony provides an account of a historical will of rational exorcism. One endows the savage with an owner’s responsibilities in relation to haunting. Yet this move—which is combined with other moves, such as the intensification of inspiration in literature—fails in a performative way. In fact, it simultaneously instantiates a greater belief in omnipotent rationality. In doing so, it must undertake an enormous discursive and coercive enterprise. The spiritual exchanges, ecstasies, and mystical copresences found in so many civilizations become, in an ever-neater way, attributed to the indigene alone—even as the troubling preoccupation with these hauntings emerges from the European possession of territories and peoples. Rationalization only decreases the irrational it pursues at the cost, as is the case here, of its own mystification. Later, this process can only try to interdict, without being able to reduce the share of the nonrational as such, as it thinks and signifies precisely by escaping both madness and ordinary logic. Possession is not just anything at all, although it experiments with the impossibility of a multiple and contradictory reality. It opens up another logic—persistent, lacking continuity—where something is said that crosses the normal limit. In this other logic, it is possible to be this and that and this again, together and separately. We can thus approach the (post)colonial anew, without trying to diminish the violence of contacts, not in unitary identity or in mere mixing or in dialectical exchange or in the error that would inevitably perish. Not only does possession form the framework of the phrase of domination; it also

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contains the most violent interrogation of the myths of rationalization (from the civilizing mission to the imperatives to modernize the Third World), and it helps us to renew critical thought. Possession is no longer the private business of colonization, just as it was not the nature of the savages. However, possession allows us to reconsider colonists and colonized outside their unique encounter, and to go even further, to reconnect the (post)colonial to other political and social prescriptions. Possession is perhaps not in itself desirable. It is always more valuable to recognize the paradoxical force of the impact possession has if one wants to gain something from it, or even achieve an unexpected deliverance. It is not part of my project to try to correct (post)colonial haunting through demystification. By commenting on texts, one does not bring about the counterimage of the truth that would deliver us from the evil of illusion. Curative lucidity—consider me as having little faith in it. Essai sur la colonisation (Essay on Colonization), which Carl Siger in 1907 hoped would be among the first books to consider the question philosophically, ended with the author’s visitation by the devil. At the other end of the political spectrum, Frantz Fanon announces, in L’An V de la révolution algérienne (translated into English as A Dying Colonialism), that as a result of decolonization, “the old superstitions are beginning to crumble,” and that we will soon see the end of “witchcraft,” “maraboutism,” and the “belief in the Djinn,” that “spirit” that “haunts the houses and the fields.”21 The death of archaism among the “most underdeveloped people” for the greater glory of the “most modern forms of technology” (Fanon, A Dying Colonialism 135)—this is a surprising statement from a thinker of such remarkable anticolonial acuity. It is because, beyond his attachment to Marxist presuppositions, Fanon is still on the same level as the phrase of possession, as we have seen. Even if “superstition” were to fall to the influence of technological modernity, which remains to be proven, in Africa as in France—this in no way means the dissipation of all spirit of haunting. Let’s take another, quite recent, example. In his latest studies, Johannes Fabian brilliantly presents the ecstatic quest that informs the narratives of nineteenth-century explorers and ethnographers. These European authors interested in the curiosities of the indigene spent their time moving outward: out of their country of origin, out of their senses, out of their minds. This point corresponds to the example detailed above, since the force of colonial possession is neither ordinary nor measured. On the contrary, the attempt at exorcism has devastating effects. But I am not questioning the limited conclusions that Fabian draws in his presentation. What the investigator proposes, in light of his rereading, is to augment rationality. He thus rejects any contact between empathy or ecstasy and knowledge, leaving the thing

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to “mystics, perhaps to artists” (Fabian, Out of Our Minds 281), in the purest tradition of “pure reason.” Fabian then clears anthropology of its collusions with colonialism, finding this to be only an accident—an accident typical of the “errors” caused by a poor adherence to the “demands of reason” (281). The wager of my research is that the failure of reason not only comes from the lack of logical application or the mad abandon of the spirit. The defect will not be concealed,22 but we can signify a thought from the sites of fracture. The (post)colonial scene configures the vibrance of the nonrational otherwise, singularly. And in this case, trying to emend the error committed by modern technology or argumentational rationality is only ever the modified echo of a colonialist “process of civilization.” Certainly “possession” does not equal “colonization”—beyond my claims, there are many other hypotheses to formulate. Indeed, it always surprises me to hear that an interpretation must settle all questions or provide a comprehensive account of a problem; such satisfaction exists only in the impressive and futile style one sees in advertising slogans. This book is as broad as it is partial; it does not intend to furnish a definitive solution. The wish, rather, is that in thinking in this way, one might renounce if not the worst, at least some of the pain. Among the many advantages of reconsidering possession, I would like to develop the response it offers (in two moments) to the jargon of victimization. We are living in a time when the indispensable critique of universal dogmatism,23 borne by the practices of decolonization, among other forces, leads to opposing attitudes. If the One gives way, if its irresistible power is contested, must we take the side of the others, those who have been denied, deformed, canceled out? Politically, and dialectically, perhaps yes—for a time. On the other hand, when the majority of minorities demand reparations, I am troubled. If I truly follow the impulse of recognition (and the desire for gain, as social and financial as it is narcissistic), I know that this is also a confirmation of the colonizer’s supremacy. The French state can only grant reparations on the condition that it recognizes its own victims, once again sorting out the deserving from everyone else. The “executioner” who had designated his prey may again specify it and enjoy the privilege of writing and signing his name to the charges he has brought against himself. A victim who must be recognized as such by those who have violated him remains, in this regard, the victim of the other, even when given rights or compensation. The risk lies in the fixing of roles, a concerted attribution of predetermined functions, where domination will finally remain oriented in the same position. The use of international authority does not necessarily rescue us from this aporia, especially in the case of a phenomenon as global

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as colonization. Lastly, the brutal reversals of partitions, where the victim becomes executioner—and which happens more through war than through law—is only a practical alleviation, the reality of which might change the direction of oppression, but not its thrust. Possession, through the copresence it implies, revokes in advance the freezing of identities. It also always signals a beyond: for example, the existence of colonization as a force invading all parts and parties. And yet a new danger might reside in that circulation and superimposition. Must we claim that each of us, inside, is “the wound and the knife” (la plaie et le couteau)?24 It would seem that the language of enchantment would lead to the obliteration of the specific, leading to a mixing of master and slave. We have read this; we will read it further on: the (post)colonial phrase of possession also aims to accomplish a simple substitution. But there is only possession to the degree that difference exists. If I am myself and another, it is because the other is also not me. When contradiction ceases, possession stops—in the return to normal, to consumption, death, decay. Possession thus designates an intransitivity of the supernatural: a transformation of form, and the decline of separation. But it survives only in the maintenance of differentiation. Here, possession rests on a transitivity: someone came who created the fate of domination. The colonist is possessed by that which he has unleashed, a progressive invasion that will not spare him, despite all his precautions. There will always remain the transitivity, even if imaginary, of the first act, and the phrase of possession cannot neutralize this seizure of control. That the one might let the other speak in itself does not mean that they are both equal. Locally, domination is now reversed, as power finds itself subjugated by the haunting it has unleashed, as the indigene bursts the seams of the social bodice, and the colonist finds himself in the anticolonialism of the colonized, and so forth. Such shifts in direction do not correspond to the extinction of possession. For instance, the Nègre who speaks up (qui prend la parole) becomes neither blanc nor métisse. Possession’s almighty negation also contains the unheard-of power of an inflection. Finally, even if there is possession, intransitive, there also exists a utopic art of avoidance, a deterritorialization of suffering, which can be immediately constructed. My aim in these pages is to show how prescription has organized itself through its own linguistic effectiveness; how speaking can have a prodigious effect of displacement that threatens the fabric of domination; how one can also break with a phrase by not forgetting it, but instead by traversing it from end to end. All this will be developed in each part of this book. But before this, we must continue to signal the parts of a proliferating phrase.

Ch a p ter 2

Haunting and Imperial Doctrine

When it is uttered in a political space, the phrase of possession also helps us to grasp the principal colonial and postcolonial doctrines, which tend both to invoke and to revoke enchantment. Reestablishing the tacit links these doctrines bear to haunting is thus a supplementary gesture of interpretation. I want to show here that theories and words are articulated all the same, and that it is permissible to rearrange them in their connection to (post)colonial possession. (Post)colonial languages make use of multiple paradigms that tell without telling (qui disent sans dire). Each dogma thus contains an internal tension that both makes the phrase of possession speak and attempts to displace it in the direction of another system. Each utterance is in fact likely to repeat and to modify itself. Our reading has reconstructed possession not in order to craft a tangible and preliminary critical model, but rather to choose a new, dark enlightenment. The great modern political themes of colonization appear, in this sense, as so many confirmations of the phrase of possession and of ad hoc deformations of it. To this are added major contradictions. In truth, the partisans of slavery and those who sought liberation from it have more in common than is sometimes believed. Fanon and Schoelcher also confirm the logic of subjugation that was in place during the time of Louis XIV. Nevertheless, the discourses diverge, and I do not claim that apartheid and assimilation are equal—under the pretext of affirming their colonial substratum. The first part of this book 36

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described the normal exercise of a phrase, which allows for the execution of that phrase in very different forms. Beyond this internal tension, we further recognize the flaws, gaps, and oppositions between each text, plea, song, or statement. These differences are such that they might tempt us to reject comparison (between countries and positions). On the contrary, I think that this linguistic chaos does not discredit the idea that one colonialism exists, or of such a thing as the postcolonial. Precision and prudence are necessary, however. It is not a question of returning positions to what would be their Urgrund. The phrase emerges from discursive communication, it passes from one person to the next and then arrives assembled and ready to be remade again; we come to know the phrase at last through our reading. The phrase thus designates one possible field in the usage of speech. The phrase comes before us because it bears a history that situates it in an active past; it is not to be considered an originary structure—the weight of its longevity is enough. The phrase is always understood after itself, because our interpretation composes it, and because it is not a given. I assume that this double movement of recognition and reconstruction is at work in the performance of (post) colonial discourses; from this movement emerges the hypothesis of a tension that contributes to speech. We must not forget, however, that we, too, do the work of establishing. It is by this gesture of instantiation, despite the irreducibilities and conceptual intolerances, that I am deliberately suggesting a colonial phrase. Here one approaches the fractioning of a singularity,1 and not some legendary unity (that would be uniquely Western, material, temporal, etc.). Moreover, the lack of coherence in a text (or even in texts that are supposed to be related) must not be taken as an automatic revelation of failure, nor as the obligatory discovery of an inherent and more comprehensive logic that would explain the cracks on the surface. The phrase of possession is articulated in the copresence and the altercations of utterances. The phrase will never collapse under the weight of its contradictions, for it is through contradiction itself that the phrase is produced.

Assimilation, Counterassimilation Indigenous policy was no more monolithic under the Third Republic than at any other time. In 1953, toward the end of “Greater France” (“la plus grande France”),2 Hubert Jules Deschamps (1900–1979), colonial administrator and historian, declared that “Cartesian universalism . . . leads to assimilation” (Les méthodes et les doctrines 76). Such a statement summarized an opinion that was widely shared both before and after him: that la France (rational, Cartesian, universalist) has always privileged the assimilation of the colonized.

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Numerous historians have pointed out, however, that the methods used did in fact vary according to the place, the period, and the people involved. Territories under a protectorate, such as Tunisia, had a different status than the supplementary departments that constituted Algeria. For most, the mission civilisatrice took on a more urgent character in black Africa than in Indochina. The population of Madagascar did not enjoy the same rights as the nonwhite descendants of the formerly insular slaves of nearby Réunion. The list of different policies would be long. It demonstrates colonial heterogeneity. Yet, rather than thinking about this or that doctrine, separately circumscribed in a space and a time, let us consider the coexistence of ambivalences in a force field (un champ de forces). A majority position becomes minoritarian elsewhere; it does not simply disappear. In the case of the French, from the 1870s to World War II, three great paths were outlined, which we find laid out in the acts of the Congrès Colonial in 1889. “Assimilation,” which passes then (and today) for the “French model,” finds its partisans. Others invoke English or Dutch examples and extol “autonomy.” A third category of orators, without quite designating themselves as such, favor a middle path—as if one could exist. Their supposed pragmatism, their circumscribed attentisme (wait-and-see approach), is a gray area where the other two doctrines go to die. I briefly recall this configuration in order to insist on the internal contradiction of indigenous policy. We must now determine how the doctrines reprise the phrase of colonial possession. Assimilation is the most direct example. In medicine, where the term makes its earliest appearance, “assimilated” (assimilé) refers to food that has been carved up, ground, devoured, digested, and dissolved into a living being. To assimilate an indigene therefore means to make his strangeness disappear, to feed on him before he can come to exist in a new collectivity. The Code noir anticipated the overnight transformation of freed slaves into subjects, born out of a textual reintegration of the soul. For its part, the Republic displaces this metamorphosis. The ending of slavery does not effect an immediate transformation of slaves into subjects; rather, it is the colonial process that gradually changes the colonized. In 1889, Alexandre Isaac, the senator from Guadeloupe, emphasizes that “assimilation does not consist of substituting overnight the customs and the institutions of a European people for the customs and institutions of an indigenous people” (Recueil des délibérations du Congrès colonial international 18). One goes from the subjugation of the ancien régime to modern colonialism by introducing a progressive agenda. To the brutality of the rapture and the instant reincarnation of the spirit, one will respond with a slow alteration, an occasional substitution. Yet the

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assimilated person will live the experience of her own annulment, her own mutilation, of being replaced by a preexisting entity that digests and absorbs her. Disintegrate to appropriate. In this way, the ecstatic phrase inaugurated by the first colonial empire still determines the promulgation of assimilation for the indigene. Colonial specificity demands that, in order to assimilate, a total substitution of entire populations, of countries and regimes, take place. This comprehensive extension makes the act of ownership tangible for the conquered nations. The excesses of possession create a difference between the colonized and the migrants. The assimilation of Jews, for example, would extend to people and to customs, but not to all institutions; when dealing with all indigenous Algerians and their political power, it was never a question of assimilating all Jews to France uniformly. This distinction is at play in the Crémieux Decree of 1870. Then declared “French citizens,” the “indigenous Israelites” (israélites indigènes) of Algeria are recognized in a different way from the rest of the autochthonous population,3 which includes Algerians of European origin. In light of these decrees, and despite the unity of the term, “assimilation” does not have the same meaning for the colonized foreigners as it does for the others. The laws of 1865 (promulgated by Napoleon III) put the “Muslim indigene” (indigène musulman) and the “Israelite indigene” (indigène israélite) on the same level,4 each of them French, but only as secondclass citizens. Later, however, with the provisional government of 1870, one henceforth speaks of an “indigenous Israelite” (israélite indigène). The switching of the adjective and the substantive signifies that the Jews are considered as Jews, and not, in fact, as Algerians. This slight transfer of meaning implies a disjuncture at the heart of the phenomenon of assimilation. In the case of the “israélites,” assimilation is now already acquired: it begins with life on French soil, in the automatic acquisition of citizenship, and it continues in their subsequent political behavior. But in the case of the “Muslim indigenes,” or if I may, “indigenous indigenes,” there is no right to automaticity. For them, assimilation comes with no guarantees: they must provide evidence and request it individually before the governor-general. This “colonial” assimilation is described as a complete substitution that goes beyond the traditional— and partial—repudiation of the past by the immigrants. I am not ignoring Algerian anti-Semitism, brought over by the colonists (in addition to that of the local populations), and which made it possible for someone like Edouard Drumont (1844–1917)5 to later become the deputy from the département of Algiers in the National Assembly. However, the discourse of the law and the majoritarian usage of colonial speech during the Third Republic will maintain the internal hiatus within assimilation, which under this same heading separates the colonized from the others. As the great 1886 manual, La France

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coloniale, says, the Crémieux Decree is no longer modifiable, and Algeria can, “regarding the European population, be assimilated completely and immediately to France” (Rambaud 56). “Colonial” assimilation is a process of possession that combines disappropriation (of the past, of customs), reappropriation (integration into the body of France), the act of ownership (of people and institutions), and the dispossession of immediate citizenship. However, even at this level of radical action, assimilation should include its own disappearance into a new fusional state. Perhaps certain colonists were sincerely convinced of the goal of their action, if carried to its conclusion. Despite innumerable objections that can be made, one could admit a kind of Kantian “good will,” a desire to see the colonial enterprise pass away into successful assimilation. This hypothetical attitude would have played a role in the formation of highly critical colonial functionaries. Whatever the case may have been regarding this (quite) awkward theoretical generosity, colonial assimilation also voluntarily limited itself. The doctrine, in its nineteenth-century stratification, is complicated by its profound nonactualization. Despite all the declarations, assimilation must not succeed, precisely because its completion would coincide with the end of the colonies. This is a major difference from regional annexations. Bretons, Alsatians, or Basques are, at worst, internal foreigners, immobile immigrants; however, their route to becoming French citizens is not suspended in advance. Those assimilated in the colony, on the other hand, whose legal existence proceeds from the empire (and not from the nation), must accomplish their francisation only partially or in limited numbers. Otherwise, the colony, in general, would be lost. As soon as it is colonial, assimilation reintroduces two obstacles. It has an unknown and variable duration, which the assimilator gauges on a case-bycase basis. It is, in addition, a function of elective affinities. It is also possible for indigenes to spontaneously reveal themselves as more assimilable because of secret resemblances. La France coloniale, cited above, affirms that “the Targui . . . wear, like our Gallic forefathers, a long smock and dark blue cotton pants worn smooth” (Rambaud 39); another encyclopedia published later finds among the Kabyles the features “of our peasants in the center of France” (Petit, Les colonies françaises 178); the Indochinese bear an affinity to “us” because of the ancientness of their civilization, and one may legitimately compare the Angkor Wat temple to Notre-Dame de Paris, and so on. A veritable system of correspondences between “our world” and “our colonies” was thus established, on par with the theosophy of Swedenborg. This system of secret affinities was already being established during the first colonial empire: in the seventeenth century, Marc Lescarbot affirmed that

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the American Indian “has from the Gaul that hospitality / That made him so esteemed in his antiquity” (“A-dieu à la Nouvelle France”); this concordance gets consolidated and reaffirmed in the Third Republic. The idea of a preconceived relationship between certain Europeans and certain indigenes is inscribed in the phrase of the colonial supernatural. The perfect assimilation of the indigene is merely the recollection of a predestined mystical resemblance. The assimilated autochthon was thus vaguely similar all along; only the illumination of colonial transcendence was required to behold the esoteric correspondence. As for the others, those irreducibly different colonized people, the insistent labor of spiritual education will be applied to them. Who knows whether incompatibilities will not at last be removed by the advent of some miracle? The unassimilable assimilated would in this way become the living proof of the maraboutic action of the great colonial state. Otherwise, within the ordinary, the system of correspondences will be the auxiliary of an indigenous policy, which will skillfully set ethnicities against each other (the Kabyles versus the Arabs, for example). Assimilation, from the banal to the exceptional, here commands a possession, which will either last for a thousand years or will be abolished punctually—but only to reinforce the magical structure of colonization in its entirety. To invert the signs does not change the situation. In 1937, Léopold Sédar Senghor, at the beginning of his intellectual career, called for an “active assimilation,” which might make “the black soul blossom” (s’épanouir l’âme nègre) (“Réflexions” 1). “The black soul” returns ceaselessly in Senghor’s first essays, designating an irreducibility of blacks to colonization.6 It is this “profoundly original soul” (Senghor, Liberté 43) whose opaque depth holds steady in the face of internment, the Mission, and instruction. In the name of this unassimilable, which makes him sing the praises of Lyautey or Faidherbe,7 Senghor proposes a counterassimilation. Les noirs must “assimilate, not be assimilated” (43). The reversal of perspective proves to be in compliance with the panpsychism Senghor finds in the black identity. African animism, according to the author, who hesitates at times regarding the appropriateness of the term (cf. Liberté 24), extends a soul beyond living human beings. “The soul of inert things,” the habitation of the world, is a creation of the black soul, whose idea “is, in its essence, active force” (43). Thus the circle closes. Animism, which the irreducible black soul invents, peoples the real with active forces; the black person, unassimilable in his soul, must find his own magical principle by producing an active assimilation of the other. What better way of saying that the colonial relationship is a transport? Sartre overconceptualizes this opinion in the celebrated preface he writes in 1948 for the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue

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française (Anthology of the New Black and Malagasy Poetry in French), edited by Senghor. Sartre ratifies the existence of the “black soul” in his text (“Orphée noir” xv-xvi). He qualifies this affirmation, stating that “in the soul nothing is given,” since he supposes that it had been spirited away, that it must be “refound” (xv). Overloading his own dialectic, Sartre comes to speak the phrase of possession. Sartre focuses on the poetic work, affirms the theory of negritude expressed by the early Senghor, and unleashes the lexicon of the supernatural. In addition to the internment in slavery, the Noir suffers an “other exile,” that of the “soul” (xvi). The Afro-American, his “negritude, quite present and quite hidden, haunts him.” “Black Orpheus,” the title given to the preface, names the visionary poet, “the vates of negritude,” who descends “into the blazing Hell of the black soul” (xvii). This revolutionary poet will rediscover “the old black depths . . . by abandoning himself to trances, by rolling on the ground like one in the throes of possession” (xvii). Sartre—reader and critic—describes the link between colonial possession and literary enchantment in a surprising manner. Later, we will look at ways of rethinking the slippage between the two. For the moment, I am only taking from these citations the extraordinary world they establish. They speak a phrase we are beginning to recognize. All the more because Sartre repeats (and changes) Senghor’s counterassimilation in the positioning of his argument. The injunction, “it is thus a question for the black man [le noir] of dying to white culture in order to be reborn to the black soul,” gives the negative of republican “assimilation,” this “alienation that a foreign thinking . . . imposes on the black man [au Noir]” (xxiii). Definitively, and independently of its process, assimilation in the colonies exposes and repositions the phrase of possession.

Association, Union, Attentisme Making the same argument for the doctrines of autonomy and association would seem more complicated. Certainly Senghor proposed counterassimilation as a method of “transcending the false antinomy, ‘autonomy or assimilation’” (Liberté 44). The reappearance of the indigene as an active character at the heart of colonization became a synthesis of autonomy and imbrication. The fact remains, however, that within the French empire, association was established as a response to the failure of assimilation. The collapse of generalized similarity only expressed the reality of colonial persistence. As a polemic, the “associationists” saw in this collapse only the debacle of an inadequate model. The argument of progressiveness—necessary for the pursuit of colonial jouissance—like the mysticism of affinities, functioned as a call for respite.

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Chronological articulation therefore exists; but once again, it is inserted into a rhetoric that attempts to indicate the direction of history (its own, needless to say). Despite the qualities of the classic work by Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, I think that assimilation has largely survived the death certificate drawn up by the militants of autonomy. The policy of association, even if one considers it to be a majority viewpoint during the first part of the twentieth century, nevertheless presented itself as the way out of universalism. The critique of rational unity is in no way only the prerogative of the opponents of colonization—far from it. A famous expression concentrates the grievances well: this “Nos ancêtres, les Gaulois,”8 which indigenous pupils had to chant the same as metropolitan students. Taken as an example of extreme assimilation, an imposition of a uniform will, the preconceived negation of differences, and the assertion of a legendary ancestry, this antiphonal refrain has provoked the derision or the sarcasm of the classic authors of decolonization. The caricature is well deserved, but one must then ask which Frenchman really had Gallic ancestors, or whether an ancestor in a national community is a real or a legendary figure. For my part, I neither feel nor know myself to be the grandson of Vercingétorix—but enough of that. Well before the independence movements, texts decried the instilling of a Gallic ancestry for the Nègres, including Jules Harmand, considered to be the principal theoretician of association in France. Harmand ridicules the assimilationism that “found it quite natural to drill these unfortunate ones [indigenous children] with the great deeds of their Gallic ‘ancestors’” (Domination et colonisation 261–62). Let us make no mistake here: Harmand and his ilk reject assimilation in the name of racial irreducibility. They deplore the “instruction of the indigenes” (256), which retains the same pedagogy for “minds so different from ours” (258), and which ends up with the “ridiculous ‘compositions’ of little negroes [négrillons] or half-savages” (261). In 1910, when these lines were written, the argument duplicates that of Gustave Le Bon, who, in the Colonial Congress of 1889, sounded the alarm with such insistence that he strings together two pleonasms for the price of one: “We, for our part, have never denied the benefits of instruction, we willingly consider it to be a kind of universal panacea, destined to remedy all ills” (“Influence” 227). This same Le Bon would later (1894) plead for a natural hierarchy while lamenting the “decadence of races” in his Les lois psychologiques (Psychological Laws).9 In 1911, he quite logically ends up on the path of association in La psychologie politique et la défense sociale. It is advisable “to respect the religious customs of the Arabs”; that is to say, “all of their institutions” (La psychologie politique et la défense sociale 205), since the races are fixed, and “the provisional varnish

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of European education modifies the indigene very little” (211). The man who stigmatizes “our methods of forced assimilation” (213), who advocates looking elsewhere (in India, German Africa) so as to leave institutions and customs in place, chooses his arguments well by means of racism. The recent republication of La psychologie politique that I use, put out by the “Friends of Gustave Le Bon” (Amis de Gustave Le Bon), warns me on the back cover, moreover, that the European is now “colonized from above and from below, brothel for nègres, domestic clients for the jaunes [yellows].” Jules Harmand, high functionary of diplomatic and colonial affairs, doubtless had more legitimacy than the polygraphic Gustave Le Bon, even if the latter was the former’s editor.10 The two authors merge in their acknowledgment of the failure of assimilation, regarding the irreducibility and the hierarchy of the races, on the obligation of reforming indigenous policy in the direction of an exploitative respect. Of course, the tolerance of autonomy is by no means philanthropic: the dis-assimilative will allow Europeans to increase their “domination of people so different from themselves” (Harmand, Domination et colonisation 72). The recusal of the old, supposedly French model provides an account of an internal tension within a single field. The ritual attacks on universalism might almost make us forget now and again that a respect of indigenous traditions, that the political and juridical practice of autonomy, had taken place through racism and exploitation. Are we here face-to-face with the lineaments of the colonial phrase, or does association constitute another discourse? Without a doubt the defenders of autonomy choose to undermine the project of a cohabitation of minds (esprits), just as they deprive themselves of the ecstasy of slave ownership. Nevertheless, words emerge that allow possession to be heard anew. Le Bon dismisses assimilation because of the racial fact. Race, for him, is defined as “a permanent being, free from time” (Les lois psychologiques 14–15). This perennial substrate is expressed in the sum of “living individuals” who find themselves ruled by the “immense domain of the unconscious,” owing to the subterranean action of the dead. “Infinitely more numerous than the living, the dead are infinitely more powerful than they are. . . . The extinguished generations impose not only their physical constitution on us; they also impose their thoughts. The dead are the unsaid masters of the living” (15). The “mental constitution of a race” (166–67) is thus the result of an unconscious pressure of the dead on the living. In 1899, the vicomte de Vogüé had summarized these kinds of ideas in the (gripping) title of a (not at all gripping) novel, Les morts qui parlent (The Dead Who Speak).11 The ancestors of a race even manipulate one’s mind. Each being becomes the marionette of the

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ventriloquist of race. The error of assimilation resides, then, in the impossible will to substitution. Le Bon refuses to place French thoughts in indigenous heads; such a spectacle would be contrary to ancestral fatalism. Instead, he praises natural necromancy, the adequation of the living and the dead. Racial determinism, which passes through a rereading of Gobineau and the colonial enterprise, leads to a generalized possession of the conscious mind of the living by the unconscious mind of the dead. The doctrine of association, according to Le Bon, extends the phrase of possession to the world, as a metaphor of racial behavior. Jules Harmand, less mystical at first glance, exercised considerable terminological influence above and beyond his doctrinal activities. In 1892, he writes a preface to his translation of John Strachey’s monograph India. This foreword will popularize the British imperial model while reactivating the term “possession.” Harmand wants to do away with the word “colony,” which he judges vague and inadequate. A generic substantive, it does not express historical and statutory differences; understood in its etymological meaning, it is too narrow and designates simply the exploitation of the soil. What Harmand names “colony” corresponds to a territory where the indigenes are proportionately few, where the colonists are adventurers without state mandate. Such a vocabulary no longer suits the new empire, where only “possession” or “domination” are now to be found. Harmand insists that the use of the term “possession” is more rigorous and more personal. Nearly twenty years after his preface, he proudly remarks in Domination et colonisation: By convention or by commodity, and in order to respect already accepted usage of certain words—especially since the publication of our Introduction to the book of Sir John Strachey on India—we will often replace the appellation Dominations with that of Possessions. (106) “Possession” becomes Harmand’s authorial find. He later repeats what he grasps of the word “according to convention,” in order to refer to the “countries captured from the practically unassimilable indigenes, who have become subjects of the dominating State” (Domination et colonisation 108). The honorary ambassador believes himself to be more of a pioneer than he is. In particular, he finds “possession” again (which had never disappeared) at the moment he subjugates the autochthons. This lexicon of undemocratic coercion responds to the political situation of the ancien régime and contributes to the reestablishment of the practice of possessing lands and peoples. The autonomy that the author describes at length, and which will inform the legal practices of association, thus aims to transform all the overseas countries under French control into pure possessions. As a result,

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even the Antilles, recognized as remnants of authentic colonies, will have to undergo the treatment befitting a “Domination” (109). The dominating possession (la possession dominatrice) is thus a unique paradigm for the empire. It is presented as a necessity based on the gap between “the superior race and civilization” (156) and the indigenes. The apparent loosening of the ties between France and its “properties” (106) in the politics of “association” (158) is by no means a weakening of possession. On the contrary, everything is brought back to it. The schemes of racial domination are immediately assembled. The protectorate is defended as an adequate regime because it does not imply the assimilation and promiscuity of races (22). Slavery itself is verbally reintegrated. Harmand, of course, does not exactly specify that the indigenous bodies be shackled. Rather, he recommends an institutional apparatus that serves as slave owner. A measure that might seem progressive, such as organizing indigenous assemblies (see his chapter 17), aims to “assure the servility of the indigenes” (362). After all, the inferior people are known to be naturally servile. They have a consubstantial predisposition to slavery that the European is glad to utilize, indeed to satisfy. This recalls the passage in which Octave Mannoni, in 1950, likewise explained the colonial adventure as a meeting between the “libido dominandi” of the whites and the “inferiority complex of colored races” (Psychologie de la colonisation 31). Association, theorized to its terminus by Harmand, turns out to be a mechanism of absolute control. As good logic would suggest, in “possessions,” the brain of the dominated will ultimately belong to the Europeans. If locally one observes a kind of congestion, the connections will be distorted in advance. In sum, the indigenes receive an “interdiction” against entering further into the “armature of domination: it is necessary . . . that the hope of conquering these essential posts, relatively few besides, cannot cross their minds” (Harmand, Domination et colonisation 229). Domination possesses thoroughly, even unto the formation of ideas in indigenous heads. An affirmation makes Harmand proceed from the critique of assimilation to the value of autonomy in his treatise. The leaders, he said, must consider the foreigners under their tutelage not like “sons of the same mother and citizens under the same flag,” but rather as “subjects” (Harmand, Domination et colonisation 99). They can never rise up, since they are “incapable of grasping the manner of thinking of their masters,” because of their “world of ideas” forever “closed” by the conquerors (99). One sees that the mental closure justifying their yoke will finally cede way under the power of the “master,” who, in the final analysis, possesses their minds. The state guarantees the obligation to obey, it separates different peoples, and it inoculates the ordering of the world. As for the remainder of the soul, the state does not trouble itself

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with this; the state’s only concerns are the introduction of domination at all levels and the assurance of the servility it presumes. The unity of this language stops us as we advance in our examination of a multiform colonial phrase. I would add that for Harmand himself, the lexicon and the rhetoric determine the method of domination. He denounces assimilation as a “metaphor” (Domination et colonisation 21), a “figure of rhetoric” (19). He claims that “Possession” and “Domination” are “neologisms” (107) that he is deliberately crafting. France must “have a precise terminology, with definite expressions” (99): “Colonial policy would need, no less than science, a well-made language, and we are far from possessing it” (99; my emphasis). The phrase of possession, once renewed, will transcribe in a precise way this other political property. “Fine expressions are a permanent obstacle and an efficacious remedy against the deviation of ideas” (107). The ambition is general. Precise terminology and linguistic description create possession (the contemporary colony, the enchantment of peoples). Here, not only is the external control of the indigenous mind by Europeans assured, but the Europeans are dominated in turn, prevented from getting their own ideas out of the same rut. Possession concerns the dominated and the dominator, affecting both of them. Far from breaking with the phrase, Harmand, under the cover of autonomy, speaks only of a contradictory coexistence, secured by a supernaturally possessive state. He embraces the range of haunting, including that point where copresence puts fractured identities into circulation. In the final analysis, subjects or masters will not only be possessed by one another, but also by the colonial phrase as such. Assuredly, Gustave Le Bon and Jules Harmand do not encapsulate all the discourses on association. They remain emblematic of the possible insertion—inexorable even—of the policy of autonomy into the phrase of possession; this is so despite the affirmation of separation, which might make it seem more foreign to enchantment than assimilation is. The compatibility is thus evident, however many autonomists sought precisely to obscure or abridge the phrase of haunting. Even in the least complete version, if I may put it this way, the deforming reformation of possession is still easily locatable. I will finish here with Lyautey, the conqueror and administrator of Morocco, the indefatigable partisan of separate development and of local power. Lyautey, whose sexual motivations were notorious, wanted to preserve the indigenes in their desirable exoticism; it is thus always a question of subjugating by association. The short note on “indigenous policy” that Lyautey submitted to the French prime minister, André Tardieu, in 1913 is not lacking in erotic eloquence (Lyautey l’Africain 1: 252–55). Two administrative scenarios are envisioned, with the aim of “consolidating submission” (252).

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The first comes from the nonunified lands, which lack autochthonous “leaders” (253). There, “one must proceed by direct contact with the indigene” (253). While the idea of physical contact should be transparent, let us add that it is also appropriate to “confer [s’aboucher] with innumerable small notables in order to conquer them” (253). The military convention of seduction, that great parlance of the gallant centuries, is here resuscitated. “Confer” (s’aboucher, which includes the word bouche, or “mouth”) adds to this parlance, recalling the importance of speech—and the kiss within the embrace. The objective “to know each other better, on both sides,” where the verb could very well intend a biblical usage, resides definitively in “intimate contact.” The second scenario sustains this explicit quality, since “it is enough to flirt with a few memorable personalities, to court them, to turn them into conquests in order to win all their clients with one blow” (253). My illdisposed mind prompts me to think of “clients” here in terms of prostitution. In sum, this droll jargon, designating the final “domination” in “intimate contact with the indigene” (255), murmurs the desire of possession through the Possession of Morocco. Beyond belonging to the contradictory colonial phrase, assimilation and autonomy have one last feature in common. The two doctrines are threatened with cancellation by their very execution. Assimilation points toward the end of colonies through the identity between the diverse parts of the empire. Autonomy can set the stage for the break with the metropole. The two positions strive to tamper with time. The process of the indigene’s transformation must never surpass the case by case, it does not apply to the totality of the territories, it incessantly hides, it is defined in the future, and it will thus not be realized beyond the precocious epiphenomenon. Association continues to signify domination and freezes reality in a present that is supposed to succeed the impossible future (assimilation). The tempo does not vary on either side, however; it remains that of a colonial possession. The superimposition of temporalities is part of the eternal future characterizing the event of modern haunting. The chaos of rhythms and tones, the clamor of words and laws, enter into the phrase of enchantment that speaks through texts and discourses. The impossible contemporaneity of association or assimilation, their very incompatibility, shows that the supernatural confusion of the one and the other does in fact lie within the universe of the colony. The pragmatic attentisme that I have mentioned constitutes an illusory rationalization of this doctrinal pandemonium. The supposed partisans of the juste-milieu see, in the self-eradication of the colonies offered by theorization, the need for a compromise. Once it gets elevated to dogma, this so-called matter-of-fact attitude is, by definition, contradictory. It is useless, after this

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point, to seek out some luminous salvation. Nevertheless, this subdoctrine was expressed as early as the 1889 Colonial Congress and was victorious on more than one occasion. The centrist solution suggests retaining assimilation as an ideal while opting for a separate development, but without providing effective means for real autonomy, and without believing in the equation of the indigene and the colonizer. One wants to recivilize the empire; one thinks to rationalize it by means of the meson of Aristotelian moderation. One consolidates the special status (régime special). France has continuously practiced a legal divergence in its possessions. Noncitizens were most often ruled by indigenous laws. The laws of the Republic bifurcated according to the status of the plaintiff. The special status was considered a necessary step in the acceptance of francisation by the colonized—or as a way of maintaining local tradition in the protectorates or the autonomous territories. Although this special logic is granted to association, I must insist that it does not conflict with the “progressive” attitude that founds the doctrine of assimilation. Indeed, it perfectly illustrates the temptation of the pragmatic, which decompartmentalizes indigenous policy, that place within the colonial totality where people of heterogeneous condition happen to be. The facade of naïveté (its “make do” pragmatism) then recognizes different statuses for different peoples. In one sense, attentisme declares itself in favor neither of republican assimilation nor of its associated domination; its only position is the conservation of colonial property. In other words, possession is requalified as appropriation. These countries belong to us; to us also belongs the faculty of integrating the indigenes, when needed; we decide who deserves what, politically; we attribute to the colonized a particular status, which happens to be one which they had previously enjoyed, but which we, by virtue of our power, will restore (and adopt). The great “we” is the result of contradictions. Neither a third term nor an effective synthesis, the so-called pragmatic position dreams of amalgamating the Western “we.” It is the daughter of the two great political paths, as it is of the great desire for rational plundering in opposition to the subalterns. In part, the short period of the French Union (Union Française) following the Second World War is the triumph of this attentisme. The conception of the Union, rightly thought of as ambiguous from its inception, comes from the debates provoked by the indigenous intelligentsia and the rise of independence movements between the wars. It is not only an heir of the subdoctrine, but its plasticity allows it to serve as the site of a kind of speech that is hostile to assimilation, autonomy—a site that remains to be actualized. The preamble to the 1946 Constitution stipulates that “France, with the peoples overseas, forms a Union founded on the equality of rights and duties,

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without distinction of race or of religion.” A state is allied with “peoples”— a difference from the later European Union between states, for example. That which might pass for an association always rests on the declaration of equality—inimical to the history of the doctrine of autonomy. The epithet of France “faithful to its traditional mission” (in this same preamble) awakens the old assimilating depths and the glory of the national model. The delaying of equality gets strangely added to this, since the new task of mystical France consists in “leading to liberty the peoples for whom it has taken responsibility, [so they might] become their own administrators and conduct their own affairs democratically.” The manifest announcement of a disappearance of the colonial fact is accompanied by a hierarchization. France leads the people to their liberty, which they would not know how to sieze without prior organization; a state, being essentially superior, will give to minority peoples the means to build their state(s). Once assimilation is complete, the putative liberated territories will have gained a political structure similar to that of France. Until then, naturally, a special new regime appears. If one might claim that the Constitution of 1946 should have led to the end of indigenous jurisdictions by the proclamation of equality, article 82 nevertheless maintains a distinction between “French citizenship” and “civil status” that duplicates the gap between “French citizens” and “French indigenes” in the Crémieux Decree. Plus, the entire Union is a special case, which coordinates, in the “French Republic, metropolitan France, the overseas départements and territories,” with the “territories and associated States” (art. 60). The French Union was perfectly susceptible to widely divergent readings and did not convey any new colonial paradigm. Doubtless, it did prepare the way politically for independence. The Orientalist Paul Mus, who had also played a military and diplomatic role in Indochina, posed this serious question to the Union: “Can a colonial structure be converted to a Union, which should be, in many ways, the opposite?” (Le destin de l’Union 353). The interrogation was complicated by the fact that no new language was invented, even though the phrase had already proven itself quite capable of tolerating its opposite while pursuing precisely the structure of colonial possession. A year before Mus’s book, in 1953, François Mitterand gave strong signs of a possession by means of union in his work Aux frontières de l’Union française (At the Frontiers of the French Union).12 Praising the distinction between civil status and citizenship in Tunisia, Mitterand calls for institutional reform. He wishes that “the ‘lively forces’” (133) of the different community groups of the countries were represented. These supplementary personalities would be designated “according to the norms inspired by those which determine the recruitment of our economic council.” This “second assembly” would

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reflect, among other things, the “social or economic bodies”; it would welcome each “body” (134). The Tunisian Assembly, elected in an individual way this time, would emanate from a “single electoral body,” made up of Tunisians “of French or Muslim origin” (132). The traditional bodies are reformed in the council “in the French way,” and the indigenes are integrated with the colonists in a body of electors. The Union, for Mitterand, is also a union of bodies, since, after all, “the French soul and the Muslim soul have not broken their ancient correspondence” (31). Physical assimilation, spiritual compatibility, political autonomy, and institutional francisation all serve the same goal of a union of the indigene and the European. Bodies and souls will be in the same place, between reciprocal possession, discreet domination, and forbidden disarticulation.

Extermination, Segregation, Diarchy I have used, perhaps abused, the word doctrine in the preceding pages. Modern empires (such as the Third Republic) have codified, reflected, and described their actions. The banal brutality, everyday violence, and casual torture did develop in the context both of effective speech (political discourse, laws) and of a theorization of power. Doctrine designates a composite expression that is situated in relation to other expressions and which seeks to be transmitted. The legitimization of an utterance results in its structuration and its recognition in society. Association and assimilation do not in themselves cover the range of political colonial verbiage. In France, they alone are nevertheless consolidated into doctrines, in addition to their improbable intersection in attentisme. Numerous other designs are formed, which are new dependencies, satellites, or microsystems of condemned (but uttered) opinions. In the examination of the postcolonial, to which I will turn shortly, we will see that the contemporary apology for métissage began well before the independence movements; hybridization, however, was worth far more as an instance of a type of assimilation or as a foil to the autonomists—than as a credo or as the content of education. Among the models of indigenous policy, two grim examples merit a quick consideration: extermination and apartheid. The collusion, at first, between the facts of colonizing and exterminating appears rather difficult to establish. Yes, just as colonialism adapts to monarchy, fascism, or the Republic, extermination can enter into imperial practice. Yet it is neither a deep characteristic nor the fact that reveals the nature of colonialism. With his Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire, who is sometimes evoked for the wrong reasons, claimed that the overseas experience had made what he called “barbarism”

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banal, had “legitimized” it (36)—and had simultaneously prepared for the coming of Nazism. This does not signify an equation between colonization and the action of “the negation of civilization, pure and simple,” as was practiced by the Third Reich (40). It is symptomatic that Césaire reinterprets Nazism using the words of the phrase when he declares that the “very distinguished, very humanist, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century . . . has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon” (36; original emphasis). Once again, Discourse on Colonialism presents a kind of continuity between colonization and Nazism without exactly equating the two—without affirming that the colonists necessarily engage in extermination. With the historical phase of European expansion, the concerted annihilation of dominated peoples only has meaning in relation to a conquest of the geographical and the natural world. The colonization that we are considering in these pages, however, has continuous need of the colonized to maintain itself (as an experience of jouissance, for economic exploitation, or as tangible proof of civilization). At worst, a restructuring of subjugation is therefore required, and it is in this way that deported and enslaved Africans became the replacements of the Native Americans. To put it in stark terms, the colonial must guarantee the broad existence of a human group if it wants to prolong its satisfactions. In sum, extermination encounters colonialism at certain moments. At its start, at the moment of a belief in the illimitabilty of territorial and political expansion, modern European imperialism can in essence get rid of the conquered, by absorbing them while changing them in body and soul. The link between destruction and colony remains adventitious in the improvisation of its beginnings. The establishment of slavery corresponds, if not to a rejection of genocide, then to the articulation of massacre and domination. American society in the nineteenth century can continue to repress, betray, and kill its “Natives” because it believes it now has millions of black slaves under its control. It can also engage in more localized massacres such as lynchings, which figure as warnings as much as miniature responses to the great genocides associated with the colonies. Where three black men were beaten, burned alive, hanged from a tree, photographed after this torture in order to become subjects of postcards commemorating the horror, the latency of a total and negating rage is exhibited.13 In periods of the decline of metropolitan power, extermination can also leave its mark in a scorchedearth policy. In all of these cases, I see mass destruction as the external limit of colonization. It is a question neither of opposites nor of a double denomination for a single phenomenon. The limit between extermination and colonization diverges and touches at the same time. It is quite possible both

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to exterminate and to colonize—even as the two actions limit each other. In this sense, the politics of “ethnic cleansing” of the past century is not the logical consequence of empire in the New World or Africa. Certainly, the rhetoric of reverse colonization can serve the demands of annihilation. The racist thinker Vacher de Lapouge welcomed the death of Native Americans and their intoxication by alcohol (Les sélections sociales 486) and prophesied that “the Jews might become for the majority of Europe what the English are in India” (L’Aryen 467).14 However, the issue here is the recourse to a possible complicity rather than an identity of substances. By taking extermination as the truth of colonialism, one suddenly makes anodyne such forms of Western presence as, for example, the Jesuit missions in China or Japan. I grant, of course, that if forced to choose, the priest’s strategy of conversion has more of my sympathy than the removal of indigenous populations, human trafficking, or lynching. It would be strange nonetheless to imagine that Catholic proselytism outside of Europe has no connection to state politics of the same period. A fortiori, how could anyone admit that the Jesuits of the eighteenth century, who intended to eradicate Eastern paganism, do not arise from colonialism? The smiling face and the lessening of violence are after all but the possible attributes of an enterprise of prescription and domination. Segregation is a type of indigenous policy that is certainly more common than extermination. Nevertheless, segregation does not equal colonization in general. It can appear with slavery, even though the reality of plantation life often combines techniques of enslavement and the sharing of intimacy. When the servile condition disappears, segregation tends to be reinforced: in the United States after the Civil War, in South Africa with apartheid. Contrary to certain received ideas, France has practiced the division of populations on multiple occasions. The most notorious example is the doctrine of “separate development” that Lyautey applied in Morocco, with its urbanism of separated districts. Despite different degrees of intensity, these practices are related and arise from the same attitude as social confinement or the establishment of ghettos (such as that which gave its name to all the others, in Venice, beginning in the Quattrocento). What specific form, then, would (post) colonial segregation take? It would first be necessary to evoke the change in values, in the function of the stage where the action unfolds. The specific— which is not to be confused with the peculiar or the unique—is primarily the product of a configuration. Separation does not reveal the basis of colonialism any more than extermination does. Yet the pattern here differs. Segregation is not the limit of the colonial; it is the very border, one of those differences that matter in the exercise of haunting. Put back into the phrase of possession, apartheid might seem contradictory to any desire for integration, and internal

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alteration. In fact, it would be better to say that segregation might help the contradiction of possession. Indeed, the other is to be devoured, altered, replaced—to remain forever different. Every instance of separate development thus forms the legal preservation of a hiatus that corresponds to the political enactment of the deferral of all absolute identity. Apartheid took on meaning in South African society also by justifying the most extreme promiscuity: rape, torture, appropriation of bodies and goods. In addition, the collection of texts that governed segregation in South Africa, Urban Native Law, deals widely with “property” (and the formation of townships). From this point of view, apartheid, or any less extreme equivalent, recalls each day that the equivalence of substances must be pushed back; and, at the same time, it authorizes subjugation by means of a structurally inferior status. One can equally imagine (post)colonial segregation at another point in the opposition: as an attempt at rationalization in spite of everything. The enactment of complex laws, along with the least concerted practices, would signify a rebellion, internal to colonization, against the part of haunting. I would immediately add: this is an untenable revolution, which will at most produce a proliferating technical irrationality, as in the juridical apparatus of apartheid. And at least, as one sees in Lyautey, it creates a one-dimensional version of possession, mixed with long-term planning. In each case, segregation is a form of the contradiction that is operative in (post)colonial possession. Neither negligible nor supremely incidental, segregation makes one prescription communicate with others, going so far as, in the case of South Africa, the stratification of proslavery legislation, and giving rise to laws of exception such as the anti-Jewish regulations of Germany in the 1930s. In the previous few pages I have ventured beyond the French corpus. Obviously, this book, which interrogates speech and discourse, and which will even devote its second part to the learning and diffusion of language, cannot adequately emphasize the idiomatic value of thought. The patterns of each language carry many particular reinventions of (post)colonial domination. It is nevertheless necessary to emphasize that the European languages associated with different conquests play similar games with their words for “possession”: Spanish, Portuguese, English, German, Dutch. In addition, in every part of European expansion beginning with the Renaissance, one finds the following elements together: affirmations of the indigenes’ Satanism; the justification of slavery and the slave trade; and the requisition of lands and peoples by means of force and language. Only by leaving the limits of this book could I provide proof for each language. But throughout my argument, I will, in the margins, call on English and North American imperial models, which will provide so much punctual verification of my conjecture. I will

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not go so far as to say that all languages (not even all those of Europe) must express the colonial through possession. Not having followed the inquiry through to its end in all these directions at once, I would gladly believe that the words of haunting do not develop uniformly in every context. What interests me is how the syntax of the phrase, once given (or, yet again, constructed by the corpus and its interpreter), also partakes of the possibility of evoking and progressively revoking possession itself. If a kind of language of the colony forms, made as much of the conditions of utterance as of discursive archipelagoes, its deformation is of utmost significance. We have just seen this: how association or autonomy, once replaced in the (post)colonial corpus, has a conditional value, which connects it back to the attempt at rational exorcism in white society. The place of haunting, more or less great or manifest, helps to situate the character of each indigenous policy. The second colonial empires (such as France after the loss of Saint-Domingue, or Great Britain after the creation of the United States) are surely born from a violent reconsideration of slavery and from a redefinition of the theological reason of the Enlightenment. From that moment on, spiritual “possession” must surely abandon some of its satanic pomp. We have nonetheless encountered its great persistence. In a possibly dangerous estimate, I would speculate that colonial speech in France over the last two centuries speaks the traditional phrase more directly than it does in the British Empire. The opposition between English and French manners is a cliché of most comparisons between the two, beginning in the 1860s or 1870s. One fully exaggerates the differences, since it is in any case always a question of majority positions in a place or a time. Assimilation was not the continuous or credible slogan of overseas France; and one objective of the Raj was the rapid creation of an Anglo-Indian elite, whose customs, ideas, and habits had to strongly coincide with those of the kingdom. Without renewing a convenient and false diptych, I believe that during the course of the nineteenth century, British political space governs the problem of the transmutation of souls more radically than France does. The power of the East India Company over the colony was crucial until 1858, the year the Crown took control. From 1858 to 1874, this practice of “double government” (by the Company and the monarchy) established another descriptive register. The reforms of the second half of the century, which aimed to annul the power of the Company, will especially weaken it. Yet the framework partially remains, and in particular, the idea of double government persists, whether maintained or combated. It is imposed in 1919 in another sense—this time the “double” indicating the alliance of indigenous policymakers with a British command. The term “diarchy” is widely utilized in this period, along with “duality.”15 It is also a response to the threat

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of the independence movement and to the demands for self-government, which Gandhi will take up, theorize, and utilize up until 1947 and beyond.16 To summarize, the colonial political stakes in the Raj crystallize around the self and the double. It is not exactly the same and the other, since the double can reveal contradictory realities (the Company and the Crown, the local and the metropolitan, the autochthonous and the British). The grammar of the English empire in India is a tension between the insufficient self of the indigene, who, along with Gandhi, will seek self-sufficiency—and the necessity, contestable, of a reduplication. The double of the double government, let us also consider it as a doppelgänger, that lifelike, superior companion that haunts the days and nights of fantastic heroes. In 1858 in the House of Commons, Palmerston presents his political reforms using these double figures. He begins his oration with praise for the United Kingdom that conquered India, whereas in antiquity the former was “in a state of utter barbarism,” and the latter “enjoyed a civilization and as great prosperity as that age could offer.”17 The end of Palmerston’s description creates a chiasmus: “It is the duty of this nation to use it in such a manner as to promote, as they can, the instruction, the enlightenment, and the civilization of those great populations which are now subject to our rule”—without which, “scenes of barbarity” would ensue. While this rhetoric of inversion is not exceptional in the history of the British colonies, it is mostly absent in the example of France, scarcely sketched out on the subject of Indochina. In this case, Palmerston is not content to construct the image of the Oriental, that vague subaltern that Edward Said has taught us to recognize. No—this discourse goes further, speaking of a transfer of qualities from one to the other. He does not represent Indians as the anti-English. He reveals a phenomenon of doubling: of replacement and of allegiance. In literature and the arts, doppelgängers are often prowlers who possess and take the place of others. Transformed into a critical category in a schematic extension of the works of the psychoanalyst Otto Rank, the “double” is commonly evoked in order to free oneself from an even more problematic possession.18 I think we find the same movement here, as duplicitous as it may be. The obsession with the “double” redefines colonial haunting into a dogma that then appears more rational and political. It also leads to the undoing of the aporias of possession, with a certain effectiveness—to the apparent advantage of self-government, as soon as the presupposition of the colonizer’s extraordinary superiority falls to the wayside. Without a doubt, the dossier will not be so quickly closed. I wanted simply to indicate one other possible path of exploration, which, emerging from the French language (or from the American version of English), would lose and then once again discover the phrase of haunting.

Ch a p ter 3

The Revenant Phrase

The colonial phrase of possession is made possible by the encounter of multiple elements: these include a discourse relating to the appropriation of the earth, the language of the slave trade, and a description of the supernatural. Depending on the histories of the specific places and languages, this possibility is more or less achieved both in the colony and in the texts that contribute to the life of empire. Discursive exploration that is not merely ornamental effectively touches the world without being equivalent to it. One should also add that not all (post)colonial speech is destined to form and deform the phrase of possession. As soon as one forgoes totalization in favor of the singularity of worlds, one should no longer aspire to a universal explanation. My insistence on finding colonial haunting (and what it allows one to think) should only be considered as a complementary sign of enthusiasm for the research itself. In no way does the field allowed by the phrase limit speech: utterances are detached or articulated in different ways, formulating the colony in a distant or empty relation to haunting. Possession could very well not be everything; and it is not nothing. So much do I believe in the fallibility of the model; so much do I seek a reorganization for which the work will be meaningful; what we take for granted must be further parceled out, selected, displaced. Regarding this point, it therefore becomes pointless to object, for example, that the phrase does not encapsulate the totality—how could it? This is not my claim. 57

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I do, however, assert a persistent inequality among “colonialism” and “discourse” and “society”—and “colony” and “speech,” and so on. That which is incommensurable authorizes another thought of empire than the contemplation crossing the phrase of possession. Nevertheless, this possible haunting exercises an influence in the theorization that must not be minimized, not even by its maximal inadequacy.

After the Colony? The role of the phrase that we have just been locating is perhaps even more striking in the contemporary period. When a conqueror verbally takes possession of a land, as Champlain and a hundred others did, the words are effective. Does the law still announce that a black person is a property-being, or that an indigene will be dispossessed (of his land, his traditions, his abilities)? “So be it”: in performativity, the speech act provokes the law, and the action only has value through being said. When a war of independence succeeds, the territorial Possession disappears, in the retreat of weapons and of claims uttered. When a slave recovers freedom, he ceases to be the property of the master. Nonetheless, after the loss of the perlocutionary, the phrase may continue. The persistence here does not come from the mere phenomenon of discursive self-begetting or the weight of verbal concretion. It is explained by what it said, by the extraordinary possession that is never erased without wearing away its host. In particular, the modern experience of haunting lengthens, even perpetuates, the time before its remission. The said is imbricated with the saying, and in such a way that the colonial phrase that we are privileging will preserve itself until the time when all imperial property (human and territorial) ceases to exist. A classic materialist approach would doubtless return us to neocolonialism. If, as I am soon going to demonstrate, and as I suggested above, possession announces itself after the collapse of la plus grande France, is this not a consequence of the surreptitious maintenance of colonialism? And yet, to my mind, not fraudulent financial gain, nor political malfeasance, nor the segregation of immigrants, nor a military presence in the former territories signifies the maintenance of spoken colonialism. All these events combined fail to constitute a good reason for the differential perpetuation of a combination of utterances, for the continued presence of a rhetoric. The logos espoused its own logic of disorder in the colonial exercise of haunting and survives naturally, even after most of the moorings of its power have been severed. Its effectiveness has changed in aspect and intensity. The supposed fix of the neo corresponds, rather, to an age, one different from imperialism; the neocolonial is not colonial in general. On the other hand,

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we are left with a still active phrase, as well as mechanisms of censure, which I will be describing in the second section below. This linguistic subsistence motivates the parentheses placed around “post.” As soon as “colony” is no longer understood as an event circumscribed by chronology, we see that the majority of postcolonial authors are continuing colonial diction—if only, of course, while inverting or dispersing the signs, such as Fanon or Senghor do. The resistance of the colonial phrase, despite the metamorphoses of its performativity and historical transformations, deserves our undivided attention. It manifests itself in the literary description of the colony by formerly colonized people or their descendants. It still resonates in contemporary doctrines and political dogmas—in francophonie, most certainly, and beyond. However, when we venture from literature to other instances of speech or verbiage, the situation is not exactly the same. Literature has widely contributed to the proliferation of the phrase of possession, without originally being its quintessential site. Postcoloniality, and the movements that paved its way, have on the contrary made literature a privileged depository of colonial haunting. It functions otherwise than political doctrines, where possession seems more ghostly. The significance of the colonial derives more from its discursive capacity, as the next section will demonstrate. Political discourse and the practice of power underestimated colonialism during the second half of the twentieth century. Fights for independence and their outcomes for the empires, as well as contemporary battles for civil rights in the United States, have lead to a profound modification of speech about the colonies. Fundamentally, less than the phrase of possession as such, it is the colony that gets blurred in politics. It is not a question of reconquering the lost territories or of reestablishing the racial segregation born out of slavery. Among the adversaries of colonialism, after the end of domination, alliances will increasingly occur between groups that are fairly (indeed, very) independent from imperial history. The liberation movements from the eighteenth century to the 1950s define themselves by colonial history. The black combatants of Saint-Domingue also want to take advantage of the French Revolution to abolish the system of the colony and to put an end to slavery. The name Haiti, which the Republic adopts upon independence, is itself highly significant. Mulatto and black inhabitants of the island thereby confirm the rupture with the old order. They choose to restore the island’s Indian name, in homage to a subjugated population, and whose disappearance leads to the African slave trade. New Africa would have been possible, if they had followed the logic of a restoration that did not account for events. “Haiti,” on the contrary, confirms colonial reality: forced labor of the indigenes, their replacement through deportation and

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slavery. The Haitians thus recognized themselves in the fate of the Guaranis or the Arawaks. A partially Indian ancestry was sometimes invoked during the nineteenth century by the inhabitants of the island. From 1822, in a poem exalting the power of Jean-Pierre Boyer, Juste Chanlatte apostrophizes the “People of Xaragua” in this way: you who on the path Of virtues, of honor, perish among the last, By what charm of attraction were your shades Provoked, with great screams, by our ranks evoked! (Berrou and Pompilus, Histoire de la littérature haïtienne 33–34) The nekyia refers to the role of the propagandist bard who makes the dead Indians reappear in the nation’s present. The main histories of Haiti written by its citizens in the first five or six decades of the new nation give a crucial role to the first exploitation of the indigenes. During the 1850s, Emile Nau even writes a history of Haiti’s caciques. The preface affirms that “the African and the Indian went hand-in-hand in chains” (Nau, Histoire des Caciques d’Haïti 12). A parallel is drawn between the attitude of Columbus toward the caciques and Napoleon’s action against the revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture (13–14). The dominant position in Haiti, then, is a union with the Indians, beyond death. Suffice it to say, colonialism is admitted, it is reappropriated in the direction of a postcolonial history as something to pursue and to construct. Despite being a different position, even W.E.B. Du Bois’s first PanAfricanism is clearly articulated in relation to the legacy of colonialism. Du Bois did not link the fate of black Americans to Africa in order to deny what had been a colonial “parenthesis.” His doctoral thesis, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in Africa” (defended in 1895), gives 1638 as the beginning of exploitation. The study emphasizes the continuity between the earliest colonialism and the persistence of slavery in the United States. This position, which might seem obvious, has in fact a particular critical meaning. By reintroducing the historical condition of the colony, Du Bois breaks with one entire school of the American debate (especially before the Civil War) that focused on the justification (moral, racial, religious, economic) of slavery or emancipation. In 1897, the manifesto The Conservation of Races pursues the genealogy by naming “the present friction between races” as “a heritage from slavery” (Du Bois, Writings 825). Pan-Africanism becomes a means for African Americans to gain recognition for the characteristics of the “contribution” of blacks to civilization, but also the possibility of aiding the emancipation of the colonized. In his 1940 autobiography, Du Bois

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repeats that xenophobia and human exploitation were not the creation of Europeans only. On the other hand, he describes modern racism as an effect of colonialism, of the special determination of the “white world to work toward the continual subordination of the colored races” (655). The question of Africa refers to the occultation of racial difference in the United States. It also testifies to an individual connection: is not An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept the first subtitle of Dusk of Dawn, where the search for individual history is rooted in the exploration of racial thinking? For Du Bois, the question of color does not exist any less because of this, beyond facts relating to individuals or black people in general. It is not surprising, then, that a Pan-Africanist in 1945 would write a general work on decolonization.1 Marcus Garvey, a violent opponent of Du Bois and champion of the “Back to Africa” movement, demands the reintegration of blacks into a land that would belong to them naturally. Garvey’s racial idea (“Africa for Africans!” in Philosophy and Opinions, 1: 68) contests European colonization in the name of a discrepancy between the people and the place (everyone in his own place, in short). The “Declaration of the Negro Peoples of the World,” adopted in 1920 at the convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, rails against the “European nations” that have “taken possession of nearly all of the continent of Africa” (2: 135). The program that follows, quite different in fact from the brilliant ideas of Du Bois, demands a recolonization of Africa by Africans (of the continent and elsewhere, of course). In these mirror demands, the term possession returns several times: “We believe in the inherent right of the Negro to possess himself of Africa. . . . We place on record our most solemn determination to reclaim the treasures and possession of the vast continent of our forefathers” (2: 138). Garvey is happy to expand the phrase of colonial possession, speaking of a “Negro Empire,” where “Africa will be totally colonized by Negros” (1: 70). If it is a question of return, why speak of “colonization”? The formula is so strange that Garvey feels obliged to note that this would not mean establishing African Americans as “exercising an over-lordship over the natives” (1: 70). Even through this phantasmatic will to regression, colonial rhetoric is preserved. I could give many more examples, but I will stop here. I only want to say that even Haiti, the first modern black republic, even the Pan-Africanism of Du Bois, even the return to sources of a Garvey, are direct and concerted responses to colonial expansion. Almost always, the struggle takes colonization to be the point of departure that had provoked it. And often an alliance is sought with other peoples affected by the colony. Certainly the Marxists had problems with the specific circumstances of the colonies. The desired coalition with the working class moves outside the debate over the

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colony. It is nonetheless striking that during the postwar period a number of once-Communist authors, such as Aimé Césaire, René Depestre, and Gilbert Gratiant, had tried to explain the colony without totally reducing it to the schematism of class struggle. Marxist phraseology is modified by its colonial acclimatization. In 1932, the review Légitime défense evoked “the black proletariat, which in the Antilles is sucked dry by a parasitical Mulatto clique sold to degenerate whites” (12; le prolétariat noir, que suce aux Antilles une mulâtraille parasite vendue à des blancs dégénérés). The categorization of color (“black proletariat,” “parasitical mulatto clique”) for each class is highly disturbing for the materialist dialectic. The blancs lost their necessary qualifier as bosses or capitalists. In short, in this violent attack against exploiters and the embourgeoisement of the working class, Marxist orthodoxy collapses. After the civil rights movements and the establishment of newly independent states, the politics of emancipation takes a new turn. The associated discourse demotes the colony and denies its particularity. Third-Worldism might seem, however, to be a perpetuation of decolonizing speech. On the contrary, the critique of neocolonialism departs from the idea that the colony is no more. In the Cold War context, the interpretation of the “neo” turns, in general, to the Marxian argument against the hegemony of capitalism. The advocates of antiglobalization,2 in many ways the current inheritors of Third-Worldism, situate themselves on this line. Its most successful theorization, that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, plainly specifies that colonialism was “dialectical”—whereas our time “is not” (Empire 128). On the national level, the emergence and reinforcement of the categories of “minorities” and “communities” have also connected the colonial to its exteriority. Whether these groups of individuals are praised or scorned, they validate the thesis of a communication between the postcolonial and, for example, the end of phallocentrism or heterosexism. What is at stake in the question of immigration in general is transformation. I indicated as an example that “assimilation” did not mean the same thing in France when referring to Algerians and black people as it did when referring to Jews or Italians. “Immigrants,” likewise, signifies differently, as a function of the colonial or noncolonial origin of the people involved. However, the monographs on French immigration, as well as the blaring usage by the media and political orators, have ended up validating a single situation corresponding to a single term. One thus speaks principally of “immigration” as a general phenomenon, and of “racism” in the same way. One could nonetheless ask whether the famous difficulties with certain categories of immigrants are truly due to their recent introduction within France, when in the United States

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problems considered comparable (exclusion, underemployment, insurrections) concern millions of people (black, Indian) whose ancestors have lived in America for centuries, and likewise when a large percentage of “banlieue youth” are Antillean and therefore descendants of families that have been French for a very long time. This type of questioning is largely avoided, as it sheds light on the recent discursive coalescence with which the political regimes equipped themselves in order to pass over their colonial component. That said, the relegation of colonialism absolutely does not signify its disappearance. In France the rhetoric of the Far Right has largely contributed to the spread of the comprehensive category of immigration, but it does so by continuously insinuating a colonial value into the term, feigning a reclamation of its broad spectrum. When Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks of “immigrants,” he is referring to the indigenes of the old empires—and very marginally to Russians, Australians, or Americans who live in the metropole. Semantics reproduce a difference, despite lexical concentrations. The phrase of possession itself survives by means of the supernatural logic linked to it. The politics of ethnic and national exclusion borne by Le Pen the orator emerges from a haunting in reverse. The president of the Front National regularly repeats a phrase he would have delivered at the moment France abandoned its fight against the FLN: “You did not want French Algeria, you will have Algerian France.” Colonization by the colonized, as we have seen, is a motif secreted through the duration of possession, where domination is transformed into copresence. The symmetrical enchantment of the self by the other is consolidated in all comparable declarations. But certainly Le Pen, a former combatant in Indochina and Algeria, expresses himself in the colonial phrase that nursed him. In a recent fragment of televised speech, Jean-Marie Le Pen spent a little over an hour reminding viewers of “those countries [that] are now independent,” which contested “what they called the yoke of colonialism,” which they have not proven “that they themselves are capable of removing.”3 Le Pen prophesies, again and again, the inversion of domination and the dissolution of the former colonizer in the indigene: “So if we don’t prevent them from coming, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen: we will be submerged and when we are no longer the majority in our own land, well, we’ll be slaves.” The last word is no mere metaphor, we had better believe it. In order to prevent the apocalypse, Le Pen warns people elsewhere, “it’s necessary that people living in foreign countries know that France no longer has the means to support people who would come here and would think that the country is the country of Golkonda.” The legend of the rich kingdom

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of Golkonda returns, and with it, all the exoticism of the adventurers of the French East India Company—this time up against Asians and aliens. It would indeed be wrong to believe, however, that Jean-Marie Le Pen has a monopoly on the expression of the phrase. With fewer flourishes perhaps, the words remain part of the “official” terminology ratified by those republicans who are viscerally hostile to the Front National—to use their consecrated formula. “Integration” is the term that now corresponds to “assimilation,” whose essential value appeared with François Mitterand’s creation of a “High Council” for Integration (an institution founded in 1989 and still in existence). I have the impression of a return or revenance of colonial possession when I see in the first report that “integration takes time” (Haut Conseil à l’intégration 53). I know that many things take time: learning to drive, to read, to bake a cake. So in what way does this banal formula bother me? It is because in the report cited this comes as the first characteristic, before the hollow technocratic babble (“Integration requires vigorous and innovative interventions”). Integration shares a certain metaphorical content with assimilation (the Latin integrus is the whole of the national body that accepts the ex-foreigner into its bosom). The Decouflé “Integration Terms,” which was last edited in 1998 and remains online on the website of the High Council for Integration,4 specifies this distinction. It defines assimilation as the “assumed or expected outcome of an integration process for immigrants.” Integration is teleologically assimilating; I would wager that, despite appearances, it leads back to the old distinctions. Aren’t we told in the article on integration, that even if integration policy, which “does not only concern immigrants, must nonetheless take into account the particular problems that some of them might present”? Everyone has been made to understand who it is that deserves a particular system of rules. In any case, it is not very useful to look for the place where Satan resides, to find him in the demonic Front National, and to weep for the Le-Penization of minds, that evil sorcery that infiltrates people.5 “Possession” comes from farther away than a single man with pernicious talents. In political speech, it has continued to maintain itself despite the partial collapse of its traditional context of utterance, despite the effective relegation of the colony as a motive and a category. It has been perpetuated in places outside of politics—in literature, for example. The very possibility of expression is still marred, as we shall see. This gap between a postcolonial pursuit of the phrase (with the censure that it colonially implies) and its political displacement might clarify today’s renewed desire to say the colony—in different idioms and jargons, in political, media, and scholarly forms of publicity.

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Métissage, That Unexpected Universalism Alongside the multiple agonistic repetitions reprising the split between colonizer and colonized, discourses that celebrate métissage—most often called “hybridity” in English—have grown during the last ten or twenty years. It is with this evocation that I will end the elucidation of haunting exercised even in postcolonial politics. Métissage is one of those words whose success becomes a curse. At once designation, concept, category, notion, motif, rallying cry, and even commercial label, métissage is invoked on a massive scale, from everyday parlance to the humanities and social sciences, from marketing to politics. There are good histories of the term (and of its English equivalent, “hybridity,” undoubtedly less omnipresent).6 But these histories both remember and forget certain elements that seem central to our approach to the resistances to the phrase of haunting. Whatever the degree of the conceptualization of métissage, the term is used today to speak of a situation of contact and exchange between distant entities. Does the word refer to cultures, civilizations, populations, usages? The question has not been decided. Serge Gruzinski, one of the most systematic French authors on the issue of métissage, therefore tries to escape the usual designations in order to concentrate on a métissage of artistic forms or social practices. Two things are certain, however. Despite the long history of the term, métis finds a specialized meaning with the conquest of the New World and refers to children born of couples that would today be called “mixte” (a word linked to métis through its etymology), part Native American and part European. Contemporary métissage claims precisely this mixture as a typical consequence of colonization. Undeniably, métis says colonization, from its lexical revival to the distributed idea of globalized communication between individuals and peoples. The “ethnic” component, then, is not negligible. It is privileged by Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82) when he invents modern scientific racism in the middle of the nineteenth century. His Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines describes the “continual adulterations” among the three original races—white, yellow, and black (1: 25).7 Gobineau’s vocabulary remains relatively vague, and he sometimes employs the terms race, famille ethnique, and espèces (species) interchangeably. But certainly a natural hierarchy (dominated by the blancs, the “Aryans”) exists for him. Mixing corresponds to the course of history, according to an inexorable movement. For Gobineau, the first instances of crossbreeding were productive; he thus attributes the appearance of art to the “intermarriage of white and black” (208). Yet on the whole, increasingly over time, métissage equals degeneration. Gobineau’s thinking, and thus the new racism,

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respond throughout to colonization. On this subject, the author maintains a double sentiment. It was “natural, desirable,” that the superior races came to dominate the inferior races. However, the expansions accelerated “ethnic amalgamation” (2: 555). The victory of the “degenerate man” (1: 24) has sounded; “the era of unity” (2: 560) has begun. Henceforth, there are only “hybrids” who plunge human history into stagnation: the future of humanity is in the image of the “dreary somnolence” of the “métis Malay” (560–61). These assertions have an obvious reverberation in Hitler’s hostility to mixing, though it should be noted that Gobineau is not particularly antiSemitic—and that his problem remains colonization. In speaking of “races,” Gobineau also designates “civilizations,” which are the direct consequence of ethnicity: “Every civilization flows from the white race” (1: 220); “The métis races have equally métis civilizations” (173). This association allows us to underline the second characteristic shared by contemporary celebrations of métissage: rooted in colonial data, they promote a mixture not only of bodies, but of ideas and usages. These texts are the heirs to a tradition of hostility to colonial racism, a fact that is generally left out of the picture. The theme of “cultural métissage” gains ground and becomes consolidated during the 1930s and 1940s among the black francophone intelligentsia. In 1937, in Mirages de Paris, Ousmane Socé presents the character of Fara, who is in love with a white woman. In a discussion with another black intellectual (Sidia), Fara affirms that “if the mixing of races continues at its current pace, the métis will be the man of the future” (147). Opposed to the ideas of his friend, a partisan of purity, Fara drifts from “race” to civilization and culture: “If we push the question,” he says, everything is métis: “There is no pure race on earth, no civilization that would not be métis” (148). Allow me to point out that during this same period Senghor speaks of the “disaggregative action of métissage” (Liberté 1: 23). A subsequent “conversion” (83) will occur in Senghor, which will make him rejoin Socé’s positions, as a response to Nazi racial purism. Hitler was cited by Socé in 1937. The politics of totalitarian purification will transform Senghor for the remainder of his life into an advocate of “cultural métissage.” A tireless orator, in 1950 he affirms that the “ideal civilization . . . can only be métis” (96), and then celebrates the “freedom of the Métis” (103). Senghor will even come to forget this turn in his own thinking (which he had written down, however), and in 1951 he affirms that “I have been advocating métis civilization for fifteen years” (123). The count is not correct, as I have just pointed out. It indicates the degree to which Senghor is now rallying to the cause of métissage, as a supplement to negritude. Twenty-five years later in the Senegalese regional capital of Saint-Louis, the

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president of Senegal will announce the summary axiom, “Everyone must be métis in his own way” (Liberté 5: 51). This inflation of the term is such that the fate of “cultural métissage,” and indeed, of “métissage” in an absolute sense, can be attributed to Senghor’s insistence. The indigenous promoters of the category we are interrogating were certainly speaking from the space of the colonial encounter, and against a racist system that was to a great degree a function of imperialist expansion. Is it useful to say this? Socé and Senghor, when they elaborate their notion of the métis, express themselves using the phrase of possession. Senghor describes his first period (that of negritude) with the language of “fervor,” “witches,” and “voodoo trances” (Liberté 1: 83). Regarding his own group, he bewails the fact that “we were only haunting those of our own kind” (86). If the change to métissage is made in the name of a “dominated romanticism” (86), by taming the black rage against Western “reason” (84), it is nevertheless designated by the formula of a “veritable conversion” (83). On one hand, Senghor reattributes (according to colonial logic itself) the irrational to black people alone and thus sees in métissage an alliance of “feeling” and “discipline.” On the other hand, he rediscovers the language of religious shock, of its brutal and inhuman revelation, used to describe how to become one of the “masters of its telluric forces” (85). The refusal of possession still carries with it the mark of an ecstasy. Concerning the cultural métis, it incarnates, beyond the binarism of the colonizer and the colonized, the copresence of worlds. The cultural métis names and lauds itself to ease the burn of its strangeness. For Socé’s Mirages de Paris, caught in a colonial situation in spite of everything, this dialogical praise could not prevent an accident that occurs in the narration. Jacqueline, Fara’s wife, dies in labor at the moment she should be bringing the “métis child” into the world (146). The other métis, the culturally métis Fara, then suffers a birth pang, through his association with his deceased wife: “Fara had the impression that his insides were getting tangled, tearing themselves apart, and rising up towards his throat” (157). At the end of the novel, Fara has a hallucination. From the Seine rises first his village with its music, then Jacqueline, a new Lady of the Lake. Fara plunges into the “cold water” of the river, “warmed and enchanted by the visions he was grasping in his arms” (187). In addition to the didactic level allowing Socé to develop, through the dialogue, a concept of the necessity of métissage, the behavior of the narrative constructs another métis. The latter is the aggrieved bearer of diverse worlds, from which it is not possible to free oneself in the birth of another. Fara, a métis of Europe and Africa, returns to this home village by plunging into the Parisian water and the medieval legend of Lancelot. This reunion belongs to the “enchantment” the narrator evokes.

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Who knows whether Fara, at the behest of Lancelot guided by the Lady of the Lake, will not be led into a new (métis) world by this last voyage through the depths? In one way or another, the métis, as it functions in Senghor or otherwise, designates a possible postcolonial state, which would free itself of the phrase of possession—but only by recognizing the truth of colonial enchantment. The beyond still remains uncertain. A similar history reveals itself in the contemporary jargon of métissage, which seeks to be done with the colonies, while also returning to them. This ambiguous attitude explains that the métis in question can refer to ethnic mixing, to the synthetic stabilization of haunted spirits, or to the promotion of a fractured identity. These three great models are sometimes poorly distinguished from one another. Socé and Senghor surely remained within the confines of the first two, seeking a position halfway between the influences of métissage and the societies that are linked by it. The 2006 “Nuit Blanche” in Paris took place “under the sign of métissage.”8 The Socialist municipality recognizes how easy it was to utilize this category within the parliamentary Left. The antiracist argument weighs nothing in the vague and stubborn celebration of métissage as a mutual improvement of social practices. Close to this empty and concerted naïveté, the third paradigm of fractured identity reconstructs (and rediscovers) in hybridization a way of nomadizing, of deterritorializing, every unitary formation—to such a degree that the categories of “culture” and “identity” themselves would be contested or discredited. Despite its differences, the current celebration of métissage tends to underestimate several key problems involved, regardless of how unacceptable they might be. To start with, the ethnic element is inescapable. As long as the term métis is used for individuals born of racial mixing, this collusion will remain. There is nothing terribly scandalous about this. Yet by that same token it is useless not to want to address the existence of race when one rehearses the virtues of métissage. In the American debate, where race is generally an accepted fact (albeit as a simple collective construction), my reservations take nothing away from the rhetoric of hybridity.9 It seems to me that in French, métissage, on the contrary, too often serves to remove race—a dangerous game, played involuntarily a contrario. Another difficulty emerges from the encomiastic tone so often adopted. One slips quickly toward the prescriptive. Everyone must be métis. What might such a command mean today? Is it a question of an accompaniment to globalization, as the work of Serge Gruzinski would seek to prove? An individual humanization of the great expansionist machine? The logic here seems too closely linked to that which it seeks to combat. I understand that one wants to take the side of métissage against racial, even national,

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purity: Gobineau, Hitler, apartheid. However, it is entirely false to say that colonialism has always been hostile to métissage. I am of course thinking of instances of métissage due to love, rape, or the promiscuity of the plantations, but I am even more concerned with a preferred legality of biological métissage. One colonial position, which was ultimately in the minority, defended métissage at the time as a perfect instrument of expansion and domination, as the paragon of assimilation. Champlain is considered to have been the herald of this concept, with this prediction delivered to the indigenes of La Nouvelle France in 1633 as a slogan: “Our boys will marry your daughters, & we will then be but one people” (qtd. in Jesuit Relations 211). A little while later, in the Pays d’en Haut (or “Upper Country,” corresponding to the French possessions in North America, bordered by the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River), the civil authorities (including Cadillac in Detroit) and most of the Jesuits will equally promote “mixed marriages.” The historian Gilles Havard talks about this in terms of an “official encouragement” becoming “systematic beginning in the 1680s” (Empire et métissages 647). It must be noted that in this territory, as in Champlain’s phrase, the recommended métissage seems to depend on a kind of masculine superiority in which French men assimilate indigenous women; mixed unions were recognized only under this condition. Likewise, in 1658, after the reestablishment of slavery and before the Code noir, Louis XIV recognized as fully French the métis descendants of a woman from Normandy and a Native American man (an inverted mirror of Pocahontas and John Rolfe).10 The Code noir also allowed children of a black slave and a free woman to be naturally freed from servility.11 During the Enlightenment in the metropole, it is in particular the emancipated Nègres who marry white women.12 Of course, imperial politics after the death of Louis XIV become progressively inflected with racism—a trend that intensifies until the French Revolution—and in this way will come to challenge the legitimacy of marital or sexual relations between French subjects and slaves or Native Americans.13 But the fact remains that over a fairly long period the strategy of conquest was in no way hostile to métissage. Jules Michelet, in his monumental Histoire de la France, even saw in this attitude the typical expression of French colonization during the ancien régime: The more positive minds, Coligny, Henri IV, Colbert, believed that our Frenchman (especially one from the south) was very suited to the colonies, that a small number of French would have created a great colonial empire. How? By grafting themselves through marriage onto the indigenous people, penetrating them with European spirit. Real colo-

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nization, which would have saved and transformed the American race, but which the savage contempt of the English exterminated. (180) We recognize the biologism of domination (with its grafts and crosses), and the mental alteration in the offspring produced by the physical possession of indigenous women. We are far from purism, but at the same time fully within the bounds of imperialism. One might add that Michelet pens these nostalgic statements at the moment that France is constituting its second colonial empire: the old dogmas are potentially valid. At the beginning of the Algerian conquest, moreover, the utopian economist Constantin Pecqueur pleaded both for the colonization of people from a “superior civilization” (Economie sociale 397) and for a generalized métissage. The future “métisse generations” (329) must contribute to the establishment of “the brotherhood of the entire earth” (334). Let us note that Pecqueur, in agreement with the contemporary sycophants of hybridization, designated by this notion a “tendency towards universalization” that was in no way a “UNIFORM unity” (404).14 It is worth noting that beyond the French “case,” other hegemonic plans promoted a form of métissage on multiple occasions, potentially ranging from racial mixing to cultural interrelations. José Vasconcelos, Mexican minister of education and future presidential candidate of his country, argues in favor of the “cosmic race,”15 this “mixed race,” synthesizing the diverse races of the Americas and producing the great civilization of the future—thanks to the systematic “incorporation” of the indigenous element.16 At the same time as Senghor, Gilberto Freyre also sings the praises of ethnic and intellectual mixing. He develops an irenic and modernist vision of Brazil, which persists to this day, and which would represent the end point of the Portuguese style of colonizing, far from doctrines of “racial integrity” (Freyre, New World in the Tropics 174). More broadly, “the Luso-tropical symbiosis” (Freyre, Portuguese Integration 13), agglomerating Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, and Brazil in a “fusionist” composite, is “difficult . . . to confuse with the colonial dominions of the English, French and Dutch in the Tropics” (31).17 It is understood that this rhetoric had been accepted and then appropriated by the Portuguese dictator Salazar and his circle. Once again, and in just as majoritarian a way as occurred during the French seventeenth century, hybridization of the colonizers and the colonized plays a very central role not in the critique of imperial oppression, but in its most fundamental justifications. The occultation of the procolonial métissage is thus loaded with consequences. There is in fact no situation to reverse. To promote métissage does not naturally mean that one is opposed to colonization, domination, and so

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on. It is a safe bet that in the most commonplace usage of the term métissage includes an internal rift. “The cultures of the world” become the “spiritual supplement” for a country that has been sapped. Yet obviously this synthesis moves in the direction of an ornamentation of Europeanness: dear former indigenes, come play the tom-toms on the quais of the Seine, we will buy some traditional objects (for tourists) from you that will adorn our everyday life. In short, the heuristic contribution of métissage, in the humanities and social sciences, is unpredictable. One may quite rightly become fascinated with pictorial exchanges between the hybrid and the grotesque, and between ancient and new worlds, such as Gruzinski describes in La pensée métisse. But if métissage for Gruzinski begins at that time, then the contemporary scope of the question can only prove frustrating. How might we follow Gruzinski? Is the filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai truly métis because his film Happy Together shows the wandering of Asian characters in America?18 As one of my students suggested,19 why not likewise praise Jackie Chan, whose kung-fu films mix periods and practices, grafting elements of popular Asian cinema onto the Hollywood blockbuster? An initial answer might appear in the drift from a concept (métissage) toward its ornamental use: the foreigner provides decorative arts. The aesthetics of chinoiserie persists. Yet more than that, the difficulty stems from the incapacity to circumscribe contemporary métissage. Each time Gruzinski moves from one historical plane (the age of conquest) to another (the contemporary), the leap is unmotivated—except by the political prescription I have just mentioned. To the degree that his category is propped up (in the first case), so much is it unjustified (in the second). The author alone is not guilty: it is precisely the rhetorical omnipotence of métissage that he surrenders to, despite his proclaimed resistance to it. Fundamentally, for the partisans of the term, “everything is métis,” as Fara says in the Mirages de Paris. Gruzinski resists this maximal extension and refutes in advance the métissages in existence before the European expansion in America. Previously—he says—it was only a question of exchange, nothing more, since different peoples only had contact with their neighbors. This definition is highly arguable and does not take into account the duration of voyages: it takes less than a day by jet to travel from Paris to Port-au-Prince, Rio de Janeiro, or Abidjan, whereas navigation from ancient Egypt to Greece took much longer. No matter—let us grant him his thesis: there was nothing métis about the ancients, but about us there is. Still the historical break—supposed to preserve the value of the concept of métissage—only results in its geographical expansion in the contemporary. All in all, Gruzinski, in spite of his efforts, finds himself confronted by the tautology of cultural métissage: everything that is métis is everything that

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is. The ambition to totalize gets bad press among scholars, but this does not prevent it from reemerging whenever possible. Socé and Senghor at least retained that general desire. In his list of métis societies, Senghor included Sumeria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and even “Greater France,” the United States, and the USSR of the 1940s (Liberté 1: 91, 96). This great honor roll, oft repeated, ultimately considers all civilizations as métis, except for certain tribes termed “primitive” and the Third Reich. “Métis” is thus promoted against the closure of some supposed civilizational immaturity or racial extermination, nothing more. Even the segregation of blacks (in the United States) or the deportation of Tatars (in the USSR) is not enough to stem the tide of métissage for Senghor. One can understand the political and historical urgency that led Senghor and Socé to oppose ethnic purity projects. Where Nazism stood for barbaric regression, they decided to indicate a direction of universal history. Today, the partisans of métissage perpetuate this positive tradition, but just at the moment when their efforts are applied to the specificity of the category, a fundamental universalism comes back to haunt them. Thus does Françoise Lionnet, Mauritian by origin, affirm that “those of us who suffer . . . because we belong to insular ‘minorities’ [. . .] will never be tempted by the illusions of leadership, will never be deluded into thinking that we can represent anyone but ourselves” (Autobiographical Voices 6). Twenty pages later, métissage is presented, however, as the means of assuring “a peaceful ‘Relation planetaire’ at the threshold of the twenty-first century” (29).20 Does not such a statement herald a stunning return of universalism, in spite of everything? Let me add that the results of this universalizing tendency in readings of literary texts are in their turn swept along by the pancosmic dimension of the concept. Gilberto Freyre, from his particular position, spoke blithely of a “Luso-tropical totality” (New World 156). Even Homi Bhabha, whose brilliant doctrine will require our attention below, is not entirely convincing when he moves from the terrain of the eidetic to more precise commentary. Thus according to Bhabha, Derek Walcott displays and realizes his hybridity by convoking the languages spoken in the Caribbean in the poem “Names.” The verses Pomme arac otaheite apple, pomme cythère, pomme granate, moubain, z’ananas

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the pineapple’s Aztec helmet, pomme, I have forgotten what pomme for Irish potato, . . . Come back to me, my language. Come back, cacao, grigri, solitaire allow Bhabha to advance the following thesis: “History’s intermediacy poses the future, once again, as an open question. It provides an agency of initiation that enables one to possess again and anew—as in the movement of Walcott’s poem—the signs of survival, the terrain of other histories, the hybridity of cultures” (The Location of Culture 235; my emphasis). Yet Walcott’s text could just as well (or perhaps even more successfully) be read in relation to the poetics of Ezra Pound, whose Cantos mix and graft languages (and not only European ones). I cite these verses, which for me are among his finest, simply for the record: Le Paradis n’est pas artificial but spezzato apparently it exists only in fragments unexpected excellent sausage, the smell of mint, for example, Ladro the night cat. (Pound, The Cantos 458) Yes, it must be remembered that Pound broadcast Fascist propaganda on his radio shows and in his books in Italy during the war. He praised Hitler’s antiSemitic politics in the name of the economic understanding his books were developing. Pound, métis? After all, Bhabha ventures that hybridization can be seen in the heterogeneous uniform of a Spahi in the colonial army (The Location of Culture 300–302). Juxtaposing languages is not enough to create métissage; it only reintroduces, paradoxically and on a massive scale, a causality of the referent: in the end, Walcott’s hybridization would be the simple mirror of his biographical history. I hope it is clear that my deep skepticism does not come from a rejection of métissage. Promoting it, however, is, first of all, not so clearly anti- or postcolonial. In addition, the concept too often serves political interests that

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are flaccid at best and ethnocentric at worst. The category leads back, in the end, to a totality (in universal history, in the globalized present, in the slightest instance of exchange or copresence within a text or an image). The most elaborate theoretical elaborations of métissage collapse into a reading of social or literary facts. We are always brought back to a generalizing tautology. If Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau creolizes French and contributes to “inventions of hybrid and protean language” (Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations 173), then Cicero, who adapts numerous Greek and Latin words, is a great métis author. And since every idiom is composed of borrowed words and phrases, all languages are hybrid. Ad infinitum. Another example would be the writing of Marguerite Duras, which— Catherine Bouthors-Paillart assures us—is shot through (métissée) with Vietnamese turns of phrase.21 The Durasian taste for parataxis, for example, becomes a clear influence of “yellow language” (a very dangerous concept justified by nothing other than a forced parallel between “languages” and “races”).22 However much the teaching of French tends to devalue parataxical usage, it would also have to be lacking idiomatically for her argument to make sense. Why do people want to find the sign of a mixing? Because métis people are present in Duras’s texts, and she would have undergone a deep impregnation of Vietnamese during her first year of life (Bouthors-Paillart, Duras la métisse 155–56). Even if one admits, for the sake of simplicity, that literature expresses phantasms, and that some deeply buried unconscious layer in the-mind-of-the-author might make an ignored language reappear—even then, one piece of linguistic evidence remains. Duras’s text is by and large intelligible to any French speaker who does not know Vietnamese, but I highly doubt the opposite is true. By going so far as to admit an influence of the “yellow language” on the “white language,” the métissage in question only signifies the importation of exogenous turns. French remains the frame of idiomatic practice, into which one introduces a foreign body. This métissage would be ordered by the colonizer’s national language. With constancy and consistency, Edouard Glissant developed an idea of relation, and he does not hesitate to cite Pound as an example of one who multiplied languages in his poetry. Glissant also articulates the idea that colonial insularity is conducive to a thickening of relation. This point can be discussed, but Glissant does not hide the fact that he is operating on a double level (categorical and poetico-political). Creole, for him, goes with relation. In the humanities and social sciences, however, métissage most often refers only to itself, becoming an instance of self-affirmation. In this sense, métissage is cause and effect, product and producer, and in such a way that its declared specificity (colonial history) gets dissolved in a generalization that it

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should guard against (the remnant, “everything is métis”). Defenders of métissage would perhaps respond that this self-erasure signals the entry into the postcolonial, according to a dialectic of incarnation in disappearance. This defense might suffice, unless this dissolution into the all still responds to a logic of possession, where the enchanted passes entire into the other, metabolized, assimilated by him. There is no doubt that the dilution in turn alters the integral body. However, under the cover of métissage, the preeminence of colonization and imperialist hierarchization might unexpectedly find a new life beyond their historical death, and for centuries to come.

Inspired Literatures My objections do not concern métissage, but rather the loud appeals made in its name. Without in any way denying the productivity of the idea (in literature and especially in anthropology), I think it is indispensable to question with more virulence its prevailing rhetoric, or its unwarranted prescription. The paradigmatic temptation that hybridization illustrates (without encompassing it) proves a supplementary trap. In this sense, the possession encountered here does not do the work of speaking all the colonies. Yet the phrase that exhibits and realizes possession can also determine the discourses of the (post)colonial period. The phrase is neither a necessity nor a closed field where every utterance must remain. Anterior and ulterior to each word spoken, it provides words, arrangements, and expressions that have already been tested, whose reprise, whose revival, only appears all the more obvious because of its existence. It then falls to each text, each statement, to reckon accounts with the phrase that it speaks. Possession may in this way become motif, jargon, category, concept, or notion. These differences concern us as soon as we examine the quality or the scope of a discourse; it is not necessary for us to be detained by them any longer than the long exposition that has just taken place. A speech event makes the undetermined of the determined stand out. As it happens, possession can tell us something else about the colony, and about what escapes it. The colony does not subsist entirely within possession, nor is its diction solely subsumed in the phrase of possession. However, the apparent refusal of the words of enchantment for imperial expansion and its consequences brings with it the significant risk of an unfortunate repetition. Contemporary doctrines, from integration to métissage, illustrate this point well enough. Modern social speech is ruled by a figure of rationalization that has moved outside its former philosophical limits. Colonization is likewise an enterprise for the conquest of the unknowable, which gets allocated beforehand in a

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race, a county, a people, and so on. This illusory movement (deterritorialization and reterritorialization) proceeds from the failures specific to the supposed process of civilization, as I have noted. When the other’s privilege fades—his consubstantial magic—this nonrationality can be reconsidered for thought yet again, as I am attempting to do here. It can also be caricatured as irrational, or masked, hidden—a phase that does not uniformly coincide with the disappearance of the phrase that bore the gesture of inclusive exclusion, so typical of colonial transformation. Nonetheless, explicit arguments about the satanic indigene enter into a series of reforms, whose latest manifestations render the language of haunting nearly inaudible, although haunting circulates still. In this apparatus of historical rupture, literature could not fail to play a decisive role. Constantly banished outside of discourses of knowledge, despite the action of its thought (or rather, because of it), literature names a discursive practice that creates meaning in language, and does so by nonrational contradiction. Such a posture is accompanied by an attainment of enthusiasm, where the poet is visited by the voices of others, inhabited by a god, troubled by the Muse. This legacy imposes itself on writers in the colony, being especially poignant for those demoniacal indigenes whom the blancs possess. Colonial enchantment encounters literary haunting so that the two may communicate with each other. Another possibility: if it is true that literature is an experience of possession for readers and authors, and I believe this to be the case, enthusiasm is not always expressly configured in the unfolding of the text. And books that pass through the colony have no particular obligation to do so. All the same, the phrase of haunting is often carried out through indigenous literature that returns to the history of a copresence. The colonial encounter has a similar formulation due to circumstance and not cause. Moreover, the poetic alliances of haunting become meaningful in discursive performance. One does not write about colonial possession because one is born an indigene: the writer transforms the summons in a new spoken act. It is far from my aim to read the proof of the colonial past in every ghostly occurrence. The examination of uttered coincidence is enough; no need to change determination into determinism. Literature thus had a propensity for speaking colonial haunting and its untenable logic; it was not lacking in this regard. It helped maintain the dominant conversation, which will become even clearer in the next section, which analyzes speaking up (la prise de parole). Literature also provided the impossible itself to the colonized, who made their voices heard through the poetic act. Decolonization movements in the twentieth century included

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literature as a site of reflection that was quite often important, though perhaps not always privileged. Long before this, pioneering authors had demonstrated the reunion between lyric enthusiasm and the possession of slavery. We see the phrase altered by writing as far back as the publication of the literary collection of Phillis Wheatley. Wheatley was probably the first black woman captured in Africa, enslaved, and then freed in America to have published a work of poetry in English (1773). In this opus, one finds few clear references to race. Christian sentiment dominates, and the poetic “I” sometimes rejoices in the deportation and enslavement that allowed her access to the Gospel. The beginning of Wheatley’s poem “To the University of Cambridge, in New-England” qualifies her “native shore” as a “land of errors” and thanks divine providence for having led her to America (ll. 5–6). The discovery of the true religion suits the colonial missionary spirit. Wheatley finds common ground with her elder, another freed slave, Jupiter Hammon, who addressed her in twenty-four stanzas, all glossing a passage from scripture referenced in the margin. Hammon is a preacher first and foremost, and his prose “Addresses” are incessantly interrupted and complemented by biblical citations. With Pauline accents, he does not hesitate to say that the most complete form of slavery is bearing the “yoke of sin and of Satan” (Addresses 14), besides which actual existing slavery is merely a terrible but transitory form of suffering. This kind of argument might lend credence to current ideas about Wheatley (to the degree that we can know her at all, I should add). We would have an intelligent woman poet, courageous and talented, but who would belong to a period without racial awareness. She would not have completed the mystical voyage described by Sartre; she would not be reborn to her African-ness, from which would stem her mediated acceptance of slavery in the name of the Gospel. Her repeated professions of faith, her many references to Greek and Latin worlds, would signal so many proofs of her inevitable alienation. Certainly Wheatley, the “Ethiopian poetess,” does not sing negritude in the way Senghor did. However, it is easy to see in her a precursor chained to the representations that are produced about her milieu. Wheatley, in contrast to Senghor, speaks the path leading her from her possession as a slave to her poetic inspiration. Beginning with her verses addressed to Harvard, Wheatley invokes the muses of the neoclassical tradition: “While an intrinsic ardor prompts to write, / The muses promise to assist my pen.” The feminine “I” is swallowed up in a creative fire and is accordingly made to assist the divinities. What might seem to be a simple cliché takes on a singular consistency in the web woven among the poems. The “muse” of the “I” becomes “my

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muse,” as in this text written to a young black painter: “my muse with heav’nly transport glow” (“To S.M., A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works”). In yet another instance of occasional verse “the Afric muse” emerges (“To His Honor, The Lieutenant Governor, on the Death of His Lady”). Egypt, Ethiopia, and Africa are often given as synonyms that refer in general to the “I,” or to other black people mentioned in the poems.23 This African muse is no commonplace expression. Francis Williams, a black poet born in 1702 who wrote in Latin, caused a scandal by giving to Musa the epithet Nigerrima in his encomium for the governor of Jamaica.24 To the traditional muses a new divinity is added, one that protects African poets. Furthermore, Wheatley’s phrase is ambiguous, since “the Afric muse” could also serve as a paraphrase for I. Gallant poetry has transformed the beloved woman into an inspirational muse, so that the irresistible power named by Wheatley could just as well be that of the Muse passing through her. This collusion is rendered even more probable by the opening lines of “On Recollection,” which read: “Mneme begin. Inspire, ye sacred nine, / Your vent’rous Afric in her great design.” Mnemosyne, apostrophized by the Greek term translating “recollection” (mneme), is the ninth Muse. The adventurous African is here the I, claiming the transports of enthusiasm. “The high-raptur’d poet” (l. 14) becomes a participle of the muse and of Africa. The two entities become interchangeable, and the I, self-enchanted, is repeated in the perlocutionary utterance of its poetic authority. Africanness is displaced from its biographical meaning to the oratorical construction of a creative possession. Wheatley’s ars poetica is “Ethiopian” thanks to the African muse, which by providing the words, calls forth a black Phillis Wheatley in the very gesture of writing. Only one poem in the collection is devoted entirely to the dispossession of slavery, “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” This poem includes the argument for providential conversion, but also a reported statement, a self-justification by the slave merchant, which is placed in quotation marks and contested by the author: “ ‘Their color is a diabolic die.’ ” This “diabolic die” attaches magic to black skin. If Wheatley admits to the wrongs of her “Pagan land,” she nonetheless undoes racialization, the coloring of enchantment. To the phrase that would make her demonic by nature, one of the Nègres that Father Labat described in his 1722 account of slaves as “obsessed and tormented by the Devil” (370), Wheatley doubly responds. She tells us that the fate of black people is not fixed once and for all—an argument that strikes one today as somewhat tricky. Yet her text also responds in a different way, beyond apologetic intentions. The possession created by colonial language is transformed into an inspired haunting. Literary expression—the neoclassicism

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of the African muse—opens up the possibility of a postcolonial singularity: the demonizations of the slave trade are thwarted. The first discourse of power that “made” the victim rearticulates itself in the nonsubjective singularity of a poetic I that her work brings forth. Literature does not end slavery, grant independence, or change society. It makes minor, episodic contributions. Literature only helps people to live, to live more; this is what both authors and readers seek. Because colonization is also a spoken oppression, literature has the liberty to respond to it in such a way that singularities may be formed, manipulating possession itself to instantiate a thought, a language. If novels and poems refer to the phrase we are analyzing, it is often by virtue of a critique exerted counter to the logic of colonial haunting. Literature offers the chance—take it or not—to make possession speak against the grain of social appropriation, for literature to recognize itself in possession. It allows us, as in a mirror, to understand the colonial experience, taking us beyond our own personal encounters. The colony begins with some group taking power from another group; after this, everything remains to be said. What is at stake here is the reinvention of a signifying contradiction—not reversal, inverted symmetry, imitation, or denial. Each time a work is concerned with the plunder of colonialism and draws the force of its writing from it, then this work is providing the opportunity to survive haunting in that language. This gift is not obsolete after the abolition of slavery, or independence. To believe this would be to minimize the supernatural part of colonial domination, which begins with property but then instigates the abnormal durations of possession. Enchantment can continue, so solutions must endure. One must give thanks for books that recognize possession and find in it a force different from that of already-established power. Hear how René Depestre makes the voodoo spirits speak, how the Loa spirits of Un arc-en-ciel pour l’Occident chrétien (1972), or the Cantate d’octobre à la vie et à mort du Commandant Ernesto Che Guevara (1968), inhabit a text in order to designate the (post)colonial history of the Antillean people. Think of the writing of Toni Morrison, whose Beloved (1989) links the narrative opening and the form of the slave narrative, addressing the exemplary historicity of the fugitive slave, Margaret Garner, by describing the fantastic return of the dead child in an adult body. See Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Phantasia (1986), which renders the wandering of the Maghrebi immigrant through a spectral aesthetics of wonders. Understand the double transformation of the title character in Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière (1986), about a métis slave in Salem who is beaten for calling herself a demonic witch, before becoming an Invisible pro-

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tecting her fellow creatures. Find the (post)colonial in Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko, somewhere between Japan and the Indian reservation, the wounds of the past and shamanism reinvented. Admire how the different stories of Nour, 1947 (2001) by Raharimanana carry out the other spiritual cannibalism practiced by the missionaries and colonizers in Madagascar. I hope the length of this list and its lack of exhaustiveness will be excused. The goal was to put forward just a few of the possible authors and titles. This book includes others. My proposition aims to reach the richness of the word: it proposes. The case is therefore not closed, but this suggestion seems strong enough to warrant continuing onto another path that would cross this one. By ending with literature, I want to emphasize that in terms of language, not all utterances are equal. As such, I am not doing discourse analysis. If to compare is instructive, to flatten texts without any concern for their qualities or contexts nonetheless remains a schematization, a painful restriction. It also bears repeating that literature—at once having no effect on society and the site of vital invention—includes writing as well as reading. To those who do not want to perish from the phrase of colonial possession, to those formerly colonized people who are held against their will in the past, to the noncolonizers enlisted to the cause of the massacre by political reality, I am not saying: “Become poets!” To read is to be the other, otherwise; a bold enough project as it is, and quite ambitious. Yet beyond this, for those who say the colony, literary singularities are a proof of an impossible possibility. And an inspiration. Everyday speech is to be formed again, and again reformed, if one wants to avoid perpetuating the destructive brutality within the phrase. I am not issuing prescriptions, nor do I know the antidote to murder, exclusion, or racism. I do know, however, that if one hears these things spoken of, the status of our speech deserves to be interrogated. Literature helps, although it alone is not enough to understand the nature of this trap. We have heard the phrase ferry its words, initiate its logic, lend its way of talking. We must now see how colonial power extended the empire of languages overseas little by little, how it perfected a censure of the indigene. We must move from questioning what is said, and now consider how the very articulation of speech was conditioned by the advent of the colonies.

Pa rt I I

Giving Languages, Taking Speech

Who speaks—can she? Is there a force or an instance that authorizes us to speak, or to write? Social language usage certainly privileges some actors and orators over others. However, speech cannot be given unless someone in fact takes it. In other words, it is only the right to proffer that may be conferred; to withhold a word, that is another story: here, it is ours. These opening sentences doubtless bring us to the nagging question of my own legitimacy, and of all legitimacy, for the interpretation of the colonial adventure. For the present, I am much more concerned with slaves and indigenes who ventured far beyond the stated limits, and who spoke. To the predetermined restrictions placed on access to discourse, one must add an entire set of pronounced impossibilities when speaking of the colonial context. If an idiom is always acquired, removed from all naturalness, then a so-called français de souche, a “French-Frenchman,” has no more of a predisposition toward his language than someone recently annexed to the empire. However, in many of the texts we will read, we will find the formulation of a linguistic inaptitude among the colonized. As a result, the francophone indigene, for example, will pass for a puppet—or a prodigy. In the latter case, as a divine miracle or living proof of the supernatural action of national education, the new speaker will still have to face a certain history of the language, which sought to arm itself against all illegitimacy, and which wanted to impose a silence at the very heart of words themselves. This procedure of interdiction, 81

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residing in the words of a language devoted precisely to replacing the other idioms of the conquered, constitutes a colonial specificity (more extreme than the republican hostility toward dialects and patois). The gift and censure of French sought to safeguard an instrumental francophonie against all (desire for) speech. I will examine these detailed mechanisms I have just named. We will see once again that differences (historical, geographical), even the theoretical contradictions, do not prevent comprehension of the meanings of the colonial phenomenon. In short, we will linger over the repeated event of words that break with this system of silencing, in the Americas, and in Algerian and metropolitan France. I will also certainly continue to examine the colony from different sides; this will allow us to specify how you and I can speak of it.

Ch a p ter 4

The Languages of Empire

With the prescribed articulation between language and speech (langue et parole), we enter a more clearly theologico-political space. The term “theologico-political” merits clarification. It is taken from Spinoza’s 1670 Tractatus theologico-politicus, written in Latin. This text aimed to establish the possibility of a philosophy that would be indentured neither to religion nor to secular power. The final chapter of Spinoza’s work affirms the possibility for “everyone” to publish “what he thinks.” “Speaking” is “licit” (dicere licere, the chapter title affirms), desirable even, from the point of view of priests and princes. These two perspectives are considered in sequence, in the order of demonstration, which might explain certain older translations in the vernacular languages, which disregarded the audacious adjective Spinoza uses. In addition, the Tractatus does not take the pairing of or the slippage between theology and politics as its primary focus. This does not keep the collusion between the two from being designated in the preface, which condemns the apotheosis of kings. This idea is already quite present in the description of the “transfer” of sovereignty from the Hebrew nation to God after the Exodus.1 I do not intend here to initiate a new interpretation of Spinoza. Rather, I invoke his ideas in order to make use of the argument. We know that “metaphysics” was not a substantive for Aristotle, but rather a descriptive designation (this is the book following the Physics—in Greek, meta ta Physika). The new concept of “metaphysics” does not constitute a betrayal 83

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of Aristotle, only a reprise of his doctrine with a different meaning. The same thing is happening here: after so many others, I consider the existence of a theologico-political domain. The fact that this intersection is marked by a Spinozan term is not irrelevant:2 the field of study—the legitimacy of speech—is precisely what is at stake. Political theology is in any case induced, at one moment or another, by the phrase that convokes ecstasies, possessions, and spiritualism in the colony. The reprise of others’ words did not, in principle, prevent the effectiveness of poetic speech. Allow me also to requalify one last time our objective here: we will explore theologico-political programming against indigenous speech, and through language (contre la parole indigène et par la langue). This is why the second colonial empire and its aftermath will serve as our primary terrain. It is not because the ancien régime had in some way privileged the expression of slaves. At the same time, however, language simply did not play the role that we have started to examine. Censure was exercised in another way, which I will have to approach using broad strokes.

The Polyglot Mission Separating souls from enslaved bodies, the Code noir does not even mention the possibility that the slave might speak. The prohibition is general. The only misdeeds of the noirs are located in the blows they might inflict, assault and battery, theft, and escape (arts. 33, 34, 35, and 36, 38, respectively). Freed slaves, for their part, are expected to pay special respect to their former masters and their direct descendants. Slander will be punished according to the aggravating circumstances (art. 58). In ancient law, slander (l’injure) could be either physical or verbal. The capacity of a word to inflict harm on its own is thus not introduced until the point where, slavery having ended, the soul is legally reintegrated into the formerly possessed body. The royal edict annihilates the spoken word by means of the performative range of its own wording (langage); the annulment, however, is not performed specifically by the French language (la langue française). The legal text is intended to be put into effect, no matter what language translates it. As for slander, it would be recognized independently of the speech that would constitute slander. The ancien régime readily tolerated a de facto multilingualism in the heart of the kingdom. Language is not the basis of identity. The celebrated VillersCotterêts ordinance (1539) mentions the “langage maternel françois” in only one article (art. 111).3 The supposed reason for this has to do with the difficulty of “interpretation” (art. 110) and lawyers’ poor “understanding of Latin words” (art. 111). So, the opacity of an ancient language justifies the

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imposition of French. As with Joachim du Bellay’s La deffence et illustration de la langue françoise (Defense and Illustration of the French Language, 1549), the aim is to construct a vernacular that would rival Latin. This is the starting point for a linguistic tradition that will combine the exaltation and the control of French, such as we will find in abundance below. However, the social dimension of prescription in this period is intrinsically associated with the exercise of royal power (the court, the courts of justice, the capital, etc.). The production of books, and of literature especially, will spread this usage of French. Nevertheless, there is no immediate obligation to write in French: Descartes chooses whether or not to compose in Latin depending on his desired readership. Ultimately, the injunction that everyone everywhere use French is neither fundamental nor effective in the France of the ancien régime. The linguistic situation is, on the contrary, diffracted according to the various sites and milieus. In such a context, the silencing of slaves could not be strongly tied to language. This fact in no way excludes the theologico-political patterns established by speakers. However, the paths taken rarely cross the majoritarian option that we will encounter at the end of the nineteenth century. In a country rife with linguistic diversity and particularities, “Créole” is a supplementary “degeneration,” a new “patois,” that is, a “corrupted language,” to refer to the definition given in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. This vision of decay can be connected structurally to biblical damnation (Genesis 11:1–10): people are fated to understand each other less and less. Exile outside the Tower of Babel and geographical dispersion are the factors of this ideolectical multiplication. Even if it is not recognized as a language at the time, Creole recalls the process of differentiation that is at work in the theological history of the Fall—and its repetitions. The appearance of a common version of Creole spoken by the common people coincides with the hierarchical division of the political body in the account given in the Old Testament. Can this inevitable corruption be avoided? The Missions, by spreading the Gospel, displace the question of language. The episode of speaking in tongues in the book of Acts serves the conquest of the colonized in another way. In this passage, Luke presents the apostles as being inspired by the Holy Ghost. The “languages of fire” (Acts 2:3) signal this new gift: the preachers address a cosmopolitan crowd, and each person is able to recognize his own language. The message of an evangelical God has no need for a given language. The New Testament thus corrects the curse of Babel in the universality (cf. Greek katholikos) of the word of Christ. The Missionaries of the modern period will, in turn, evangelize to faraway peoples in their languages. The inculcation

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of French and ecclesiastical Latin will of course take place, but the decisive front will always be the other’s language. The difficulties caused by the linguistic uncertainties of the priests and interpreters will revive the story of the Pentecost. “From lack of knowing the language,” notes the clergyman Pierre Biard in 1610, it is not possible to “instruct” deeply ( Jesuit Relations 1: 160). Biard is only repeating the conviction held by the Iberian members of the Society of Jesus at the beginning of the preceding century, when one preacher affirmed that “it is necessary to understand the language,” or another preacher claimed that “we are learning the language, and are deriving many fruits from it” (Monumenta Missionum 158, 562). The Jesuits in particular are masters of this propagation of the divine Word through the means of languages. One of the first accounts of a mission in a foreign land is written by Paul Le Jeune in the 1630s. In Champlain’s Nouvelle France, Le Jeune does not cease to underline the importance of multilingualism for the man of faith. At the same time as he teaches the ABCs to an Indian child or a “little Negro” (petit Neigre) (Jesuit Relations 5: 62) originally from Madagascar, Le Jeune undertakes the assiduous study of the “language of the Savages” (112). The Jesuit missionary must do without an interpreter, become a polyglot, and even adapt prayers for a new language. For instance, Le Jeune mentions the version of the Lord’s Prayer he “composed, partly in rhymes in their language” (188). The following wish comprises the final words of the 1633 account: “O let us know the languages of these poor savages! This will befall us when it please Our Lord” (112). In the New World or in Asia, missionary activity remains linked to respect for the divine Word, independently from the language in practice. The European vernaculars, Latin, and the languages of India and America are all capable of spreading the biblical message. As a result, the articulation of the theological with the political is complex and variable. The plane of worldly power is not detached from the Church; it is in fact the sacred nature of sovereignty that allows worldly power to exist— but it is not an atemporal power, since religion must, despite everything, pass through its social actualization. The theologico-political then gets split and begins proposing divergent goals, even as its actions render these goals effectively compatible. In this case, the force of law annihilates the possibility of speech for the slave and reduces to a minimum the verbal expression of the “savage”—even those who have been freed. However, in order to prove the divine gift of languages, the missionary needs to recognize that the colonized (Indian or black) speaks another idiom, be it a distinct language or a patois. Such a contradiction is far from a cracking open of the colonial edifice, but it does foster violence and subjugation. The untimely movements from the one plane of the theologico-political to the other regulate individual existence. In

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the phrase of possession, one witnesses an aleatory series of sudden impulses, which follow, moreover, the physical abduction—expulsion from one place toward another, breaks in continuity, legal ecstasies. At the end of the day, the colonized will always be possessed. Ultimately, each plane is likely to pursue an action that is at the very least paradoxical. Of course, the apostolic miracle confirms even the savage’s linguistic faculty, without which there would be nothing miraculous at all; but this capacity of the catechized is surreptitiously presented as a secondary effect of pastoral care. The overseas populations were speaking before the arrival of the Jesuits; it is the inculcation of the word of God alone that can remake their language for them. Let us stay with Le Jeune’s account. The author repeatedly underlines the difficulties he faced in his linguistic apprenticeship. Yet when he describes his teaching in 1633, he becomes the one, by the grace of God, who puts the words in the mouths of children who do not speak French. One thus reads: “I make them say the Pater noster, the Ave Maria, and the Credo in their language: I give them a rough explanation of the mystery of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation; and at all times ask them if I am speaking properly, if they are truly understanding, and they all reply, ‘eoco, eoco, ninisitoutenan,’ ‘Yes, yes, we understand’” ( Jesuit Relations 5: 186). The students’ assent eases the anxiety born from their poor command of the language, confirming the existence of a glossolalic force. But there is more. The children possess speech here only to say the prayers written by the priest in their own language—and to declare that they understand: the divine and the phatic. Le Jeune becomes the true depository of this indigenous language he has half-learned. He may now make himself its master by reinventing it: “I forge words close to [words in] their language, which I make them understand” (188). These neologisms form the new Catholic lexicon of a language being revolutionized. We should note that the syntax of this last quotation borders on double entendre (in the two meanings of the word “forge”: to create and to counterfeit). This text can be read as saying that the priest “makes [the students] hear their language” ( fait entendre leur langue [aux élèves]). This meaning would point to nothing more than a simple extrapolation of the prayer that Le Jeune wrote; in the original text, he himself gives the first words of this prayer, and their French translation: “My Lord and Captain, Jesus: teach me your words and your will!” (188). When a missionary comes to recreate the language of the other, as did all those who adopted European terms to express divinity or to impose a new semantics on the lexicon of another language,4 the speech of the savage ends up becoming merely a consequence of the supernatural linked to ecclesiastical power. Before the arrival of Europeans, the indigenes were only awaiting the revelation of their own language through the Word of the Church. On

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the more worldly side of things, law is the institution that takes these tactical contradictions the farthest. The Code noir reduces the speech of the slave to nothing, as we have seen. Yet the judicial stage is the place where the Nègre, if he is summoned, must speak. Transcriptions of testimony, as usual, are always mediated in such a way that what gets written down is not identical to the statements uttered. It is a safe bet that the slave ordered to testify by the same law that bars his speech has little to gain in the process. I write that it is a safe bet, since few trial documents that cite black participants are available to us. But this was apparently extremely rare, and it is no accident that the rare occurrences of black testimony are not available to us; at the command of the king, in order to satisfy a demand made by the sovereign Council of Martinique, the legal archives of the Antilles were mostly destroyed in 1787, on the grounds that the clerk of the court’s offices were “congested” (Chauleau, “Quelle histoire pour l’esclavage?” 28). The immense job of collating snatches, membra disjecta, and fragments, and of collecting notarized documents that have survived this legal destruction, remains to be accomplished, although certain scholars are currently working toward this goal (including my nearly homonymous colleague, Laurent Dubois). In this series of incidents, take notice of the mechanisms of control that annul, then give back under constraint, then finally erase the speech of slaves.

The Opening of Black Indigenous Speech in French Whatever internal differences existed, the colonization of countries, bodies, minds, and souls in this period considers the French language to be incidental for its project. The gift of languages is a consequence of Babel and an apostolic miracle. Absolute silencing remains independent from the language employed. There is nothing special about French. The Revolutionary period will redistribute these values by rooting the colony (via the nation) in a language. The emergence of francophone speech by noirs previously gagged or interdicted gets added to this change. In particular, ever since the publication of the collective volume Une politique de la langue (1975), it has been common knowledge that although other options were considered at the time, unification through language became a republican imperative during the Terror. It is worth insisting that the focalization of language was neither a historical obligation nor the inevitable result that it is often presented as in the grand and legendary narrative of the “progression of French.”5 The justification that Bertrand Barère brought before the Comité de Salut Public in Year II of the French Revolution is more congruent with this fact than the myth of linearity. For Barère, the push to

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unify the nation through language was a question of creating a rupture: “We have revolutionized the government, the laws, habits, morals, customs, commerce, and even thought; let us also revolutionize language, which is their everyday instrument” (in Certeau, Julia, and Revel, Une politique de la langue 295). Logically, the slogan is the following: “Citizens, the language of a free people must be one and the same for all” (297). The consubstantiality of the political regime and the language becomes prescribed as never before. Once the sovereignty of the king has been given to the Republic, conceived as the unity of the collective, plurality has to yield. These new transfers still depend on the theologico-political, and it is not surprising to read in Abbé Grégoire’s report that “with thirty different patois, we are still, in terms of language, in the Tower of Babel” (302). French is the language of France; a Frenchman must speak French. Such tautologies are acquired historically, and whatever prior events helped authorized them, they emerge in the context of the political renewal after 1789 and the rise of the nation. The Revolution is also the moment when men of color6—including the noirs, both in the colonies and in the metropole—will publish, write letters, and express themselves beyond the circles in which they were confined under the ancien régime. The creation of this “public space” through political changes, the use of written techniques of diffusion, and the textual events themselves are all crucial. Yet if these historical actors wanted to question the new regime verbally, they had to do so in French. Since this language serves as an essential and sacred bearer of national identity, the linguistic obligation to it therefore increased. My intention is not to interrogate, on principle, the color of the men and women who have handed down texts in French at the end of the eighteenth century. I am concerned with speech that constructs the speaker as indigenous or black. There is no naturalism here. Black speech or mulatto eloquence derives its meaning from itself, in its capacity as a speech act. We must first focus on how diction creates a racial subject. Granted, the material obstacles are not insignificant. The Cahiers de Doléances,7 for example, drafted in the immediate aftermath of monarchic power, almost always excluded the noirs on principle, so they could thus record nothing of what they wanted to, or were even able to, say. Mulattoes were often the heirs, sometimes rich heirs, of white colonists. “Free men and women of color” could also prosper in business, and a number of them possessed slaves and land in the colonies. This bipartition between métis and Nègre will mark the free Republic of Haiti for a long time, where an enduring black middle class will only truly emerge with the Duvalier dictatorship. Reproducing the discourse of domination through continuity, profit, and calculation, a number of public mulatto authors will publish pamphlets and

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petitions during the Revolution that espouse the cause of slavery. Here, too, the documents are few and far between. These delicate questions lie at the center of several remarkable essays that focus on the end of the colony of Saint-Domingue and its transformation into the independent Republic of Haiti. My goal here is to situate an event in the colonial order of speech, which is in itself more important than arguments about a compromise with slavery. When the mulattoes took up conservative positions (which many of them would keep), they did so in the name of their European ancestry. In the March 1791 petition that the “Colored Citizens” (Citoyens de Couleur) addressed to the National Assembly, the signatories designated themselves as distinct from the white or black populations. The authors claim a systematic expansion for the mulattoes—whom they immediately distance from the Nègres. Do their motivations arise out of political realism? This is not out of the question. After all, that champion of emancipation, Abbé Grégoire, member of the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks), declared that immediate freedom would be “a grievous present” for the enslaved Africans (Lettre aux Philanthropes 3). The appeal of the mulattoes to the deputies of the Assembly culminates in a grand return of the white ancestor: “The whites are the fathers, the brothers of the citizens of color; it is their blood, it is French blood that runs in their veins” (Pétition nouvelle des Citoyens de couleur 8). From this point of view, speaking up is ambiguous at the very least, since the mulatto in this text distinguishes himself in order to be better identified through the inexorable factualness of generation. The fraternity invoked here (“brothers of the citizens of color”) belongs to the revolutionary register of the naturalization of political ties. Immediately, the addition of paternity, combined with the metaphor of blood (which at that time was a near equivalent of what we now call race), shifts the debate toward a politicization of natural ties. In this perilous zone, the citizen of color is defined by his race(s) and his ancestors, where the blanc takes precedence, on principle, over the noir. One can easily recognize here one of the roots of the implicit hierarchy of different métissages that will still hold sway in the nineteenth century and that classified those with “mixed blood” in inverse ratio to the proportion of their African ancestry, placing the Octoroon (oneeighth black blood) ahead of the Quadroon (one-quarter black). If one owes speaking as a mulatto to the fact of being a child of white parents—and it is in this name that a different kind of expression arises here—then nothing could be more normal. Such an instance of speaking up by a person of color is canceled out and no longer threatens the imperative of silencing. Yet although the majority of mulattoes publicly expressing themselves had opted for this ambiguous discursive strategy at the beginning

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of the Revolution, a later correction clearly occurs, which recognizes another manner of accounting for performative potentialities. In this case fraternité becomes (within the limits of phallocentrism) an appeal to the transcendence of races. Jean-Baptiste Mills, “métis deputy” of Saint-Domingue, likewise declares that in the Year II in Paris, during the celebration of abolition, “this odious word [‘slaves’] will no longer sully the dictionary of the French, in every part of France there will henceforth be but one people made up of friends and brothers” (qtd. in Chaumette, Discours 38); later, before the Conseil des Cinq-cents, Etienne Victor Mentor, a man of color born in Martinique who himself became a deputy in Saint-Domingue, aims to speak to his “citizen colleagues . . . in the name of all [his] brothers, the blacks and men of color of the French colonies” (Mentor, Discours prononcé 1). This redefinition of a theoretical brotherhood, surpassing all the fantastic limits of family ancestry, becomes suddenly more necessary than before, because it must operate with what was the shock of black speech rising up in French in 1789, and which demanded an emancipation that neither their official “friends,” the mulattoes, nor the majority of colonists wanted to grant them. On 29 August 1789, a group of slaves from Martinique present themselves as “the Whole Nation of Black Slaves” (La Nation Entière des Esclaves Noirs) (Pétition nouvelle des Citoyens de couleur 8).8 This use of the term nation belongs to ancient, biblical usage, designating a human group linked through a common history and alliances. Just as one would speak of the Hebrew nation or of different “African nations,” the signatories of the letter evoke the “Nation blanche” and the “Proud Nation” of mulattoes.9 These nations, however, are assembled within an entity that assumes the French meaning of “nation.” What the slaves are attempting here is comparable to the establishment of the Indian nations in the United States, where the social and political meanings of the term get blended together. The means of this unexpected vindication attaches itself to the production of a spoken word, described at the end of the letter: “All slaves of one unanimous voice issue forth but one cry, one clamor, demanding a liberty that they have rightly earned through centuries of suffering and ignominious servitude” (Tous les esclaves d’une voix unanime ne font qu’un cri qu’une clameur pour réclamer une liberté qu’ils ont justement gagnée par des siècles de souffrance et de servitude ignominieuse; qtd. in Pouliquen, Doléances des peuples coloniaux 74). The petition is rife with figures of unanimity, wholeness, and union, pushed to the point of paroxysm (cf. “the Whole Nation of Black Slaves”). These figures are transformed— or reinforced—in the resounding unison. The lexical requalification from “voice” to “cry,” then from “clamor” (clameur) to “demand” (reclamer), the polyptoton of these last two terms, the coalescence created by the absence of

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punctuation between “one cry” and “one clamor,” and the alliterative emphasis clearly announce the process of the formation of a black enunciation. A new voice forms and makes itself heard in French. The politician Anaxagoras Chaumette was thus able to say in 1794 in front of the three deputies of Saint-Domingue, “one black, the other métis, and the third white: And you, Black Men, you do not . . . (I have to use your expression) you will no longer hold your tongue [vous n’avalerez plus votre langue]” (Chaumette, Discours 31, 38; original emphasis). The aposiopesis preceding the prophetic future transcribes the interruption of a white, French discourse under pressure from a tongue/a language, both the same and other, with a resounding clamor. With the emergence of the collective speaker, the figure of the black spokesman appears. A number of politicians who had been brought out of slavery play a considerable role in the French Revolution. In the 1930s, C. L. R. James writes The Black Jacobins, a work that will become a classic, although little read in France. Toussaint Louverture remains one of the most remarkable of such figures, a man whose historical and literary reputation has been active and constant since the nineteenth century. And yet Toussaint is not only a great military figure, a tactician of the Revolution, or a dictator. He is all of these things combined, even though hagiography often erases the disgraceful Haitian constitution he signed in 1801, just before his deportation to the Jura by order of Napoleon. However, “the First of the Blacks” still contributed, after deportation, to the establishment of a body of work in French that he had been writing since his time as a colonized subject. Louverture (sometimes spelled “L’Ouverture”) is a nickname whose origin has been much discussed. In the absence of any consensus, I purposely link this cognomen to the opening (l’ouverture) of indigenous black speech in French. The force and variety of Toussaint’s interventions are striking. Letters, reports, and texts appearing in various pamphlets have been preserved for us. They all testify to a brilliant use of the rhetorical and generic resources available at the end of the eighteenth century. The move here is from silence or slander to the pronouncement of a word that mobilizes belle lettres for political use. Extrait du rapport adressé au Directoire exécutif (Excerpt from the Report Addressed to the Executive Director, 1797) is presented as the narration of meetings between Toussaint and Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, who was the commissioner of the Republic in Saint-Domingue. This book gives Toussaint the opportunity to discredit Sonthonax, whom he will eventually push out of power. In the two sections of the Extrait, named “conferences,” the narrative most often uses “the form of a dialogue” (2). The capacity to change form according to the nature of what is being said marks each of Toussaint’s texts, which select and then exhaust linguistic forms. Another work, the Réfutation of the argument

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made by the royalist Viénot Vaublanc, is conducted in the manner of a textual explication, an exegesis where Vaublanc’s Discours is decomposed into fourteen “assertions,” cited before they are decrypted, criticized, and opposed. Far from employing an epidictic tone, the Extrait is as much Socratic dialogue as it is theater. The two characters (Toussaint and Sonthonax) respond to each other, and certain moments required for tragedy can be easily distinguished—such as exposition or catastrophe (when Sonthonax, per Louverture, proposes Saint-Domingue’s independence from France, Extrait 5–7). Stage directions punctuate the text, reinforcing the vivacity of the (post) colonial stage. When Toussaint gives his directions using the first person I, on occasion a third person intervenes, as in this specification concerning “General Toussaint: (With impatience that he is unable to hide)” (13). Without wanting to overextend any paraphrase of Maurice Blanchot, I would readily agree that this slippage from the I to the he introduces the political into the orbit of literature. Toussaint is a character for himself and for others. A tragic king, despotic and sublime, he constructs his theatrical role before the play Lamartine writes in 1840 (to which we will turn shortly) or Edouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint (1961). In many ways, Toussaint Louverture enables the birth of francophone literature. He is both the bearer of black speech (une parole noire) that resounds in the poetic event and, through his repeated critique of slavery, a pioneer in the critique of colonialism that will so mark the corpus from the 1930s to the 1960s (with Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, etc).10 My recrossing of the revolutionary moment is not meant to be comprehensive. Let me underscore the fact that something also happens within the order of colonial speech after 1789. We see the formation of an indeterminate body of texts articulated by former slaves or people of color who take advantage of secularization to escape the simple repetition of religious dogma. The theologico-political condition remains, however, when Republic and Revolution can—up to a certain point—replace the Church and divine grace. Let me underline that this aggregation of words is not univocal; this will also be true much later. Let us resist the temptation to organize textuality around one meaning (the absolute denunciation of slavery, for example); this would be going too far in a direction that today might seem more politically satisfying. However, I retain what counts: the advent of another textuality during the first phase of modern decolonization. As absolute as it may have been, the silencing enforced during the ancien régime had at least one enormous counteractive effect; the very contingent overturning of the rule authorized a form of speech that was commensurate with the censure. The letters of slaves from Martinique or the writings of Toussaint

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condense discursive mastery and polyvalence. This occurs in French. There was certainly extensive use of Creole during the fight for independence. A Creole prayer, attributed to the black leader Boukman, was apparently pronounced during a rebel voodoo ceremony in the Bois-Caïman. The traces of this other rhetoric are questionable at the very least, however—and even the episode of Bois-Caïman is uncertain.11 Concerning the historical and emancipatory use of Creole, essentially all that remains are apocryphal words and bits of quotations scattered here and there in stories and narratives. Since it was a question of conversing with Paris and its emissaries, the great corpus of the black rebellion takes place in French, during this time that the political regime chose to create a national language. The legitimizing force of French was too powerful during these years for another great parole to develop in another language, be it Creole or one of the African languages spoken by slaves, or even Latin. To summarize, we have just found one instance of (post)colonial francophonie. This category of francophonie is not descriptive for me but rather interpretive. I will have the occasion, in chapter 7, to return to a further description of this term, with the supplementary proofs of what will come to intervene in the twentieth century. For the moment, let me emphasize that this revolutionary speech, having had Saint-Domingue as its epicenter, established the lasting possibility of calling oneself “black” or “of color” in French. The perlocutionary component of such an actualization is strong, given the censure, the denegation of all language by black people. Such an actualization also rests on a manipulation of the address, this one being almost entirely circumstantial—it is a question of responding to an accusation, of denouncing a particular attitude, of rebelling against a statement, etc.—and, in addition, abstracted from a purely determinative context from whence come the double theatrical enunciation, open letters, petitions, and discourses that surpass the specific context of their enunciation. Public space, certainly favored by conditions that were fairly independent of each other, is produced as a supplement by texts allowing the sharing of discourse by white, black, and mulatto speakers, independently of their first author, listener, or reader. This sharing takes place in a European vernacular, guaranteeing a remarkable coefficient of dissemination within the colonial empires. I want to reserve the term francophonie for these singular ruptures of the linguistic order, of which the years following 1789 provide the example. In this sense, the “opening” of francophonie by way of Saint-Domingue is not an origin (for the concretion I have described to become possible, there would have to have been previous attempts and long-standing linguistic capacities—in short, a kind of history). This opening remains, however, a stubborn reference,

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revealing the recurrent traits of this militant francophonie: disturbing, migrant, at the limit of literary poetics and politics, rife with spokespeople and collective speakers. Right after the independence of Saint-Domingue and the end of the French Revolution, the immediate consequences of the recent events will reverberate on two levels. The memory of disruptive francophone speech by Nègres or mulâtres will continue to play a role in the maintenance of the linguistic prestige of French in Haiti after independence;12 little by little, these “marks” will be deliberately covered over in metropolitan France. As for the second colonial empire, even as it retains certain theoretical foundations that would dictate the hierarchy of speakers, it will adopt strategies that appear to be less far-reaching, though inextricable, since they are now internal to the dispensation of the language.

Ordinary Grace and the Gift of Language The new empire that is established in the nineteenth century thus inherits all the previous debates, problems, and solutions. The revolutionary past will especially mark public life. The course of history is also a reflexive repetition. Through the succession of accumulations and modifications, a system of colonial constraint is set in place. This system is neither the fruit of ill will nor a creation ex nihilo. It is not absolutely totalitarian, in the sense that it would prevent any other attempt to distribute (or to coerce) idiolects. Lastly, this system of constraint is not perfectly stable, as events will disturb it more than once. In the pages that follow, where I will be associating discontinuous facts, I will no longer be erasing my own position as interpreter. I would also like to add that history, for our purposes, does not get the last word in this book; rather, history will be one of the qualities examined. By turning to military songs, political stances, or published articles, all chronologically distant from one another, I am deliberately tracing a pattern that links these points together. And asked to ground the reality of this gift in a certain date, I would respond that the goal is precisely to explain the normative function of colonial speech when the extraordinary emerges within indigenous expression—whether in the 1910s or the 1950s. In the aftermath of the Revolution, and indeed up until the Third Republic, secularization will not affect the theologico-politics of language doctrine. The majority argument will change, however. The republican state initiates one of those “transfers” observed by Spinoza: the body of the nation takes the place of the body of Christ. The Holy Word, during the apostolic missions, served to unify the diversity of languages. In the new theologicopolitical France, however, this Word can only be French, a language that had

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become naturally transcendent. Now, the idea of the superiority of French is an old one. During the Renaissance, Henri Estienne launched a book project entitled De la precellence du langage François (On the Precellence of the French Language). This particular status came from a secret “affinity” with “the Greek language, queen of languages” (Estienne, Traicté 17, 18). Later, the Enlightenment will accommodate this idea perfectly, as in Antoine de Rivarol’s L’universalité de la langue française (Discourse on the Universality of the French Language, 1784). These texts and others like them are reintegrated into a fictive framework, historical and progressive, which will bear witness to the gradual awareness of French exceptionalism on the part of France itself. The formation of the republican nation, still under the influence of the effects of the Revolution, transfers the attributes of the Supreme Being onto the body politic. France is no longer only the eldest daughter of the Church, the putative descendant of Greece or of Rome; it is La France. The first part of this book has allowed me to establish that the colonial phrase included supernatural possession until it obtained its rational and republican accents (with assimilation and integration). The theologico-political basis remains completely intact at the end of the nineteenth century, to which we now turn. And the theologico-political now also dictates the course of French education. In the controversies of the 1880s and 1890s regarding colonial education, the majority position will be that training is required in the national language. The apostolic model persists in most religious missions, precisely because they refuse the transference of transcendence. I am interested here in competing ideas not about the necessity, but about the possibility of instilling French among the colonized. Some theorized that the indigenes have a racial incompatibility with the French language—a position that will not prevail. Such is the credo of Gustave Le Bon, whose statements from the Colonial Congress of 1889 have been discussed in chapter 2. “Different races will not long be able to speak the same language” (Le Bon, Les lois psychologiques 92). Recall that for Le Bon, the indigenes’ faculty of expression is a decoy, a “provisional varnish” (La psychologie politique 211), since men are fated by race to repeat the words of their ancestors (Les lois psychologiques 14–15). Race, as inconsistent as it is unassailable, inserts each individual into a macabre continuity. The principle of possession and enchantment by the dead does not stop at the colony, but it designates that the veritable empire over beings has nothing to do with the functionaries of the overseas French empire. The indigenes are ruled by their complexion and the history that constructed their bodies and minds. Underneath the varnish, racial fatalism controls things. Consequently, Le Bon

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denies on principle the possibility that a black person, for example, could speak French. If this might seem to occur, the signification of the words he uses remains configured by heredity and in no way refers to the semantics of the language: “When people are different, what they consider to be corresponding words represent modes of thought and feeling that are so distant that, in reality, their languages have no synonyms, and translation from one to the other is impossible” (93).13 This internal obstacle to real communication between diverse languages prevents any genuine acquisition of a language separated from its race. In other words, the colonized person becomes a puppet manipulated by two forces. The mouth utters French words, but the real meaning of the discourse remains determined by foreign thinking, which the passage to a new dialect renders inaccessible. The indigenes get together and change French from within, as previously the Gauls had transformed Latin (Le Bon, Les lois psychologiques 92). This hypothesis is not probable, however, because of the inferiority of the conquered peoples. Le Bon believes more in a great degeneration spreading across the world. It is the age of the “Decadence of the Races” (the title of book 4 of Les lois psychologiques). Le Bon is thus tied to the Babelic model condemning men into their divisions. He even finds confusion within each language. Race avenges itself for having been abandoned by a national expansion that disregards its own principles, and prolongs the ruling of Yahweh. As for language, the republican dogma that Le Bon criticizes will, at first, distance itself from the figure of a vengeful God. France is the distributor. Because its word is its language (son verbe est sa langue), France will not faithfully reproduce the speaking in tongues episode from the second book of Acts. Vestiges of the gift of foreign languages remain for a small number of the apostles of the civilizing mission—think of the figure of the scholar, whose ultimate language would be Knowledge itself. In general, however, the gift of language will be from the colonizer to the colonized. French enlightens the indigenous mind the way grace would. In line with Malebranche’s Cartesianism, the state and its agents allow for the existence of a “supernatural infusion” (Traité de la nature et de la grâce 2.1.32). Sometimes one observes wonders. A black person inhabited by French, who lets himself be so thoroughly enchanted by civilization: a miracle. Remember Toussaint, how surprising he was. In 1840, before Toussaint signed into law the second abolition of slavery, Lamartine wrote his play Toussaint Louverture, in the preface to which he claimed was a “political work,” not a “literary work” (Oeuvres Complètes 22: 3). In this strange drama, Toussaint speaks a noble and sublime French. Far from producing a rereading of the success of “the First

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of the Blacks” imbued with voodoo, Lamartine, following his own religious poetics, finds in Toussaint a great inspired visionary, like “Moses, Romulus, Muhammad, Washington!” (Toussaint Louverture 2.1.41). The chosen one is the apostle both of a sacred ideal and of worldly power. The leader of the rebels addresses God directly: “Yes, you engendered this nation through me” (41). When he relays the grievances that the noirs have against France to the blancs who have come to interrupt his work, one of them exclaims: “What language!” (3.1.98). Later secular fables will equally admire the incredible language of the francophone indigene from Timbuktu. Let me cite one such vestige (in 2005), the journalistic qualifier “child prodigy” (fils prodige), used in Le Nouvel Observateur to describe a member of my cohort at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Louis-Georges Tin, an Antillean with an Agrégation degree in literature who was seeking “to prove to everyone that he is indeed a real Noir.”14 One must therefore believe in the persistence of some kind of inexplicable grace, due, more or less, to the real presence of France in Martinique. Politicians and pedagogues from the Colonial Congress of 1889 certainly concede the existence of the supernatural. They respect its abnormality so much that they do not even depend on it. Regarding the spiritual enlightenment of the soul, Malebranche remarked how much simple charity “brings the soul to desire the knowledge of what it loves,” and understood that the process was “often . . . a natural effect” (Traité 2.1.32). One of the speakers at the Colonial Congress will defend the teaching of French to the Indochinese with his refusal to anticipate the miraculous impregnation of minds: After all, who said anything about a kind of operation of the Holy Spirit that would make the Annamese people suddenly renounce their own language? I have expressly said, and I repeat, that for this enormous endeavor, the implantation of our language in Indochina, the only endeavor that could justify the conquest, which alone will assure immense results, it would require three generations, maybe more, maybe fewer, depending on the skill of the conquerors. (Aymonier, “Rapport des commissaires,” 330; my emphasis). This declaration by Etienne Aymonier is all the more valuable because it rejects the method that had previously been used by the religious congregations in Indochina, who had invented a transcription using Latin characters and diacritical signs (the Quoc-ngu writing system) that had privileged the local language. Aymonier here recognizes the linguistic project that the Third Republic takes upon itself to form, despite disagreement and skepticism: a kind of ordinary grace through which the teaching of French must be organized.

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The maintenance of faith (even tacit faith) in the French miracle creates an ambiguity, however. Election relativizes instruction. The oscillation between these two approaches is not unique to the colonies. It belongs to the national mystique in general. Didn’t Georges Pompidou claim that “one does not become a normalien, one is born to it, as one is born a knight”?15 I think, however, that this oscillation had more of an effect on the structure of French teaching overseas than it did in France. Firmly ensconced within the colonial phrase of possession, the hymn to predestination led to a system of exception that, more than elsewhere, disdained the construction of a common educational scheme. I see here one of the causes of the great gap between discursive voluntarism and the lag of language instruction in the colonies. The low enrollment rates in the empire compared to those in the European territory are among the symptoms of this self-negation of education. One should also mention the invention of “reduced French,” promoted by Faidherbe, and all comparable decisions to truncate the language aimed at indigenes.16 The diminishment of both the material and the effectiveness of education coincides with the supernatural element of the colonial phrase, which reserves a position for the future “prodigal sons” of the Republic. This approach still plays the game of colonial racism, declaring that its miracles have all been performed in vain. In the beginning of the twentieth century, a confessed student of Le Bon, Léopold de Saussure—brother of the linguist—certifies that “assimilation through language” is “the least chimerical” of republican procedures (Psychologie de la colonisation française 164). His optimism is quickly corrected by the example assumed to be the most conclusive, that of Indochina, where French proves to be a “disorganizing” acquisition (186). One rejects the belief in the omnipotence of the democratic nation; the exception is no longer produced, and one opts (for lack of a better solution, i.e., any solution) for a miniaturized French. The “gift of French” by means of education is thus mined with the theoretical disposition of grace. It is not only a question of an internal redistribution among concurrent systems, or of republican elitism, or of the exaltation of innate nobility (of the state). Education is leveled and differentiated as it is in the metropole; however, the very meaning of instruction is at least weakened by the preponderant role conferred on the figure of the inspired colonizer, in line with the phrase that frames the practice of domination. A Breton must undergo the reprimands of the black hussar and forswear his patois in order to be reborn to France in the national language. An Antillean will instead have to await the action of grace, ordinary or not; will he attain it? Interrogating the connection between “the Noir and language,”

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Frantz Fanon compared Brittany and the Caribbean in Peau noire masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). Must one really locate a distinction between the negation of regional languages and the colonial linguistic situation? Fanon both brings them together and separates them, deciding that the supposed inferiority of race is what saves the Bretons in the end . . . and harms the noirs. For my part, I also believe in a fundamental difference between the local and the colonial. I have just emphasized the first factor, the status of education in the metropole and overseas, where problems of race intervene. The fact remains that the different provinces annexed to France, in Europe and beyond, sooner or later suffered attacks against their locally used languages and dialects. Louis-Jean Calvet has coined the term “glottophagy” to describe this kind of cannibalism performed to the benefit of French.17 During the Third Republic, in particular, Bretons, Basques, Maghrebis, and Indochinese were summoned to switch to French and to renounce their own languages (if they had not already done so). However, this was not always the same French; it varied according to the speaker, or to his or her status as a subject of the empire. Here we arrive at the procedures for the censure of francophonie and indigenous speech by colonial language. Yet before this, perhaps it is worth adding a few lines explaining this very expression, “indigenous speech.” Here, I have by and large used the word “indigene” in a gesture that has deliberately reclaimed it from the discourses of observation or law. This category, in French as in other languages, has been developing for a long time in an ordered but not unified way, through narratives of explorers, political statutes, and forms of social expression. That which is indigenous, the Latin equivalent of the Greek autokhthonos, refers etymologically to the native, to that which is originally from a given place. But whereas autochthony was a major justification of the legitimacy of power in antiquity, in Rome or Athens, and the great European kingdoms also fancied themselves born from their own soil, on the occasion of the modern conquests, the “indigene” increasingly designated that which is found rooted in an elsewhere, indeed rooted in these overseas regions. Toward the second part of the eighteenth century, from the imperial point of view, the “indigenes” are in particular those “original” populations of the colonial territories, which leaves black people who had been deported in a sort of in-between space. This usage is concurrent with that of “savages,” “cannibals,” and so on. In the following century, “indigene” becomes more centrally political in that an official and subaltern status corresponds to the term, as we have seen. This collection of negative connotations and the limitations on citizenship that the term calls forth, have often led anticolonial movements to reject the word. At the same time, according to a current strategy of détournement, “indigene” can

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be appropriated in a polemical way, as a return to sender; this was widely the case in the last decade in France, with the appearance of the movement Indigènes de la République and the feature film Indigènes by Rachid Bouchareb, about the enlistment of colonized peoples during World War II.18 Beyond the historical meditation, such recent usage has likely been driven by the swell of “indigenist” currents from Latin America, which seek to valorize the traditions and interests of Indians.19 In this book, “indigenous speech” ventures well beyond the simple reformulation of imperial texts and instead participates in a (post)colonial critical tactic. With this term (and other comparable ones, such as “indigenous voice” and “indigenous textuality”), I am designating a structural repercussion and extension of the phenomenon that I have just called black francophone speech. Anachronistically, nothing would prevent us from considering this a particular case of indigenous speech. The aim is not to confine a discourse to its conditions of enunciation, but precisely to understand what it does with them in order to survive. Ultimately, if one must say it, indigenous speech is not necessarily “indigenist” in the sense (and quite a diverse sense it is) of the adjective as it is used in the arts of the Antilles or Latin America.20

Ch a p ter 5

Interdiction within Diction

We have seen all the uncertainties and limits concerning linguistic transmission; we will now examine how a modification in the practice of French becomes fused with all these uncertainties. The ultimate goal of these changes is the canceling out of the speech of the colonized. The phrase remade syntax. Because language is henceforth charged with a power that identifies it with the colonial nation, French can only be granted on the condition that it make itself impregnable. Without which, possession would cease. This ambition to control the speaker through language eventually fails as unexpected literary and discursive events emerge. The trap is nonetheless perilous, and nothing indicates that it might be sprung once and for all. On the contrary, those of us who speak French continue to have trouble hearing ourselves talk. The indigenes receive a place in the language that is granted to them. If they become French and make their Frenchness heard, they risk becoming themselves spokespeople for an ethnic and political assignment that their naturalization opposed. The colonial accent can ultimately color everyone’s speech, beyond the question of real or imaginary origins. A network of utterances and syntagmas colonize language. This resemblance between the French language and France’s historical fate does not make the language sick or intrinsically bad, since a language is perceived only in its production. On the other hand, ready-made language endows itself with a layer of intimacy, with a colonial 102

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xenophobia. This makes the transcendence of ritual parlance through effective language an essential and urgent task. As it happened, beginning with the early decades of the twentieth century, the means of censuring language doubled in the colonial reinterpretation of the words of the colonized. Since the internal immunity of the dominator’s French alone was not up to the task, the colonial powers will try to erase the very discursive reality that escapes them.

Handbook of Colonial Usage As with any dynamic involving foreignness and conquest, the words of the other are inserted in the vocabulary and regularly assume a pejorative value. Didn’t the pain and the vin of the Bretons (bara and gwin) give us baragouin, “gibberish”? Between the end of the nineteenth century and the decades that followed, the negativity of the word fatma begins to spread (a generally pejorative adaptation of the Arabic female name Fatima—used much like “chick” in colloquial American English—fatma is usually but not exclusively used to refer to women of actual or perceived Arab descent), along with gourbi (“rathole” or “hovel”) and bled (“country,” “countryside,” or “region”). These loanwords from Arabic are quite distinct from the medieval adaptations, such as zéro, chiffre (figure), alchimie, and hasard (chance). Bamboula, taken from the languages of sub-Saharan Africa during the eighteenth century (in the restricted sense of “drum”), passes into colonial discourse and becomes synonymous with “festive excess,” “orgy,” and then simply Nègre. Both Tombouctou and Timbuktu will come to mean “nowhere.” This lexicon creates a supplementary effect through combination. I cite a short passage from Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan (Mort à crédit), in which the narrator goes to a fortune-teller: We came to a booth . . . the last woman [moukère] in the place, a grandmother, was rolling up her hangings. . . . She was dressed like a houri. . . . She rolled up her oriental carpets. . . . She was yawning tremendously . . . enough to dislocate her jaw. . . . Wah! Wah! she grunted out through the night. . . . The Fatima [fatma] motions me to come up, to step into her shack [gourbi]. . . . The old bag [la moukère], she turns it over, she looks at my hand. (213) On arrive devant une estrade, c’était la dernière moukère, une grand’mère qui décrochait ses teintures . . . elle était nippée en houri. . . . Elle roulait ses tapis d’Orient. . . . Elle baillait énormément, à se décrocher la mâchoire. . . . Ouah! Ouah! qu’elle grognait à travers la nuit. . . . La fatma, elle me fait signe de venir, de monter dans son

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gourbi. . . . Elle me prend la main, la moukère, elle me la retourne, elle me regarde dedans, les paumes. (259) The seer condenses the figures of the gypsy (saltimbanque, “acrobat”), “the Oriental,” and the fatma (259). Céline multiplies the clichés, leaps over them somehow, and lands amid an accumulation of racist colonial vocabulary that seems to beget itself naturally (moukère leads to houri, which leads to gourbi, which leads to moukère, ad infinitum). This lexical hyperbole renders the strangeness of the nonself absolute. In accordance with his egocentric poetics, Céline must separate the “I” from all others; in this case, this separation occurs adding together terms that have become acclimatized in French, yet contained by an external logic. The Célinian text indicates that words with Arabic origins are encysted in the language; style must underscore the impurity of the idiom. Exotic language, in general, attempts to sublimate the unheard-of (the language of the other) in the recreation of a savage French (think of the famous opening line of Flaubert’s Salammbô: “C’était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d’Hamilcar” [It was in Megara, in the suburbs of Carthage, in Hamilcar’s gardens]). These attempts often veer toward banality. Céline reclaims the failure of the exotic and uses it to construct a xenophobic scorn, where the Arab-Oriental-Gypsy will retain his or her non-French accent. The saltimbanque can only have a “gaping mouth” (bouche toute ronde), yawning. The sounds that escape from his throat are “growls” or barks. The “Wah! Wah!” parodies the Arabic language itself,1 destined to remain a “foreign body,” fundamentally incomprehensible to the French speaker.2 One should add that moukère is borrowed from Sabir, a lingua franca of the Maghreb, which received its name from the colonizers themselves.3 Lingua franca designates the composite dialects, which have been widely spoken in the Mediterranean basin from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. Travelers from a variety of nations would therefore use this common language, which relied on a fluctuating syntax and a vocabulary combining Romance languages, Arabic, and Turkish. Without ever playing the role of a creole, the lingua franca was largely practiced as a foreign language in Algeria when the French soldiers seized the territory. The shared roots of large portions of vocabulary made quick exchanges possible. Moukère derives from mujer and is a general term for “woman,” in Sabir as in Spanish. The song “La Moukère,” to which I will return shortly, certainly helped spread the word in French. Moukère then becomes Arabic (whence the predominance of writing it with the more “savage” k) and takes on a more precise denotation, henceforth referring to an “Arab woman.” The apparent integration of the foreign word into French thus depends on a deliberate error

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of recognition that inverts the very nature of Sabir: a transcultural word is taken for a specific, connoted term in French. Colonial usage recommends recourse to a vocabulary as strange as it is foreign—at least when it is a question of speaking of realities external to French life. Henri Estienne, addressing himself to the court of Henri III, had already remarked that the only words legitimately borrowed from Italian corresponded to actions without French equivalents: charlatan, bouffon, assacinateur and assacin, supercherie, bardasch (for the contemporary slang word tante, or “fag”).4 Estienne was defending the jargon of Philausone, an Italianized courtier, and railing against “Messieurs the courtiers,” who claimed “the privilege of legitimizing bastard French words, and of naturalizing foreign ones” (Traicté 14). It is true that the facts we have been collecting on the degradation of external languages do not belong to the colonies only. But the inferiorization of these words in the lexicon nevertheless set the stage for tactics that were even more elaborate. At the heart of this issue we find the coordination of techniques tried out in a new arrangement. Locating resemblances with other contexts does not necessarily reduce the importance or the particularity of the colonial linguistic trap; rather, such resemblances demonstrate the historical stratification out of which another event is produced. When a competition between French and Italian occurs during the Renaissance (as between French and Anglo-American today), purism will call for a language freed from external influences, mirroring the political tensions of the day. With Arabs or Africans kept in their parodic exoticism, an isolated subcategory in French takes form. Although an Arabic word is reputedly assimilated into the language (albeit pejoratively), this passage is contradicted by its colonial enunciation, which exhibits it as unassimilable. Let us reformulate this result in two ways. In the sense of the “colonial phrase,” possession never ceases. It has no end, since through its words (meaning our own words), the colonized is condemned to be himself and another. Or, since language can always say something else, a predisposition forms in French that runs contrary to noncolonial usage. A predisposition, I insist once again on this point; yet insistence does not diminish the difficulty of trying to turn away from shared habits that have taken hold. I conclude this section with an evocation of the popular song “La Moukère,” mentioned above. Parlance is full of conventions and uncritical repetitions. Can a chorus transmitted for more than a century (perhaps from the 1850s to the present day, or at least until quite recently) be void of resonance? Isn’t this just a question of a successful melody with inoffensive lyrics? I think not. Under its different titles and in its different reincarnations, “La Moukère” might constitute one of the oldest and most archetypal

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of colonial songs. That somebody named Eugène Dubreuil, “singer, life of the party,” claimed to have written it (Ruscio, Que la France était belle 358) would be enough to explain my own personal interest in the affair. There is more, of course. The melody and some of the lyrics of “La Moukère” became a popular, almost automatic reference in the Maghreb in the twentieth century. Inserting them into another song is enough to signify North Africa. Among those who will do this between 1910 and 1942 are Dranem (“En rev’nant du Maroc”), Maris Dubas (“Butterfly-Tox”), Jacky (“A Rabat”), and Maurice Chevalier (“Ali Ben Baba”).5 In its main variant, the chorus of “Travadjar” goes thus: “Travadjar la mouker / Travadjar bono / Travadjar sens devant derrière / Travadjar chouetto / Bono Blidah! / Boufarik et mascara! / Barca!” The language is inspired by Sabir. Other expressions in the couplets, such as “Ateni duoro,” “hold a piece,” refer to the same synthetic dialect. There is little doubt concerning the erotic dimension of travadjar (work), which helps explain “sens devant derrière” (moving forward behind) and leads to the final couplet: “Smoking a briar wood pipe / Wearing a chechia / We pillage and we pinch / In the razzia / But in the gourbi / We make quite a ruckus / Smiling Fatma / Cuckolds the Araby!” (Fumant une bouffarde, / Portant la chéchia, / On pille, on chaparde / Dans la razzia / Mais dans le gourbi / En f ’sant du fourbi / Fatma qui sourit / Fait cocu l’Arbi!). From the beginning, the colonial soldier admits: “My friends, of Africa / I’ve had my fill” (Mes amis, de l’Afrique, / J’en ai plein l’dos). The discouragement and weariness lead, all the same, to the comforts of physical and colonial possession, which motivate the presence of the soldiers in the Maghreb. This stanza is crafted from well-written French, contrary to the short phrases riddled with apostrophes, such as “Arbi,” and especially present in the chorus. However, in the exaltation of easy pleasure, the language, like that of Céline, accumulates acclimated words (chéchia, razzia, gourbi, fatma). All told, the final couplet and the chorus are equivalent to each other. Speaking about Arabs means speaking Sabir, or speaking in Arabic. Not even the becoming-Arab sketched out here, or the soldier’s Orientalized life, could be (spoken in) French. The incessant reprise of “La Moukère” is not a simple case of embedding stereotypes in the culture. It is the incessant iteration of the semi-integrated foreignness of the possessed colonial figure. To “cuckold the Araby” prolongs the delirious desire in the language and remotivates the nickname: after all, the “very naughty woman” (the “femme si coquine”), a song from the Zouaves tells us, “cuckolds her Arabic . . . uckold” (fait son Arbico . . . cu).6 The pun inscribes an onomastic fatality. The racial slur is never enough but must be multiplied to stigmatize even further. Dispossession continues when derisive language becomes the source of fur-

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ther spoils. Colonial rhetoric resorts to turns of phrase that also return fire. These tropisms are most clearly located in the oppositional language at the front. I would speculate that they are re-enforced, perhaps even produced, by the rise of decolonization movements. To extract this other level of intensity from colonial linguistic censure, I will at first limit myself to a body of articles written in the journal L’Afrique française (published by the Comité de l’Afrique Française), which gives an account of the political tensions in the Maghreb during the 1930s. These texts, written by different authors, are linked together through their deployment of a double lexical misappropriation. One can thus read that the first Moroccan nationalist party, Comité de l’Action Marocaine, “stole its name in a razzia” (L’Afrique française, 1936, 648).7 In their first appearances in French, gaze, gazia, and razia, loanwords from Maghrebi Arabic, designate the supposedly typical military practice of North African peoples. The technical (or ethnographic) acceptance of this term persists in the treatises describing indigenous ways and customs. The French colonial expeditions of the 1830s will also be very quick to lay hold of this term and to identify it with a violent (and eventually punitive) act of pillage. This colonial appropriation transforms the word into an emblem of the behavior of the French African army. Razzia appears in “La Moukère,” while in the middle of the nineteenth century, “Le Chant du Chacal” (Song of the Jackal) celebrates the term by asserting: “You have to see him in a razzia” (Il faut le voir en razzia).8 The Littré dictionary remarks: “It is through imitation that the French in Algeria use the word ‘razzia’ to describe their own expeditions against the tribes from whom they often steal provisions and animals.” Apart from the fate of the term in a wider context, razzia serves as an example of the magical transfer of qualities at the heart of colonial discourse. Our authors give the word back to anticolonial movements in order to underline their total illegitimacy. The name Action Marocaine for a group of Moroccans is inappropriate; the only true designation is the (Arabic then French) word for “pillage,” rendered unto its natural owners. The razzia, defined as belonging properly to the Arab, had been reappropriated by the occupying army; it is recreated in such a way that it signifies the absence of a proper name (un nom propre), that is, “l’Action Marocaine.” Elsewhere, the Algerian nationalist group L’Etoile Nord-Africaine is denounced for collecting funds in order to pay for the defense of activists arrested by the French state. The journal’s news section sums up the situation: “To pay the fees of the . . . lawyer, ‘L’Etoile Nord-Africaine,’ according to El Ouma, had to ‘work like a dog’ [fait . . . suer le burnous] . . . ! ” (L’Afrique française, 1934, 579). In this series of articles, the ellipses principally serve to announce one-liners, exclamation marks, and grins: all told, not too far from

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Céline. In this short quote, the “punch line,” typographically designated as exceptional, resides in the inverted use of the expression “faire suer le burnous” (literally, “make the burnoose sweat,” i.e., to perform physically demanding manual labor to the point of exhaustion). The expression is usually employed to describe either forced or poorly paid labor that the indigenes owed to the colonizers. A French parallel would be travailler comme un nègre (work like a nigger). It is possible that the older French expression faire suer le bonhomme (put the squeeze on the good chap), related to the money and food that soldiers extorted from peasants, might have served as a model, given the similarity in the sound. Bonhomme was adapted to the conditions of the terrain and became burnous. Already we have an attempt to equate “the Arab” with his clothes, as the female Muslim will become “the veiled girl” (la fille voilée). The article in L’Afrique française once again transposes exploitation, staining the burnoose with local color; the raising of funds is compared to colonial domination and “restored” to the apparent essence of the Arabs. This sort of spin and misappropriation announces the grand strategy of rhetorical inversion of antiracist values by the contemporary Far Right, which Pierre-André Taguieff has demonstrated in La force du préjugé. Yet the double inversion also conditions the response that the colonized may bring to bear on the project of censure. It does not seem irrelevant that verlan (a form of slang constructed through inversion, addition, and subtraction of syllables and sounds in a word) has now been designated as the prerogative of the banlieue, although it has been active in French for centuries. There is nothing random about this identification, coming from both within and without, between a jargon and a social population marked by the (post)colonial fact. The inversion of syllables and sounds in verlan hijacks the logic of the colonial prescription of language. In this respect, two closely related techniques take on a heightened importance: veul and lanvers, which refer to double phonic reversals. Lanvers is verlan for the word “verlan,” which is itself an inversion of the French word that means “the reverse”—l’envers—but which does not simply return intact to its linguistic point of departure. Through a series of successive transformations, femme (woman) becomes meuf in verlan, then feum (in veul, another term for lanvers). Arabe is inverted into beur, then into reubeu. There is also flic (cop), which becomes keuf, then feukeu, where the influence of the English fuck seems quite plausible—especially since fuck les keufs exists as a slogan—and where the influence of Arabic seems possible, kif or kef (referring to either hashish or the pleasure derived from it), the Arabic letter kaf, and the word kufr (disbelief, infidelity) can be heard. The vocabulary of Lanvers remains fairly limited, but in these cases, the instances of significant foreign languages (American English, Arabic) combine with the reversal of

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a reversal that must avoid recuperation and assimilation. After all, meuf, keuf, and beur have since been “integrated” into spoken French, far from the “noplace” of the banlieue. This supplementary return, played out in language, responds to the grammatical movement of political prescription. The set of linguistic manipulations that I have inventoried illustrates techniques of proliferation within verbal creation and appropriation. These discourses configure a system of language that speaks the colonial phrase in the very body of French, understood as the necessary symbol of a theologicopolitical conception of the nation. This special form of xenophobia helps to open a parlance, a style where the indigene is always simultaneously foreigner and assimilated, even prey to haunting. Haunting because francisation, in the second colonial empire, is the imposition of an alterity within identity. The force that arrogated to itself the power of possession always believes it can “contain” the perils of enchantment, thus protecting itself from its effects. Yet colonial France tries to ensure that it will maintain exorcism in the meaning that it first imagined. To keep possession, French must be set into the mind of the indigene. However, it is advisable to let foreignness be proportionate to the familiar. Colonialism is a haunting that refuses to be dispelled; this loa blanc has no intention of withdrawing. The frenzy of the practice of possession obligates the colonizer to be more and more identical to the colonized, and—if he tries to keep the upper hand—to refine his weapons each time, so he will have a difference upon which to call. In his superb book, The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha proposes “almost the same, but not quite” as the colonial axiom.9 At least within the French space I am examining, this formula does not quite apply. To begin with, possession is the self and the other. The gap of the self that Bhabha brilliantly puts into play is not colonial reality (which desires the copresence of different substances), but the law of duration within colonial desire that wants to perpetuate itself without end. The “not quite” results from the status quo of exploitation; it is not constitutive of the formation of an empire over the indigene. The enacting of colonial linguistics aims precisely toward the impossible possibility of a continuation of colonial practice through the invention of procedures that are radically other within the life of the same French language. Beyond this point, Bhabha gives too much credit to the methodical proclamations of philosophy. Despite the principle of noncontradiction and identity, continuously bandied about by Aristotle and his successors, so-called Western thought was never confined to an exclusively rational logic. I have already written about this, and I will return to it. I say it again in these lines. To be one and the other is not an experience born of colonization, even though it is included in colonization. The destiny created for the francophone indi-

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gene educated in the colonial language, this position of speaker and outsider, is not in itself troubling for the potential West (l’éventuel Occident). On the contrary, reports of the end of haunting drive the colonial powers toward escalation: deny the faculty of language (the mute slave), before offering a reduced French reserved for specific people, then confer the language—but only after having made it unusable; finally, as we shall see, censure speech once it occurs, while affirming that it never took place. But to continue with the stage we have been discussing, the performance of the language in colonial discourse is conceived in order to break indigenous speech. This effect is in no way conducive to the emergence of another enunciation, as an extrapolation of Bhabha’s claims might lead us to believe. Only a position that surpasses the impasse allows an opening into speech. This joint display of the permitted and the forbidden does not contravene the operation of the language in the West; its supposed irrationality is not productive in and of itself, and it is pointless to hope that a third logic will arise from it. On the contrary, the harshest kind of grammatical legislation presupposes contradiction. At the same time as he defends the logical coherence of his ideas, Vaugelas superimposes a religion of usage,10 whose credo reads thus: As with Faith, so, too, with Usage, the definition of which obliges us to believe simply and blindly, without our reason shining its natural light upon it; yet we nonetheless do not fail to reason over this same faith, nor to find the reasons for things that are above reason. (Remarques, preface, 5.2) Reason is exceeded in good Usage, the definition of which is centered on the social space of the court (3), but whose essence resides in the je ne sais quoi of sovereign power. Similarly, universalist reason and colonial usage are not mutually exclusive. They culminate in a social prescription, as Vaugelas’s Usage and Reason justify the court’s grammatical privilege that cannot, at last, be located. The normativity of the seventeenth century or the colonizer’s verbal injunction forms different figures of an interdiction within diction, within speech. The theologico-political language of censure did not wait for the overseas expansion. It is now our task, however, to stop describing the paths of interdiction within possessions, if we want to grasp more firmly the power of indigenous speech.

Petit-Nègre and Oriental Style The encystment of foreignness will not long satisfy colonial aims. In this escalation, censure must also act in a more general fashion. You are speak-

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ing? Are you sure? Against the nascent francophonie of the 1930s, one may mobilize the rules, those of Vaugelas and of public education, in order to correct the awkward speaker. Hypercorrectness will put a straitjacket on all attempts to speak. Since one solution does not exclude another, I will continue working with my collection of articles from L’Afrique française, where we will discover that lexical misappropriation functions quite smoothly with calls to linguistic order. In a column entitled “Fantasies & Mirages: Vocabulary,” the recurring problem relates to the imperfect manipulation of French by Maghrebi rebels. When the term indigene is criticized for its pejorative aspect by those who first take up the issue, the columnist responds that nothing must be changed, since “French words have a meaning that has been fixed through usage” (L’Afrique française, 1933, 300). When the Littré dictionary uses a citation from Voltaire to salvage this defense of usage, resistance seems futile.11 Additionally, the author of this series of continuing articles on vocabulary insists on the aberrant “distraction” that had seized “certain people in the far East of Barbary . . .: playing on words” (299). This kind of play is licit only for the “masters and possessors of the nature” of the language. “Barbary” (la Berbérie), again according to the Littré, is the homeland of the Greek term barbaros, and thus of the barbarisms denounced in the column. His multiple opponents think they are speaking French; they are mistaken, having understood nothing about usage; they are derailed, off-key, lost. They produce chimerical words. They create fantasies, those allies of the mirage: fantasies, empty images, and clichés, evoking—in addition to the fantasia—the act of bravura, and the desire to court danger. Barbarisme in French finds a natural home in Barbary and overseas in general. If it is often easier to demonstrate or denounce linguistic usage at the level of vocabulary, educational censure clearly goes beyond the category of the word. To the degree that an Arabized vocabulary exists, French is threatened by the broken syntax of petit-nègre (pidgin French) and by the exaggeration of the “Oriental style.” To say it is “threatened” is only partially appropriate, since these two supposedly indigenous tendencies cannot be taken seriously. They are still close to the grotesque or the childlike, and they figure widely in the rhetoric of the “masters” and “institutors” of the French language. A colleague of mine, trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, while remaining well intentioned, as they say, described to me the “Turkish delight style” (style loukoum) of a Tunisian student. Much earlier in my life, in first grade at my elementary school in Lyon in late 1979 or early 1980, my teacher lambasted the petit-nègre we were producing, particularly in writing.12 As with the Barbary barbarism, this technique ascribes a colonial location

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to deviations in language. The problem is not the potential fault as such, but rather the identification of a given error with the origin of those who committed it. The difficulty of mobilizing syntactic resources characterizes all beginning speakers, and quite often those who express themselves in a second language. Hyperbole and metaphor exist in many other places than the Orient. (Incidentally, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Lahontan, who lived a long time in Nouvelle France, considered these same tropes quite typical of the verbal style of autochthonous peoples of North America.)13 These lapses are suddenly revealed by colonial experience to be the consequence of trying to assimilate subaltern populations. Likewise, an imperfection in a French utterance is attributed to the corruption, through usage, of the stuttering subjects of empire. Deviation gets delegated to others, those unassimilable integrated ones. Education—secular, or as it is called, “free,” libre—once again played a crucial role in the consolidation of grammatical beliefs, bestowing on them the legitimacy of formation. The pseudoobviousness of these colonial categories is maintained by the production of texts and discourses ratifying these distinctions. Batouala is the first novel written by a black author—René Maran—to have received the Prix Goncourt, in 1922, seventy years before Patrick Chamoiseau. The subtitle of Maran’s narrative is Véritable roman nègre (A Genuine Negro Novel), signifying both the accession to literature by a black writer, and more importantly, the establishment of a black subject matter, since the action takes place in the Oubangui-Chari and becomes marked by savagery (of customs, situations, and of the prose itself). Before again becoming a purely academic author and losing the shock of his writing in a second, policed version, in Batouala Maran will redeploy a system of French colonial languages. The narration skillfully applies a great lyrical exoticism, in the lineage of Leconte de Lisle or José-Maria de Heredia. The indigenous words are woven in with a noble French. I cite as evidence one of the first sentences: And when ‘Ipeu,’ the Moon, was orbiting the heavens,—in their distant villages: M’bis, Dacpas, Dakouas, and Langbassis were praising the deeds of the great mokoundji Batoula; while the discordant sounds of the balafons and the koundés united with the tom-tom of the li’inghas. (21) Et quand ‘Ipeu,’ la Lune, au ciel gravitait,—dans leurs lointains villages: m’bis, dacpas, dakouas et langbassis chantaient les prouesses du grand mokoundji Batoula, cependant que les sons discordants des balafons et des koundés s’unissaient au tam-tam des li’inghas. The syntax guarantees the insertion of black vocabulary in the highest register of the French language: alliteration and assonance punctuate the enumeration,

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the initial “And” (Et) is epic, while the dash displays the literariness of the anacoluthon, underscored by the slightly archaic conjunction cependant que. René Maran asserts himself by savaging a kind of writing created by its lexical opacity and the sophistication of its composition. However, the Nègres in the text speak differently. Their deliberations can be transcribed directly as dialogue, as happens in chapter 4. Here they express themselves in a more standard prose, always correct. But one must understand that these exchanges are translated by the narrator, since the few scenes that place the Africans in relation with the French reveal the incomplete syntax of the indigene, as a sequel to the somewhat less sublime racist caricatures of the Y’a bon banania advertising posters, circa 1915. Here is a short sample: “Your honor, Boula make ass of himself too much. So M’bis and his friend be so glad came to the post to get drunk. The men say to me this just now on the road” (Ma commandant. Boula y’en a faire couillon trop. Alors m’bis et son camarade y’en a beaucoup contents vinir au poste saouler son gueule. Les homes m’y en a dire tout à l’heure sur la route comme ça; Maran, Batoula 96). The phrase of the black African is dislocated as soon as it is inserted into the “language of the blancs” (21). Batouala bears witness to two possibilities of expression for a black speaker in French: either the pidgin of petit-nègre, that is, the defective jargon of the savage, or the high language of literary exoticism. As a supplement, a standardized prose is spoken by some black characters, translated by an assimilated black writer, Maran, the Antillean author and colonial functionary who signs his name to the book and the preface. It is in the direction of the norm that Maran will next move, choosing to break with the risk of the savage in favor of the institutional parlance of his other works and the rewriting of Batoula. The Genuine Negro Novel, in the “definitive” 1938 edition, no longer refers to the geography of the subject. The attempt at stylistic empathy, as contentious as it was, became more important than the academic display of language. The Journal sans date ( Journal without a Date), first published in 1927 (then revised after the war under the title Un homme pareil aux autres [A Man Like Any Other]),14 is a narrative mise en abyme of the book’s trajectory. The main character, Jean Veneuse, is a dark-skinned colonial functionary, who, after having been tempted to return to Africa in order to “become a Negro again,” returns to his European state. “France is my religion,” the narrator writes. The language of the Académie Française—French in its mechanized usage—could alone serve the nouveau noir, whom France animates through ventriloquy. The rewriting of Batouala renounces the illusory Africanness of the writing. In a text seeking to join the collectivity of the grammatical and stylistic order, the only “genuinely” black language must retain the incorrect syntax of petit-nègre. Read in this way, the novel, in its two incarnations, reproduces and ratifies through its poetics the hierarchies of colonial discourse.

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Despite a belated reedition (of the second version, sadly), it is unlikely that Batouala still exercises any influence over the linguistic apparatus of francophonie. The book, in any case, is much less offensive than the persistence of scholarly attention paid to it, however attenuated this has become. Other sites persist, however: unexpected conservatories that provide models for supposedly extinguished forces. The most popular example in French is certainly Tintin, whose adventures often present types that operate in counterpoint to the main characters. It is enough, today, to reread Tintin in the Congo to learn petit-nègre; one may also consult the phrases of Cheikh Bab-el-Ehr in Land of Black Gold to penetrate the subtleties of “Oriental style.” Its perpetuation is ultimately assured by the meeting of the colonial system with the comic register, which runs from the “good racist joke” to the humorist’s sketch. If we pass over the debate about voluntary or involuntary xenophobia, which most often leads nowhere, the most striking aspect of these more-or-less humorous speech acts resides in their repetition of parlances. The colonial phrase continues to be actualized by means of linguistic codes internal to French, but always in a hierarchy. Without a doubt, the redistribution of idiolects in the language serves the order of French domination well, centralized and metropolitan by definition. In this regard, hypercorrectness was able to touch the language of the poor colonist. In particular, Jews and Catholic pieds noirs also found themselves confined within an approximately French discourse. What goes by the name of pataouète—the dialect of French Algerians during the colonial period, which included many terms borrowed from Arabic, Spanish, and Italian—could never find a place in le bon usage. It is nonetheless symptomatic that the diffuse recognition of pied-noir speech (with its own accent, syntax, exaggerations, interjections) among French speakers has never given rise to a didactic description, such as that which occurred with petit-nègre or “Oriental style.” Pied-noir expression constitutes a peril only for pieds-noirs; it is not a danger for everyone, as are African syntax and the “Turkish Delight” style. Pataouète was thus treated as a sociolect or a particularity to be rejected in the name of the norm, not as a deep and faulty structure. Pied-noir speech enjoyed an imperfect recognition, traces of which will be born by the exclamations dis (say) and ma parole (upon my word)—as if it was always necessary to emphasize locution and to begin speaking again. But at least for them there was a certain right to speak, even if minoritarian.

Censure and the Unpublished So there is censure. And (post)colonial hypercorrectness especially functions as the great prelude to the muting of the indigene, and to the deafness of

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the colonizer. Censure includes ordinary violence, especially in wartime: nonpublication, assassination. It also takes other, less direct paths. Think of Mouloud Feraoun, one of the first francophone writers from Algeria. His first novel, Le fils du pauvre (The Poor Man’s Son), will first have to be edited at the author’s own expense before being accepted by Seuil in 1954. The director of the Méditerranée collection, Emmanuel Roblès, will ask Feraoun to cut out the pages devoted to the Second World War. Killed in 1962 by the Organization of the Secret Army (OAS), Feraoun will thus experience the limits of the exterminating will of totalitarian colonialism, and this after having been denied authorial prerogative because of his position as a pioneer. Yet silencing may also occur in publication. The inside jacket cover, now modified in the current pocket edition, in effect delivered a warning (avertissement). From this short user’s manual for Feraoun’s reader, I extract this imperative report: “Not one line is imagined.” This is what signals the book’s infra-literariness. However, the first section of the novel opens with a chapter in italics, as if it represents an unfinished autobiographical manuscript by Feraoun. This superior voice, belonging to the one who is designated as the “narrator” (95) of all of Le fils du pauvre, subsequently takes over the testimony and tells the rest of the story. This device builds a narrative whose dynamic is that of fictional deviation. Feraoun, the autobiographical “I,” and the subjective narrator enter into a problematic relationship, which is everything, except for the transparent transcription Roblès announces. The avertissement should be understood as a cancellation of the literary value of the work before the fact. Colonial functionaries, ethnography, and even primary and secondary education all played a role in the production of texts by indigenes, from whom one required documents to verify their very existence. By rejecting the least picturesque section of the manuscript (after childhood in Kabylia and the difficult acclimatization of an adolescent in the colonial city), and then by denying that it was even a novel, Roblès would silence the writer who was among the first from his country to seize written French in order to speak beyond the injunction. This gesture is all the more violent since until quite recently the dominant linguistic model in modern France has been literary expression, both in school and in “polite society.” Trapped by its own dynamic, censure must finally expel the francophone author by recognizing nonliterary features in his text, that is, features that are ultimately dissimilar to the historical reality of the language. The attitude of silencing and negation is especially evident in relation to pioneering texts. Yesterday’s interdictions can rejoin those of today. In a moment, we will demonstrate this point with Bakary Diallo’s Force-Bonté (ForceGoodness). This work is likely the first long narrative published in French by

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a black writer from colonial Africa. The author describes his experience as a Senegalese tirailleur during World War I. He relates his experience, emphasizing the greatness of the French empire. The paternalism is assumed; the “I” never hesitates to remind the reader that one must obey France as one would obey one’s own parents: blindly. The description of military and administrative “niggling” and “pettiness” (Diallo, Force-Bonté 186) is in this sense subordinated to the acceptance of the colonial order. The bonté or “goodness” of the French is a leitmotif (see 139, 141, 146, 181, 183, 196, and 208 for examples). This theme allows for the following description, which takes the form of an isolated paragraph: “And like the sky that covers the expanse of the earth, French goodness is everywhere seen” (139). In short, Diallo seems to include himself in the colonial phrase, in a subjugated role. All of him has been magically transformed: “You [French] have changed me, I swear upon it, head, heart, mind, and soul” (205). Since its publication, Force-Bonté has been read primarily as a personal testimony. The interpretive choices seem to be the greatness of France, its incompetence, or the alienation of black Africans who have passed through the French colonial machine. Literary history has often chosen this last option. Lilyan Kesteloot, who played a major role in introducing and promoting black francophone literature in the academy, finds in Diallo a “naïve panegyric to France” (Les écrivains noirs 21). Later, more favorable interpretations have rightly insisted on the moments where Diallo deviates from his primary acquiescence.15 In fact, Force-Bonté does not fail to distinguish the colonists from the metropolitans, decisions made by decree from individual attitudes. Naïveté thus has its limits. However, if we want to restore Bakary Diallo to history, this reinterpretation must examine the writing itself. Tackling the problem with ideological or cultural terms allows us, at best, to posit that Diallo covertly denounces the order of power, opposing it with some ideal behavior. The consequences of such a reading are considerable. Yet this is not enough, when attention is not paid to the historical value of the writing: Diallo learned French among the rank and file at the same time that he was perfecting his active understanding of the colonial phrase. Contrary to the imperialist tendency, however, he distinguishes between language and discourse. He confides to his “compatriots” (Diallo, Force-Bonté 183), who have lived in the metropole: “Colonial language, even in French, lacks the real accent that your ears hear here” (184). Diallo identifies the colonial particularity of discourse, connecting it to one case of linguistic actualization, and he disassembles French (as a single, unified language) from its various forms of usage. This gesture initiates a critique of internal forms of censure that tradition had deployed against indigenes. Diallo is not content with simply

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designating this critique; he also executes it, to the point where he appears to be, on the contrary, closest to the imperative of power. “French goodness,” so recurrent throughout the text, is nonetheless not its title. Force-Bonté means something else, something that is found in the final lines of the book: “Long live the goodness-force of France!” (208; Vive la force-bonté de la France!). The compound word is in fact Diallo’s creation, and it forms the very beginning and the very end of the book. Yet “force” as such is rarely evoked. A friend of the narrator, advising him not to undergo a fourteenth surgical operation, adds his opinion: “Now, all you can do is regain your physical strength” (199; reprendre de la force physique). Out of context, this is an everyday expression; here, however, it follows the description of an episode where Diallo clashes with the major. They are arguing over the request of the tirailleur, who has been wounded and wants to receive special food rations. This seems exorbitant to the doctor, who gets furious and confines the soldier to barracks. Diallo comments on this episode thus: “Anger is an extraordinary force. It takes hold of a man, shakes him, rattles him at will, and then undoes him through its movement. In this way does it dominate with ease even the man who has studied, analyzed, and understood it. . . . What do we men thus have lurking in our depths?” (157). Force exceeds the individual; it imposes itself on him. The major is literally in a trance, animated by a superior entity, which replaces him. Inserting the white doctor’s anger into this position, Diallo responds to the colonial phrase, which he also speaks. Everyone may be grabbed by a power that seizes them, without distinction to race or social status. Those who are enchanted need not be black—a point which of itself greatly modifies the colonial legitimization regarding those enchanted black people who must be civilized. What is more, force-bonté is constructed like a composite form of energy that belongs to France and descends upon its citizens. The “force” of France is physical and military; it has the power to convoke, to conjugate the intensity of different peoples. Beyond that, it is already also an extraordinary, violent substance, which shows itself in the major’s anger and the racist behavior of the colonizers. This aggressiveness appears exclusively—or primarily—in the colonial possessions. Diallo’s Bildungsroman reveals here that in France, force is associated with goodness. Force-bonté becomes a complex reality where the inversion of signs is possible, and is also characteristic of France: a country whose inhabitants are haunted by force-bonté (goodness-power, kindnesspower).16 Through the verbal creation that undergirds the entire work, Bakary Diallo questions the one-way movement of possession. He proposes an unexpected humanism, in which both white and black people are equally likely

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to be visited by the extraordinary. He holds the contradictory aspects of colonialism together. Ultimately, he is a francophone author; he dismantles the trap of the racialized usage of language and forms a new noun to say the unsaid. Diallo truly took hold of the word (a bien pris la parole). Presenting itself as a child of Africa and of the colony of French West Africa, the narrating “I” tears itself from the silence of negation. One could counter that a certain kind of silence is better than empty chatter, than predictable babble. In fact, the simple fact of speaking has no predetermined value. Parlance is another destructive form that silences signification within discourse itself; it cannot be compared with the mute refusal of compliance, for example. This is why I construct the scene of speaking up, which exceeds the imposed silence, loosening tongues and undoing the censure that speaking may become. Diallo pronounces the words of the other and throws himself into a language previously unknown to him. He keeps himself in a critical position and passes through the parlance; he subscribes to the prescription in order to distance himself from it. He says goodness in order to say goodness-power. To be sure, I do not want to turn Diallo into a violent opponent of colonialism. Even less do I want to strike out his words with a single gesture, on the pretext that they do not fit a given political analysis. It’s hard to be a pioneer. Diallo is not a literary model (is there such a thing?); his work, however, forms an event. A path is opened to subsequent explorations. Literature maintains a ceaseless relation to its past. It is not a question of a continuous progress. Textual density nonetheless exists. For all the authors anxious about initiating a francophone African speech,17 the multiplicity of routes already taken is a major challenge. Birago Diop privileges African orality, while Léopold Sédar Senghor mobilizes classical cultures (from the Greeks to the Sereer). Bakary Diallo wants to break ground within colonial French and beyond; this experiment, with its limits and successes, is necessary for other later writing committed to this task. The active critique of the norm has been initiated. Although it must start again each time, it can use its own past to go somewhere else.

Ch a p ter 6

Today: Stigmata and Veils

The advent of speech is never achieved once and for all. And although it does not definitively undo interdiction, indigenous speech does open a breach in the colonial edifice. The insistence of indigenous discourses in French, in tandem with the wars for independence, has made it difficult for colonial verbiage to claim to represent the language without being ridiculed. Has interdiction disappeared? I suspect that it hasn’t. Today, in singular fashion, the most clear-cut and persistent methods of interdiction exist foremost in the most widespread forms of censure.

Education, the Press I have shown how real acts of withdrawing speech have occurred. No: you are not writing literature, so you do not exist; and what is more, I cannot hear you. Let us write new lines about the old authors. In exemplary fashion, the school system and the media exert a necrotizing control over any and all speech that breaks with the established order. It is true that in addition to the emancipatory virtues they reiterate, the traditional function of these two worlds is to enforce a kind of censure. Journalism is a democratic multiplication of the discourse about reality, and it is the secret dispensary of propaganda, a trivial way to program utterances. Education delivers individuals from ignorance and spreads the doctrine of constraint. These contradictory 119

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postulations can be articulated differently or juxtaposed according to the places, periods, and people involved. Today, the mainstream press in France (and its audiovisual and Internet equivalents) hardly bases its activity on the construction of civic reflection, preferring instead to inform minds. As for public education in France, most of the time its agents resort to coercion (seen as a good in itself), or resign themselves to giving up teaching; even the minister of education oscillates between these two attitudes, often in a way that is out of step with teachers. In this bleak situation, journalism and education, which expect to enjoy the rights that they clearly deserved in the past, may most easily relive their former prestige by deploying their capacity for censure. As for francophonie, the simple refusal to acknowledge its existence is widely employed in teaching. For its part, Parisian literary journalism does not regularly respond to Haitian or Ivorian publications; on this point, however, we touch on a dysfunction too massive to discuss here. On the other hand, what remains of literature in secondary education erases nearly all literary production from the current or former colonies. I do not exclude the courage of individual teachers. The official guidelines for choosing books today are quite sibylline, allocating the responsibility of determining textual canons to so-called accompanying documents and manuals. Clearly, there is minimal space for the words uttered across a period that spans nearly a century. The latest recommendations from the Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique (National Center of Pedagogical Documentation) give an idea of the best-case scenario for postcolonial francophone literature in institutional teaching.1 Lists of novels are cited as examples, arranged hierarchically from the very suitable to the supplementary (the “but also . . .” category), then onto foreign literature—and then finally come the “potentially” readable books. In the center of this miniature replica of Dante’s Inferno, Ahmadou Kourouma and Kateb Yacine are in the second circle. As might be expected, most of the postcolonial novelists correspond to the lowest level of instruction. That such books are presented as “potentially” capable of “sustaining the curiosity and interest of the students” suggests to my admittedly rather acerbic mind that these works are more suitable for the less “valuable” students at the Lycée, such as those who are not taking courses of general study. The idea is based solely on documentary evidence. One could recite an entire litany of clichés: the “children of immigrants” recognize themselves in Azouz Begag more than in Proust or Racine (but in what way would a “good Frenchman” naturally have more of a connection to the latter two authors?); francophone texts are easier or closer to realism (but they are read as simple testimonies, and they do not put Frankétienne or Abdelwahab

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Meddeb on the syllabus), and so on. This deafness to the indigenous text is an offspring of the doctrine of “reduced French,” for which equivalents in book form are now sought. Even when one proposes devoting a number of hours to the connection between “literature” and “otherness,” starting with the conquest of the New World, exoticism, and slavery, only Senghor’s Ethiopiques has the right of passage into the stubborn category of “literary texts.” The other francophone authors will remain on the more accessible level of the “but also” category. The precarious existence of francophonie in the classroom, however, can at least cite as precedent a legend that was hawked over the course of several centuries—and by the advocates of the language. Let us note that accession to writing or public discourse is often done in the name of some prior silence. Yet as time progresses, it becomes increasingly evident that this silence existed only as an effect of French censure. In this sense, it is logical to present the indigenous speaker as one who breaks with the old order of silence: so long as denial lasts, there is an imposition of silence, and each new voice must make its radical newness heard. However, the recognition of colonial censure almost always carries with it an awkward erasure of those who had previously expressed themselves, who had already broken with prescription. The idea that black francophone speech first emerges in the 1930s remains a tenacious legend. However, to list a few exceptions to this legend, we could cite the following: Bakary Diallo publishes his book in 1926, although Batouala was written in 1921; in Louisiana, people of color were writing in French throughout the nineteenth century; in Haiti, literature, philosophy, and history have existed since the beginning of the Revolution; the Revolution in the Antilles allowed for the emergence of texts and discourses composed by black and mulatto people. As a strategic tool, the mythical anterior silence is useful for “indigenes” who want to point toward the abyss out of which their speech has emerged. This strategy is nonetheless quite dangerous in that it recognizes in advance the absolute efficacy of the master, who would have succeeded in obliterating the previous efforts. A paradoxical collusion thus forms. This is nowhere more obvious than in the newspaper articles that deal with the famous “banlieue problems.” In November 2005, the more “comprehensive” texts on the arsonists did not fail to report statements such as “When someone wields a Molotov cocktail, he is saying ‘Help.’ He does not have the words to express what he is feeling; he only knows how to speak by setting things on fire.”2 These remarks, whose truth is far from certain, reformulate a sociologizing vulgate that has currency among social workers. Such statements doubtless correspond to a sympathetic sentiment, but one that rests on the colonial order of speech. In addition, the media never cease

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repeating that in the banlieue there exists “the reign of the law of silence.”3 Let us therefore reject the self-interested rebroadcasting of this motif of the colonial situation’s past silence. It is just as likely to denounce mastery as it is to prepare the future absorption of words into the inexorable void. Education and the press, two contested institutions, have a tendency to preserve worn-out mechanisms. The public field of speech (from politics to barroom discussions) is on the whole susceptible to such a conservative attitude. This does not mean that a partially eradicated colonial culture still exists within France. Well-known solutions are rather rediscovered, repeated in a degraded (and degrading) form. Sometimes their semantic field frays; or, to continue in a theologico-political vein, all that remains from the wound is a stigma. The sign of the colonial passion is now diaphanous for those in the know, and obfuscated for everyone else. There is no excuse for this. When we use words and syntax worn out by others, without seeking to bring about anything new, it is inevitable that our language will become wooden. Locating this danger does not eliminate the risk, and this book will in turn, willingly, submit to criticism. Nevertheless, rather than merging all suspect utterances on principle under the rubric of neocolonialism; rather than demanding a decolonization of minds, on the model of denazification—let us make some distinctions. Sometimes a statement betrays an absence of thought more than it reveals a collective unconscious. It is a moral imperative that each person must affirm herself by speaking (instead of reciting the unsaid of existing powers). Ultimately, we must not kid ourselves about the role of social programming. It exists consubstantially with society. There are degrees of repression, and they should be distinguished. This said, dreaming of a free society serves no purpose; it is dangerous to replace one prescription with another. We must no more hybridize (métisser) thought than decolonize it; it is better to encourage the conditions for renewed reflection, to learn to free ourselves from our inheritance, and then to invent.

Repairing the Language? For literature to exist, which is to say, if there is to be more than one book with its own distinctive stamp, the poetic task cannot free itself from its defective force, oriented as it is against the rules of the community. The means adopted and the directions pioneered vary among those writers who express themselves from within the colonial phrase. Regarding this subject (as others, such as anti-Semitism, the fascination with the leader, the relation to the animal, etc.) there is one literature that forgets itself, and another that is more pensive. It would be good to move beyond rankings, that old scholarly mania

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shared by surrealists, those nostalgic for hierarchies, and well-intentioned politicians. Maupassant remakes the speed of literature, he peoples the world with a new kind of demon, and he lets colonial racism pass through him in his travel accounts in the Maghreb. Such a thing occurs, although rarely as it does with Maupassant. If Maupassant takes up a social phraseology that the rest of his book invalidates, such a gesture is not the same as that of Céline, when he appropriates, absolutely, the parlance of hatred in order to affirm himself, at the risk of exiting from the “common good” of the political. Today, literature is not commanded to contribute to the colonial phrase, and one cannot judge it using only this perspective. Entering into the echo chamber, literature has to construct the nature of its own enunciation. I have chosen to end this chapter by evoking two poetic trajectories through the density of (post)colonial language: the work of Pierre Guyotat and that of Hélène Cixous. Evoking his own biography, Pierre Guyotat locates a mental encounter in Algeria that began in his “fourteenth year” (Explications 134). Even before his service during the war, Algeria was “a haunting fear, just as much as it was poetry” (134). Without reducing the book to a single facet, there is certainly a “matter of Algeria” in Guyotat’s work. I am alluding to the established expression—“matter of Britain” (matière de Bretagne)—used to designate the cycles of Celtic inspiration in medieval texts. Guyotat finds an epic breath in the intense verbal continuity of Algerian deeds. His work is also a homage to the will not to conceal real matter, be it fecal, bloody, sexual. Such a position, linked to the ambition to surpass what is “given” in the text, brings the author of Le livre to no longer call his work “writing, but rather matter” (Livre 9). “Matter of Algeria” describes this oeuvre, because its sites have seen so much action. Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (Tomb for Five Hundred Thousand Soldiers) appears in 1967 and describes a universe of violence, a mobile military brothel (BMC) in Algeria. In 1984, Le livre (The Book) is an Arab plateau. In many places, particularly in Prostitution (1975) and Progénitures (2000), the texts circle around this unobtainable land, naming its impossible inhabitants. This fantastical and phantasmatic space has marked even the reception of this body of work; this impression is far from absurd, and it has been partially influenced by successive interdictions linked to the Algerian War.4 In Guyotat’s most recent work as of the date of this writing, Progénitures (2000), the bouic (or “brothel”) still employs Arabs, and the geography of immigration is spoken of (Vénissieux in the banlieue of Lyon), as is the geography of the Maghreb (the High Plateau). Some words invoke Algeria

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otherwise. These are the first names (Bachir, Ali) and common nouns (Arab, crouille5), Arabic words translated in a short glossary (chichouah, houri), others without a gloss (haïk, hallal; cleb or zob). Guyotat does not obliterate the closeness of French and Maghrebian Arabic; rather, he integrates colonial vocabulary. Most importantly, the alteration of the language often intersects with indigenous orality, reconstructing its pronunciation and making use of its accent for its neology. Counterfeiting the Araby’s language is a habit of songwriters and comedic singers who were, in general, quite frank about their racism. During the 1930s, Léon Montagné, under the pseudonym Aïcha, sang a “comic Arab song” with the title “We Did the Nouba.” The “we” refers to a group of Arabs getting drunk on anisette.6 At the very beginning of the 1990s (yes, that recently), French entertainer Vincent Lagaf ’, appeared on television screens, with an impressive amount of stamina, wearing a djellaba and veil, singing the tale of “Zoubida” with a colorful accent.7 In both of the above cases, the actor gives a deliberately bad performance, since one need not even have talent or any technical skill whatsoever to “mimic the wog” (contrefaire le Bougnoule). With self-irony, Lagaf ’ remarks at the very moment of the chorus, “Now that’s a song!”—as a way of insisting once again on the intrinsic worthlessness of such a sketch. The dispossession of speech thus takes place through the outlandish reproduction of typification and through the schematization of imitation that renders the original featureless and lacking in singularity. Nor is it insignificant that both these ridiculous forgeries of a parlance end in the same way, with the Arabs getting arrested by the police. The theft of a tone, an accent, a lexicon, a syntax— these stigmata of “Araby” speech—participate in the “operations to maintain order”8 exercised through public force. The language police and the colonial order work in tandem here. Pierre Guyotat makes room for this imitation in his song in this case; and, independently of the character, “monsieur” becomes “mssio” or “mssiou,” “Vénissieux” becomes “Vinissioux,” “petite” “ptet.” Yet these convergences are borrowed from the voice of the despised, among other sources, which Guyotat wants to make resound in the very body of the Frenchman. The preface to Le livre announces: “The prostituted bodies are scattered within the foundations of History in order to contaminate them” (9). “The nonstate whore” and “sexual slavery” (Guyotat, Explications 11–12) refer to “this obligation of sexuality,” which is an instance of “haunting” (41) that crosses multiple levels of exploitation. In the diction of prostitution, Guyotat thus includes the Arab, robbed, dominated, immigrated. This book is the great novel of the tongue, in all its states or nonstates, and it relentlessly features writing that is torn from the conventions of speech.

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Faced with the hundreds of pages of Progénitures, the reader hesitates. Criticism will not have the last word here in a few lines. For my purposes, let me just illustrate a small fragment between two dashes; I hasten to add that thousands of other passages would perhaps work just as well. —th’word’th’ideal’Progenitor’, thee triple husband, mah Great— Cashier, inside the verses our’Inspired one to be cradled whore, mud, doorjamb, chian, shishma, assassin, third freed, maestr’d’brothels, transit, auction, vetos, we’d stain, wom’n, Moon, Sun, Gawd!— —l’verb’l’Progenitur’idéal, te triple epoux, me Grand’— Caissièr’, dedans les versets notr’Insufflé s’y bercer putain, crott’, chiambranl’, chian, chichmah, assassin, tiers affranchi, mâtr’d’bouics, transit, enchèr’, vetos, tacherions, femm’, Lun’, Soleil, Diou!—(Progénitures 24) The graphical element of the text serves to broadcast voices, where pronunciation is painstakingly transcribed to echo current elisions, and also to mark where the text tends to deviate from contemporary urban usage. Rural or archaic accents (mâtr for maître [master], Diou for Dieu [God], -chi- for -ch-) are transmitted, like the indigenous modifications that I was pointing out earlier; they are associated with the closing of the French e (loss of the accent aigu). In this heady evocation of the human brothel, the book’s title puts down roots in the language, in its self-exhibition in the form of “verses,” and thus reestablishes a theology. The “inspired one” (Insufflé) might be the writer, the Creator, or the French language, caught in the new trinity of Lun’, Soleil, Diou (Moon, Sun, Gawd). The accumulated nouns resonate with each other in the juxtaposition of their different registers. The sequence “chiambranl’, chian, chichmah, assassin, tiers affranchi” is based on successive phonic deformations. “Chambranle” (door frame, mantelpiece) restored to the older form, “chiambranle,” contains “chian.” Into this neighborhood of archaicized French words, the Arabic word “chichmah” is inserted,9 awakening the etymon of “hashish.” Thegangs of plundering thieves in stoned ecstasy imagined by the West resurface here. The expression “third freed” (tiers affranchi), two words associated through sibilance in French, retains before the name of the master “a space of slavery” (un espace esclavagiste) that has not been “reduced” (Le livre 9) to a single circumstance of history. The verse, self-designated, is the rhythmic form adequate to a linguistic sacredness that makes itself felt in an otherworld of ordinary syntax, full of active infinitives, accumulated intensities, and a continuous breath that is nearly untenable.

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Here and there, Guyotat evokes the pasts of language and rearranges them. The work does not consume the matter of Algeria but rather consummates it, in a relational, colonial history. Guyotat generates an active critique of the sociohistorical states of the French language. Despite the radical nature of his poetic choices, he does not aim to leave the space of French. On the contrary, he wants, for example, to “reintroduce rhythm into our language without inventing another language” (Explications 167). The “external points of view” on the language, including that of Arabic, must be adopted, “but inside of the language” (127). It is not for nothing that Guyotat has for several years been teaching the history of the French language to students at the University of Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint-Denis.10 He remakes French in all of its contradictions (of registers, periods, territory), but as a unitary project. It is “in itself ” that the language must welcome different points of view; and French is valuable for France, which must attend to “the organization of diversity” (Guyotat, “Voter Chirac”). Even if it means displeasing his fans, Guyotat repeats that one must not “endlessly ‘badmouth’ France” (“Voter Chirac”). This is not a case of a disjunction between poetics and politics. On the contrary, Guyotat is an intransigent partisan of the Republic, for whom France is the French language, and whose unity guarantees France’s internal diversity. When the author claims—in order to celebrate the fact—that France did not “fail at integration” (“Voter Chirac”), I believe that Guyotat is referring more to the event of his own work than voicing an economic or sociological analysis. In an ambiguous move, this event both transforms and repatriates the exteriority at its very heart. The extraneous Arabic gains access to the refuge of a reformed language. Colonial prohibitions are in this way integrated into a speech that annihilates the force of their silence. At the same time, their differential necessity and the linguistic unanimity of French are extended. Stigma of stigmata, Guyotat’s text offers us one of the most audacious contemporary French works, a work that deprives censure and reconstitutes that which gave it meaning (the theologico-political). The pleasure no longer resides in the maintenance—at all costs—of colonial possession; rather, it is born from the evocation of all the stages of France (and of French) in its discursive subjectivation. Guyotat’s language tries to inaugurate another époque for the French language, which undoes the colonialism of “old France” (“Voter Chirac”) and reenacts the greatness of a landless language. In this regard, Guyotat is a classicist, replacing modernity with an eternity of variation. Colonial interdiction is overridden, even as its diction gets recognized in the reinvention of French through French. Another kind of stigma can be found in the work of Hélène Cixous, and this is a stigma that carries with it other consequences. Like Guyotat, Cixous

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is marked by Algerian history without being altogether fastened within this space of writing. Especially in the last decade or so, Cixous has made a return to Algeria through the means of parautobiographical writing. I risk the barbarism of this word in order to describe the fictional space Cixous aims to embed in every citadel of the self. For her, the “I” is not closed, and literature is one of the manners of its dispersal. The narrator of works such as Les rêveries de la femme sauvage (Reveries of the Wild Woman) is almost her, existing at her side, in her surroundings, in her direction, and beyond—all positions contained in the Greek word para (and to a lesser degree in its French cognates). Les rêveries tells the story of a woman who remembers her life as a Jewish child and later as an adolescent in Oran and Algiers during World War II and its aftermath. Each of Cixous’s novels crafts its own poetics and habits; the inventions change in order to generate the specific language of the text. The exhibition of the defiance of sexual division (répartition sexuelle) is likewise to be found in all her work. Here, however, the play between the masculine definite article le and the feminine la takes on a supplementary meaning; in particular, when writing about the voile, the veil. Aïcha, the servant, who wears le voile (Les rêveries 90), becomes, through a slippage of the definite article, the great female navigator who travels “à la voile au petit port de la cuisine” (90)—who “sails into the little harbor of the kitchen” (52).11 The text is rich in such acts of collusion, accumulating references to the sea (especially to les barques, or small boats). Aïcha, the Arab servant, becomes in her turn the mère (mother) of a language spoken in French, giving birth to the book itself—a reflection of the narrator’s mother who runs an obstetrics clinic. Toward the end of her memorial visit in Algeria, the “I” narrates yet another veil story, which she witnessed as a child: a young woman whose veil gets caught in a merry-go-round, so that her body gets cut in two by the shock (144–46). The woman who watches the accident both remains herself and immediately transforms into the victim: “I have within me a veiled girl cut in two the deadly veil cut because I am a girl the victim’s witness, cut off from the victim” (82/146). The disappearance of punctuation, as well as the use of anacoluthon, forms the performative contradiction of this cut expressed by a single voice. The experience is unbearable. It reflects the fact of living death, of being other—as in the exchange between the “young veiled girl” and the I, “one would call it Jewish” (145). This memory becomes “veiled” (146) like the deceased, like the wheel of the merry-go-round. The splitting of the body is ultimately lived by a narrator whose condition is always “inseparable” from Algeria. In the response she gives to the social idiom, literary language takes up this Arab “veil” in order to make the internal strangeness of the tongue heard, although nearly inaudible. “Veil” is the term that since

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the 1990s has regularly been used in the media and political discourse to designate the recalcitrant Muslim. At the height of the din, a few years after the publication of Reveries of a Wild Woman, between April 2003 and mid-March 2005—between Sarkozy’s declarations to the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF) and the centenary of the French laïcité law—more than 120 articles were devoted to the veil and other Islamic headscarves in the three major daily national newspapers in France (Le Figaro, Le Monde, and Libération). More than half the texts contain the word “veil” in the title instead of another term: foulard (headscarf), signe religieux (religious sign), burqa, laïcité. If here, “veil” becomes synonymous with “nonassimilable,” with the dark depths of postcolonial immigration,12 then Hélène Cixous attempts another usage of the term, where “veil” generates the text, which is shared with the protagonists of the imperial scene. She employs the resources of the language, of each language, to designate foreignness through the utterance. The place made for others’ words does not, in itself, coincide with the end of the oppressive parlance. Cixous’s novel did not prevent the journalistic parroting of 2003. Yet it would be pointless to think that the renunciation of colonial discourse will take place without recourse to poetry. In any event, Guyotat and Cixous, with their singularities and their different perspectives, construct works opening onto the impossible post hoc of the colony.

Ch a p ter 7

Reinventing Francophonie

Speech is born from the unheard-of in language, it alters already existing connections, it reforms usage. It can contribute to the construction of a phrase—that collection of sedimented utterances, words, idea-grammars, and parts of speech. Speech is therefore an event, never original, that breaks with an established order with which it communicates; it is also liable to be combined with other discourses. One never speaks once and for all, and spoken words die out often enough. For verbal posterity, the glorious act of yesteryear may sometimes appear an insufficient expression. Yet enough force can remain in a gesture to be conserved until its relegation. The single no of a slave to his master is not the final word of colonial servitude or liberation. It is nonetheless active in thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, in whose last name I fancy that the memory of rebellion may be heard (fait non, or “enact no!”). A word when spoken strikes silence and babble at once; it wages battle against them. I have outlined how the social body uses silence and babble alternately, and simultaneously, with the aim of preventing all indigenous speech. This prescription endangers neither the spread of the language nor the authorization of any specific expression. On the contrary, the claim is that through language a way of killing discourses becomes instilled. This programmatic system is valid for any exercise of power in language. In extreme totalitarian situations, nearly an entire population can be successfully muzzled, 129

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condemned to stupor or verbiage. One thinks of course of the Third Reich, of the silence of pain or of complicity, and of that lethal usage of German, whose daily advances the philologist Victor Klemperer transcribed. Moreover, what Klemperer named LTI (lingua tertii imperii) derived from the Führer’s seizure of forms of speech. Through the exclusive figure of Hitler, the Volk had had at its disposal the inventor of a language of hatred, immediately ready to duplicate and to order. Speech became transformed into phraseology. However, by means of absolute interdictions and the business of physical extermination, words were “ex-changed” (des paroles s’échangèrent). This exchange occurs in general, under the most extreme conditions, as well as in the everyday. A power that allies itself with language, and by this I mean an unquestionable power, seeks to restrain, to hobble, to prevent formulations that would run counter to the order it establishes or ratifies. Total success would, in the final analysis, require the destruction of all but one, which would amount to a disappearance of power over others, and therefore a terminal failure. Whether censure is ultimately ineffective has, on the contrary, little influence on those who manipulate it. We have seen this with the colonizers who empirically changed tactics as they went, and when they lost, each lost a local battle. The time of power is the différance of its downfall. Dictatorship, the double fact of saying and interdicting (dire et interdire), will have only a vague suspicion of the weapons that it wields against itself, to the degree that it thinks it knows the parries in advance. Vaugelas puts Usage in the same position as the sovereign—one must follow both without rationally disputing their decisions. To crown this authority, the grammarian compiles proofs of power, using rules irreducible to logic, and—in a supplementary move—exceptions to these rules. He places everything under the patronage of a Court that is indistinguishable, strictly indefinable, and outside of which nothing else is possible. However, these orders without orders are disseminated, and therefore appropriable, including by those who, outside the holy site of language, will choose to respect and to challenge Vaugelas.

Frozen, Stolen, Stealing Words By giving French, the second colonial empire seeks to protect itself. It develops the multiple strategies of prevention that we have identified and whose effects can be seen to this day. In social space, speakers can accumulate prescriptions. In his first novel, Le docker noir, Sembène Ousmane tells of how an individual receives a set of theologico-political interdictions by being indigenous, a migrant, and a worker. Diaw Falla, the main character, has his own words taken from him: the manuscript he is editing is stolen, and it will

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be published bearing a signature other than his own. In our vocabulary, the anecdote comprises the phrase of both possession and dispossession, and it also demonstrates a convergence of social injunctions for eliminating the advent of the text. But this “fable” about such impossibilities cuts across the logic that the narrative illustrates. Sembene was able to speak up and keep his word (prendre et garder la parole) in order to tell of the silencing. In fact, speech critiques the modalities of expression that should condition the speaker, the construction, and the meaning of the message. Speaking is neither a privilege guaranteed to anyone, nor is it a permanent necessity, nor even a constant possibility. Yet if someone wants to say something else, it is important to go beyond what has been said. In this book and in my life I privilege literature because it is under this title that I scope out texts that necessarily presuppose the opening of a language beyond sayings and parlances. Will readers who truly want to traverse this text again to criticize it (I am indifferent to censors or phraseologists) find this attitude a little too French to be convincing? I would be suspicious of a determinist hypothesis, but I will not attempt the absurd task of trying to settle the matter. I don’t hide where I have come from; but it is where I’m going that interests me. However one might wish to explain my predilections, I do not think for an instant that literature can monopolize speech. Often, the two speak to each other—otherwise: a voice rises up using unexpected language. The example of Toussaint demonstrates this. There are also more humble forms of heroism. A conversation takes a sudden turn—such is the conversion of the ordinary into the extraordinary. This evidence might prompt me to investigate, or in any case, to mine the many interviews, soliloquies, and dialogues of “people without qualities,” such as they are reported by the media, in films, and in books. La misère du monde (The Weight of the World), edited under the direction of Pierre Bourdieu, in addition to sociological analyses of contemporary distress in France, includes some very long transcriptions of discussions with the terrain, exceeding typical proportions. Bourdieu was at the time pleading for an alternative interpretation of oral discourses: The sustained and hospitable attention required to become imbued with the singular necessity of each personal testimony, which is usually reserved for great philosophical and literary texts, can also be accorded, by a sort of democratization of the hermeneutic stance, to ordinary adventure stories. It is necessary, as Flaubert taught us, to learn to look at Yvetot the way one so easily looks at Constantinople. (La misère du monde 923–24)1 I would readily agree with the terms of this noble project if certain details didn’t raise suspicions about its accuracy. First, this piece of advice serves to

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praise sociology, which I think has great difficulty understanding the gaps in the social order (such as what I call “speaking up” or la prise de parole). This disciplinary blind spot warns us against a hermeneutics that would need, in advance, to make utterances ordinary under the pretext of democratization. Are ordinary people bound to tell “ordinary adventure stories”? Secondly, the situation is not a binary opposition between legitimate discourses (literature, philosophy) and statements lacking authority, as I have been careful to indicate. Speech is possibly shared between these two activities; it is not without connection to other linguistic forms, nor to silence. As for literature, it presupposes speech, to be sure, but it does not correspond to it. Literature is therefore a highly developed example, not a universal model. The blurb on the back cover of La misère du monde is explicit: “This book will read like a collection of short stories.” The injunction of a literary reading corresponds to the problem of “sustained attention.” What is most interesting in this collection of narratives can come only from the third-party observer and not from the source as such. Some literary or sociological spice must be added to the bland verbiage. What if, on the contrary, a language could be constituted among the “ordinary folk” without its use being primarily determined by others? The difficulty here stems from access to this linguistic event. The best-intentioned transcriptions do not eliminate “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu, La misère du monde 906). Bourdieu knows this and opts to minimize this effect by renouncing any objectivity that would be too radical, and by recasting the material of the interviews. “Transcribing necessarily means writing, in the sense of re-writing” (921); this may be true, but why affirm that La misère du monde records “the suffering whose truth is said here by those who live it” (from the back cover)? The claim of the commitment to writing would renounce neither the privileges of scientific transparency nor the mastery that it is supposed to secure. What Bourdieu shows us is not a peculiar deviation. If respecting the other’s speech is the issue, then transcribed testimony is always suspect. Taking words from a book of sociology or anthropology, I inherit a kind of formatting that is not germane to audiovisual recording. This recording itself disengages the elocution from what supports it and what might allow comprehension of the potential articulation of a word. Throwing myself into the pool of words, I deprive you of the recourse that textual study is supposed to afford. At the moment, then, that I recuse this investigation, I want to recount a short scene, unverifiable, which will be my sole (ironic) contribution to sociological transcription for a long time to come. The brief exchange that I report took place on a bus in Lyon in December 2005. I was listening to a woman and an adolescent, probably her son,

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who were sitting behind me. In her forties, the woman had an accent that usually signals Maghrebi origin for her generation. The boy was expressing himself in a manner befitting the banlieue, that real, deterritorialized zone of contemporary France. Both of them got on the bus at Rochecardon. Once a rural suburb, Rochecardon is home to both a population of recent immigrants in a Sonacotra2 residence and, as an extension of the Vaise neighborhood, a place of residence for retirees and the working class, often former immigrants who arrived between the 1950s and 1970s. We were going to the Gare de Vaise, very near the place my grandparents had lived for forty years and where I had spent my early childhood. The couple and I were quite autochthonous in terms of our arrivals and departures. In December 2005, the media and certain public institutions ran a sustained campaign to remind the public of the deadline (the 31st) to register to vote. This civic-minded measure was sparked by the riots, as each political party encouraged its flock to be heard. I specify this context because the mother was asking her son: “Did you register to vote?” The young man, skeptical and visibly disinclined to accept another piece of advice, asked why he should. The woman replied: “They’re giving you the chance to speak up, you have to take it” (On te donne la parole, tu dois la prendre). What seemed at the time to be only a repetition of the great public parlance now ends up in the metadiscourse that I am myself formulating. In this narrative sequence that I have just presented, is the anecdote worth as much as I got from it? I’m troubled when I reread my description. Would not the words uttered refer to the obligation of accepting the gift given by the republican sovereign to his subjects (even those of the second order)? I cannot entirely make up my mind about this scene. I have certainly added too much, cut out too much, to allow us to hear the flash of brilliance I encountered the first time I heard these words. Methodologically, I would abstain from pursuing examinations of this sort. For me, the event occurred in this game between give and take; a logical, explicable game, but which scarcely seems common usage. Upon first hearing, it seemed that the lexical slippage remotivated the syntagmas completely, since in general, one is “given the chance to speak” precisely so that someone else does not take it, and so that he will be content to have it, illusorily. Here and elsewhere (Toussaint’s republican universalism, Diallo’s paternalism, Feraoun’s schoolteacher style), indigenous speech is constructed through the traversal of assigned verbiage. This fact has left many traces in (post)colonial francophonie. I do not announce this as a particular destiny; I only want to establish that the scope of possession has more consequences than is the case in other disruptions to the social distribution of discourses. Presenting

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articles and forgotten texts of workers written between 1830 and 1851, Jacques Rancière will remark that “working-class speech appeared . . . at first as a certain decoding of bourgeois discourse” (Faure and Rancière, La parole ouvrière 16–17). The indigene in French picks up the discarded parlance, coils up within it, then sheds it. He does not decode so much as exceed his role. This configuration makes interpretation a delicate matter; we saw this with Diallo’s Force-bonté. I emphasized the difficulty of elocution for pioneering works. I have focused on such texts in part 2 of this book because I wanted to demonstrate the taking that corresponds to the giving. All of us who make the effort to speak are pioneers of our discourse, I do not deny it; but we all benefit from the effects of the condensation of language. The colony, in its different empires, with its progressively sophisticated system of censure, its resurrection through the stigmatization of immigrants, and its racist analysis, has succeeded tremendously. The indigenous historiography of silence, which recognizes the colonial diktat in order to win the glory of primacy, is, unfortunately, not without consequence. A part of the discourse gets fixed in an originary posture, which condemns it to repeat the passage from silence to phraseology to speech, indefinitely. Someone is always the first. Jamel Debbouze, entertainer and actor, reveals for many the chatter of the French banlieue in all its energy and ambiguities. Jamel began his national career doing sketches on television that were marked by his impulsive physical presence and a devastating flood of words. He speaks as if ideas are knocking into one another as they scramble to get out, crashing and colliding with one another. One of his most typical comedic techniques is to mistake one word for another, to slip between them, to multiply grammatical errors, and to keep going anyway. Jamel still uses this phrasing, but he now weaves it into shows that are among the most elaborate and complex on the French stage. This is therefore what it meant—to speak up as an Arab from the banlieue, to let bad French be heard, to show that it is possible to produce meaning despite the truncations of the idiom, to play on this prodigious fact, suddenly, to use an elaborate phrase successfully. Jamel stages the interdiction within diction (l’interdiction dans le dit). This solution is very far from an oratorical and artistic technique like hiphop, which in France first developed primarily in the banlieues. The rapper does not seek to mimic his linguistic dispossession, striving instead for elocutionary power. His mastery is not about defection from language. Rather, French becomes a substance out of which one crops, cuts, and reassembles pieces. The result must prove that there is a grasp of language in general. I find it quite significant that hip-hop emerged in an American context. African Americans still struggle with a slavery phrase, maintained despite abolition,

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and superimposed onto demands for grammatical corrections comparable to what we have seen in France. From the perspective of slavery, the enslaved does not even have the capacity for language—or else he simply speaks another language, in conformity with the logic of segregation. (The irony here is that certain Afrocentric activists have come to consider African American vernacular English as a separate language, Ebonics.)3 The act of speaking up must then break with the will to general negation or the logic of separate development. In this case, it seeks an inversion of what is given, a perfection of fluency. Through his performance, the MC (master of ceremonies) is the master of his language, just as the orator and black preacher are in other contexts, deploying an extraordinary oratory capacity specific in its phrasing, its rhythm, and its alliteration.4 Without having disappeared altogether, the edict of consubstantial silence was not maintained as the dominant model of nineteenth-century French colonization. The success of hip-hop in France is in this way an indication of the globalization of urban practices promoted by the media and the music industry. Born in a particular context, a form can transplant itself into new ground; this displacement takes on a second value, that of the local fragmentation of the universal. Joey Starr’s rap and Jamel Debbouze’s chatter approach each other in the colonial and migratory etiology they have been gifted. But Jamel is ultimately more linked to the exit from French imperialism. Whatever bits he may borrow from American show business (such as the conventions of stand-up comedy), Debbouze, in his own style, configures the clamor of francophone speaking up. This same configuration troubled me at first, I must admit, since I doubted it would amount to anything other than a re-enforcement of the colonial stutter. These unpronounceable propositions appeared to me like “tags.” The type of graffiti in question is no more the sole property of the banlieue than is rap, yet they are nevertheless inseparable. Internationally, they represent a declaration of real existence, an illicit countersignature attached to the walls of a society experienced as a force of exclusion. Far from being a spontaneous verbal creation as once believed, tags often express a pseudonym, perhaps taken from initials or a short word, willingly abridged. The main point of tagging is to accede to writing and to prepare for more complex calligraphies (“pieces,” or pièces) or murals (graphs), for those who are hardier and more talented. Considered by itself, the tag would reveal a presence, usually invisible, through the development of a cryptography. A technique of appearing through writing, it uses language without stopping at it (which puts it in solidarity with other hip-hop practices). Language becomes one of the social orders that limit expression. In other words, tags configure a dispossession of language, which is susceptible to rearticulation in the colonial phrase, even

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when not proceeding from it. Graffiti are augmented through an additional value that indicates (and only indicates) censure. Tags are words that are currently frozen. One is familiar with the passage in Rabelais’s Quart livre, where Pantagruel’s retinue during its expedition at last arrives at “the approaches of the Frozen Sea” (Gargantua and Pantagruel 829).5 “The Words and cries” of the combatants from the previous year, the noise of their weapons and chariots and the neighing of horses, had been caught in the ice. Panurge and Pantagruel decide to melt some of the “parolles gelées” (frozen words). They take them up in armfuls and admire their shimmering: “We saw gullet words—gules—and words sinople, words azure, words sable, words or” (Nous y veismes des motz de gueule, des motz de sinople, des motz de azur, des motz de sable, des motz d’orez). The colors listed are those of the heraldic code. These colored words are written mostly with few letters (“frr,” “bou,” “trac,” for example). Of course, I am pushing this comparison with tags. Once thawed, the words are heard, but outside listeners cannot understand them, “for they were in some barbarous tongue.” All those outside the group where the tags originate find themselves in a situation of incomprehension, which intensifies the possible indigenous component among writers. “Believe you me, they provided us with some excellent sport,” one assures us. The attraction to these words felt by Pantagruel and his crew is not far from the fascination with graffiti, which are often abbreviations or sections of words like these found in France: loka, maisy, cirk, kwa, felin, datf, rine, big, duf, pez, tran, tige, kung, rizote, dior, stink, ten, rale, ipno, fion, nike, slik, ise, soka, flute, t.lin !, thc, dixo, doxa.6 The spectacle of speech that is truncated yet risked anyway—tags, stammering—is impressive at times. Yet something else is needed: the narration of the thaw, the transformation of speech itself. Returning to Jamel, we can say that he knew how to keep the reality of censure alive and how to exceed it. This is truly something to celebrate. If literature provides greater effectiveness and unparalleled complexity, the emergence of indigenous speech in the everyday, the media, and politics is also to be hailed. This book, too, takes the side of resistance to the colonial order. However, getting free from a social imperative in no way guarantees infallibility. Speaking up can easily contribute to the construction of other injunctive discourses. To sum this up in a formula that is perhaps too simple: while it might seem good that the indigene speaks, what he says is not necessarily good. Too bad for the self-righteous Third-Worldist critic who finds in the colonized a bocca della verità, just as workerism exalted the natural pravda of the proletariat. Nor is it inconceivable that Jamel or the sinister, mirthless entertainer Dieudonné M’bala M’bala take up the words of Far Right racism from time to time,

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particularly the slogan of Le Pen (“He says out loud what everyone feels deep down inside”).7 Avoiding the verbiage assigned to the indigene, the speaker still is not prevented from empty talk, including that of the racist colonizer. The group La Banlieue S’exprime,8 through the slant of its website, represents this trend perfectly. One experiences the emancipation of one’s own speech while making it say exclusionary words that had previously, until that moment, been working to annihilate it.

Portable France and New Americas Throughout part 2 of this book, I have outlined how the second French colonial empire propagated the national language while also wanting to limit its use, and I have also explored how speaking up took place within this system. This linguistic and political framework explains why the critique of colonialism was first made in French, beyond the obvious practical convergence that a common language offered indigenous elites. As a consequence of my analysis, I have on numerous occasions used the term francophonie, about which I would now like to offer some temporary conclusions. Is the term francophonie merely descriptive? The upside of such a word would be slight if this were so, unless it were to meet a desire for political correctness, which would prefer “francophone text” to “text in French,” or “a francophone country” to “a country where French is widespread among the population.” Moreover, it would be difficult to underestimate the lack of preciseness linked to this kind of gesture. When a language is not national in the legal sense, what percentage of speakers (and what level of linguistic competence) does it take to make a language “known”? If Algeria is “francophone,” wouldn’t the France of today be “arabophone”? These methodological problems in fact stem from the political aim that presided over the formation of the word francophonie, and that has, to a degree, maintained it. It is widely believed that one of the first occurrences of the term is found in a work from 1886 by Onésime Reclus.9 The brother of the famous geographer Elisée Reclus, Onéisme situates his description of France and the colonies in the context of international politics. In the first chapter of his work, he recognizes the feebleness of the metropole’s reach and the insufficient numbers of its citizens. This report is conditioned, as are numerous texts written after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, by hostility against Germany, which had reduced French national territory. The Germans, says Reclus, have an expansion policy whose maxim is “As far as the German tongue resounds” (So weit die deutsche Zunge klingt) (Reclus, France, Algérie et colonie 6). The author will thus describe France and its empire

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from the perspective of victory understood as “the day of revenge” (7). The francophone world is a virtual gauge used to measure the relative stature of France and Germany. Reclus sees himself as a pragmatist, believing above all that the greatness of a country, in modernity, is proven by its area and the number of its inhabitants. On both of these points, France has failed, and its military setbacks, and its reduced influence, are thus immediately explained. Francophonie thus comes to serve as a mechanism for making geopolitical comparisons between nations. Reclus does not draw poignant conclusions about the indenization of French. On the contrary, even by adding European, American, Caribbean, and indigenous speakers, the sum total is not sufficient. French—the language of literature and culture—is in peril precisely because of its intellectual universalism (414). Reclus finds that French will lose what remains of its predominance and remain a local language, cultivated for the pleasure of populations that will resort to more useful idioms (such as English or Spanish) the rest of the time. The new words and francophone organizations are established during the 1960s for reasons that are almost diametrically opposed. Political decolonization is the determining factor. The heads of the newly independent states, such as Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, figure among the promoters of one such francophone organization. For them and others, francophonie pursued, in a certain sense, the desire for an association detached from colonial exploitation. After much hesitation (by de Gaulle, to start with), the French government finally encouraged francophonie, at least verbally. It has often been rightly pointed out that this cooperation and the maintenance of francophonie served economic and military interests. This collusion is unquestionable. The November 1962 issue of the review Esprit is elucidating in this regard, all the more because it is regarded as essential to the establishment of an official francophonie. When the editorial (already) advocates the “hybridizations” and “métissages” and critiques the illusions of the West, it announces that the “appearance of new francophone States gives [to the existence of French] its international place” (Boumiquel and Domenach 562–63). At a moment when Reclus’s text had yet to be exhumed, the question of “the competition of powers” concurs with this same geopolitical goal. If colonial expansion must be abandoned, the network of alliances formed by the empire is a useful thing. Not history, the economy, or geography will serve as the common denominator in whose name the assembly of countries will be made, as the Commonwealth or the U.N. was for Europe. The rallying cry comes from French, whatever may have been the intentions of the participants (which diverged markedly).

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This choice can be partly explained by the central place given to language in the French nation, to be sure. In addition, it is a direct consequence of indigenous acts of speaking up, and, singularly, of literature. The resolution of the empire’s interdictions is a franco-phonie, the elevation of a new voice ( pho¯ne¯ ) passing through a French mined by colonial usage. This meaning has been carefully constructed in the preceding demonstrations; it is contained in the francophone vindication of the 1960s. But the word calls forth other meanings: the pursuit of a theologico-political identification between language and nation, the desire to control recourse to the idiom, the focusing of new fields of power, and so on. Francophone speech, as opposed to imperial babble, allowed for the organization of francophonie, which, in turn, reveals itself at the origin of a second conventional language, another level of background noise, another institutional jargon. Senghor is a good example: a man of invention, orator of the impossible word, and propagator of an encomiastic parlance that rings hollow on the question of cultural dialogue—in the end, a writer of the Académie. From this perspective, I understand the irritation of certain contributors to the collective volume Pour une littérature-monde (Toward a World Literature), which argues for an end to the ceremonial approach to francophonie. It is our task to work out the meaning of our words through our discourses, without believing that meaning is closed once and for all, to discern that meaning despite the effects of its use. It is also necessary to be wary of troubling proclamations, such as when the “end of an imperial conception of language” (Le Bris and Rouaud, Pour une littérature-monde 45) entails the strange coextension of “world literature” with the “French language”; must we still traverse the globe with our bugle? Far from believing in the purification of vocabulary, I find in francophonie just a name, recaptured, for the unexpectedness within a word that punctures colonial usage. Francophone speech has resounded since the opening up of the black slave’s discourse that rang out at the end of the nineteenth century. The spoken transgression of the colonial order is thus implicated, necessitating a construction or a destitution of indigeneity (of servitude and racialism) by means of the wording. One can speak the colony without wanting to because one repeats the lethal usage of French. One can continue to speak it while returning to the enterprise of possession, qualifying it, retelling it, analyzing it. In this sense, not every writer who was a child of the empire is postcolonial, if she is in fact equipped with a third word. Others, such as Quebecois activists, seize the colonial phrase, without being descendants of deported Africans. “Speak White,” the great poster-poem (“poème-affiche”) of the indépendantiste Michèle Lalonde, powerfully affirmed that “we know that liberty is a black word / like misery is black / and like blood mixes with dust

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in the streets of Algiers or Little Rock” (nous savons que la liberté est un mot noir / comme la misère est nègre / et comme le sang se mèle à la poussière des rues d’Alger ou de Little Rock”). Biographical identification gives bad counsel when it comes to the interpretation of languages. For this book at least, I therefore propose reserving the invention of the francophone for texts in French where an indigenous singularity is constructed. The choice of French in the act of speaking up was a constraint tied to political circumstances, as I have said. It also posits a historical correction, by pulverizing the French spoken outside the body of the nation. The beginning of the francophone word might be “Je veux chanter la France” (I want to sing France). These words are the refrain and subtitle of the “Credo des sang-mêlé” (Half-Blood Creed), a long poem composed by Gilbert Gratiant for the centennial of the second abolition of slavery in France. An assertion like “Je veux chanter la France,” taken in isolation—now there’s a program for a certain kind of institutional francophonie, one could say. It is a danger I do not rule out. Nor does Gratiant, when he revises his poem in 1961 and in a preface invites readers to resist any “misinterpretations.”10 The author battles against a procolonial understanding of his work, in which “France” would equal the physical contours of the patrie, and the song would be a unilateral dithyramb. One should also note that Gratiant, more than he admits in his preface or in his contemporary manifesto, Ile fédérée française de la Martinique, celebrates in his poem “both the France of earth and the France of flesh” (“Credo” 112; et la France de terre, et la France de chair). But the materiality of the country is but one of the attributes of a France other than “la France”—Parisian, provincial, Martinican, one that is “essential” (16). La Grand’Roue and Vendôme (34, 168) enter into the accumulation of facts, objects, affects, sites, and memories that designate France without defining it. There is indeed a nationalizable register in Gratiant’s text. Especially toward the end (the antepenultimate and penultimate stanzas), the Louis Aragon element—particularly that of La rose et le réséda—comes into play. Here, evoking the Liberation of Paris, Gratiant falls into a rehearsal of Aragon’s incantatory politics. This reference would be recognized by contemporary readers, as Aragon’s poetry had grown in popularity thanks to the armed deeds of the Resistance and the resulting presence of the Communists in the editorial and political world of the time.11 Gratiant writes “O my country” once (“Credo” 718), echoing the obsessive repetition of “my country” in the preface to Aragon’s La Diane française. “My country,” for Aragon, tends to become a self-sufficient phrase: to pronounce it is to say everything (see the five repetitions of “my country” that occur in two pages of La Diane française 15–16).

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Gratiant avails himself of comparable fragments, but the poetic meaning undoes the citation and renders obsolete the patriotism that it only borrows. Gratiant’s France is, from beginning to end, a “portable paradise” (“Credo” 30, 753). The final stanza even presents France as the “daughter of my desire” (739), a desire that must “re-create” France (745). France is not an eternally given fact revealed by signs; it is an essence to reconstruct and whose manifestations are only attributive (and following this, adventitious). In the anaphora from the beginning of the preface of La Diane française, Aragon evokes “his” country “so distant one remembers it”; Gratiant speaks of a “becomingFrench” (“Credo” 732). The two poems, despite their chronological proximity and their related forms of expression, are exact opposites. The first part of Aragon’s preface to La Diane française explains how the French, including the “I” of the poem, have ended up distancing themselves from France: “Who, then, cared that this was a country? . . . Nothing remained of this country but its language” (11–12). The country, apparently “real,” returns to the conscience of the poet once he enters the Resistance. With great honesty, the poem announces that language will henceforth pass away after the country—which can be read in the oscillation between the neotroubadour style (“ladies and lords,” “des dames et des seigneurs” [11]) and the triviality of the populist novel (“Everything happened in any old way”—“Tout allait à la va-comme-je-te-pousse” [11]). The song designates the resistant action. “My country,” which “was becoming the very song of the world,” strikes up the tune of the rebellion. With Gratiant, on the contrary, France is the effect of the song. It is by singing France that it exists; France is produced by a discourse (poetic and political for the author), far from the hysterical reterritorialization of “my country.” One should understand that I am reading Gratiant in the most elevated register, that register that his poetry actualizes beyond its sometimes borrowed utterances. The Aragonian and republicanist grafting is in every way pledged to the “orientation” toward another France (see “Credo” 744), to internal displacement, to the confrontation with the Orient of the Occident. The “portable paradise / That man carries in his heart” (753–54) is transcribed in the poetic chorus. There is nothing of value in France other than a word said in French. Francophonie begins by wanting to sing France. Either it sings its praises and one falls into the inert claptrap of neocolonial “cooperation,” or else it speaks out in favor of this language it appropriates, despite the ploys of the colonizer, and from which it makes another France, irreducible to the country; or perhaps it breaks into threnody, a song of rage, a lamentation, an aria of loathing. Nothing is definitive. Yet it is clear that the colonial phrase

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cannot go without saying the colonized and the colonizer as soon as the transport of possession links them together. French is a site conducive to the violence of this encounter because in this language a colonial doctrine has been written, because this idiom wanted to replace the others, and because its usage was disseminated and controlled. Not all liberation discourses were intrinsically destined to become francophone; however, those who wanted to take speech from the colonizers had to alter the latter’s words and statements. The tear that French opened up in the colonial compact sings a self-ravished France. Sometimes to the point of being torn apart: cantare sometimes means “bewitch” and “exorcize” (see “incantations”). La France shatters, dissolves, forfeit to a voice in French that induces an active critique of Frenchness. This song is contained in the francophone experience, as is the traversal of silence and babble. I must insist that not only do I not say that this song amounts to a canticle of praise; I also do not claim that francophonie must confine itself to the impoverishment of France. These are so many moments corresponding to the rapid time of the formation of an instance of speech; it is a time that figures regularly in the colonial corpus, but which should not be the only chronology of the text. From this point of view, francophonie is eminently mortal. Born from an excess of usage, it is destined to pass away. In the 1950s, Albert Memmi had predicted, somewhat hastily, the foreseeable disappearance of indigenous writers of French. Decolonization did not fulfill this prophecy despite the linguistic nationalisms (for example, Arabization in Algeria and, to a lesser degree, in Morocco and Tunisia). Memmi was correct, however, to mention the perishability of a francophonie that would establish itself in the critique of French colonialism. The day the posterity of the postcolonial took the phrase of imperial domination for dead, a certain militant francophonie disasppeared. History is not linear. What is achieved in a text does not necessarily take place in history. There is no denying an increase in indigenous speech today, independent of the political and social profiling (citizenship, place of residence). Dieudonné and Jamel are not alone, but rather proxy orators of millions of people who are themselves on the verge of issuing a contrapuntal response to the inflexible celebration of the French nation. We who have read and continue to read francophone texts several decades old, sometimes from the nineteenth century, how are we not to have the impression of a perpetual repetition? One element of francophonie runs the risk of enclosing itself in the position of martyr. As Lyotard said of the worker, it often happens that he enjoys being mistreated and destroyed.12 We discovered that the would-be possessor let himself be drawn into increasingly sophisticated forms of colonial censure, where he always had to give more, out of hope of

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keeping alive the pleasure of plundering a little while longer. The indigene can benefit by remaining a victim, hesitating to break the chains, to speak up, especially to say that she has spoken up. Although not new, I fear this idea will be shocking to some. Yet it is not a principle, only empirical commentary on a contemporaneity marked by a return to its phantasmatic origin. Repeatedly, a francophonie was invented that acknowledged the indigénat, and then passed beyond it. It is another puncture, piercing through a negating silence, the parlance, francophonie itself, then that other discourse, and so on, as far as it can go. There is no involution of some precolonial renewal. The work is driven by a word that does not want to become frozen once again, that always aims for its own excess in another silence, that of its interruption. An example of this constant modification can be found in the work of Mehdi Belhaj Kacem. While Belhaj Kacem on occasion designates himself as Arab, his works are haunted by possession and spectrality; these motifs are most often configured in a movement that is supplementary to the colonial phrase. Among a plethora of comparable assertions, I recall the following, written by the narrator of Belhaj Kacem’s Vies et morts d’Irène Lepic (Lives and Deaths of Irene Lepic): “I am not Irène Lepic, except to admit that Irène Lepic is only a very convenient title for designating the thousands of experiences I fully plan on living” (97). Following the example of Irène, the writer MBK multiplies himself in, and expels himself from, a work that opens false trails within a dynamic of contradiction, avoiding the positivity that would be the negation of the negation. In this other space, the colony has something to say about the act of possession and dispossession that was reappearing infinitely (in love, genocide, death, etc.); the colony is not the condition of the writing. Colonial exploitation enters the field of the indeterminate, which constitutes the fabric of life, and which must be recognized. It is no longer the primary determination. Accession to francophonie can at last be transgressed in language’s other. The textbook example is Creole, which in the postwar era and especially in the works of the great Haitian writer Frankétienne (beginning in the 1970s), is also the language of a written literature. The accession to Creole writing marks the end of an era where French was the only language worth being taken (prise). If something colonial remains in the new Creole literature, it is also virtually past, exceeded, the aftershock of the aftershock—just as a French literature can quite simply move beyond the phrase without forgetting it. Likewise, textuality in African languages has less to be concerned with regarding the imperial past than the corpus composed in European vernaculars. The francophone is still the element of a reading, one that circumscribes the linguistic event in its connection to the order of the colony. The

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francophone, understood as language usage outside of sociohistorical necessity, communicates, then, with other idioms. To the degree that the francophonie that I am reading takes on meaning only as a function of particular conditions, it is able to interrogate other voices from other places. Is “I too sing America” “Je veux chanter la France” in English? In part, yes, since the Anglicist Gratiant knew Langston Hughes’s celebrated poem. Only Hughes’s poem is more of a blues than Gratiant’s “Credo”; it bears little relation to such grand lyricism. The economy of Hughes’s writing, its simple syntax and vocabulary, make the final verse stand out all the more (“I, too, am America”). The inclusion in America of the “darker brother” is not the assimilation of the indigene into the great body. Rather, this “am” already phonically announces the debut of American English, and the echo of this counterrhyme is audible in the subtle jazz-inflected reading of the poem.13 The poetic “I” is constituted on the outskirts of the political, in an impossible exchange that changes the country as a result. “America” is the name without content for every “I” that says “I am.” The United States, contrary to the hysterical imperialism that marks its existence, is also the very utopia that all the “I”s could be. The effective failure of this American dream in the grand reality of global domination must not make us forget the desire for a no-where, both impossible and necessary. Beyond (post)colonial experience, let us listen to the mad phonie of new worlds. Beyond empire, let us invent other Americas.

Pa rt I I I

Disciplining Knowledge

If one must speak the colony, then it is necessary to decide which discourse of knowledge is capable of such speech, and by means of which disciplines. What I first called the phrase designates the buildable linguistic agglomerate that encircles and expresses the colonial adventure. We have seen how a political theology of languages attempted to determine how the indigene could speak up, including the double-sided invention of francophonie. In these configurations, the discourse of knowledge does not constitute an end; my ultimate goal is not to constrain colonial experience within science as the only licit discourse. This final part of the book interrogates precisely this desire to make research and scholarly statements adequate to (post)colonial realities. In fact, texts, practices, and methods that go beyond the self-described scope of their pertinence to their object are repeatedly established in the field of knowledge. Such discourses do not engage with the colony by accident; they integrate the colony into their own definition. Immediately, two bodies of knowledge, separated by a century, spring to mind, each in its own name claiming a perfect adequacy with its field of study. In Europe, the last decades of the nineteenth century witness the development of different modes of inquiry and interpretation that attempt to form a “colonial science.” Institutes, reviews, associations, and teaching curricula all recognize this budding science, which is always threatened by an uncertainty regarding its own scope; in particular, this field of study hesitates 145

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between the decoding of annexed countries and the encoding of “civilizing” activity. Contemporary postcolonial studies, especially vibrant in the United States and the United Kingdom, can be seen as responding to this effort to construe a field of adapted knowledge. Today’s theoreticians, who are often products of the diasporas created by the former British Empire, aim at allowing an alternative voice to be heard. The oscillations of colonial science would therefore be typical of the double register of the “West” in its relationship with conquered peoples. Without any unification of these registers, a new discourse establishes itself at the intersection of disciplines created for understanding and commenting on colonialism, from yesterday to today. I will add a third case of discursive consubstantiality: anthropology. The intrinsic relationship to colonialism is perhaps less obvious in this case. However, in the age of Marcel Mauss or Franz Boas, ethnology is certainly shaped by the colony. Even now, after the self-criticism unleashed by the wars for independence, the discipline is restructuring itself in relation to colonialism in order to rehabilitate its epistemology. I am not equating scholars with agents of imperialism, but I sense that the link between anthropology and the colony is not a random one. This relation is susceptible to opposing values; for better or worse, it conditions the privilege that both anthropology and ethnology claim for their disciplines.1 Confronting colonial science, anthropology, and postcolonial theory with one another will bring these problems of adequacy to the surface. Such a confrontation will certainly help me to qualify my own approach. I think that the place given to literature in my analysis will be elucidated in a new light. Every book of erudition contains some declaration of its method and the circumstances of its analysis. Many works, however, decide to limit themselves to the minimum that can be expressed in this regard, unaware that their reserve is eloquent in itself. The researcher who reflects on the modes of his or her thinking is quickly accused of narcissism, intellectual aridity, or even practical impotence. When required, there are handbooks, manuals, and guides that collect the best recipes or general theories—and which can help in the teaching of students, or as digests of big ideas for a public ranging from the merely curious to those at the university. The split is regrettable whenever it reinforces the idea that some people think, whereas others act. The epistemology of the social sciences should be included in all research related to this field. In writing this book, I have doubled the investigation by considering the responsibility of the site of my own language. Now we go back to square one, and we examine how (groups of) disciplines claim to proceed from the colony, while coiling up in a phrase and establishing a space of knowledge. And we examine, moreover, the ways that what is said in this space might be transmitted to other spaces.

Ch a p ter 8

Formations and Reformations of Anthropology

Formations In the Greco-European lineage, it is possible to trace the first anthropological narratives back to antiquity, to Herodotus, for example. We see these narratives renewed by the experience of the New World, by authors such as Jean de Léry. However, if we consider “anthropology” in terms of a discipline, as a way of organizing knowledge in the enactment of a shared method, then the first attempts are instead found toward the end of the eighteenth century. In France, La Société des Observateurs de l’Homme, created in 1799, regulates the practice of collecting information about human beings through the writing of dissertations. Léon-François Jauffret specifies five directions for the discipline: the study of the “physiognomy of the diverse inhabitants of the Earth” (qtd. in Copans and Jamin, Aux origines 54); their differences from place to place (56); “comparative anthropology,” or the relation between “customs” and “practice” (68); the examination of “natural man” (61–62); and the analysis of the “mechanical formation of languages” (63). The very term anthropology conforms here to the long philosophical tradition of which Kant, with his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, during this same period, will be one of the last representatives. The knowledge of the character of nations and peoples was a lesser branch of (post)Aristotelian science that sought, above all, to establish

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the existence of invariable moral “types.” The new “observation of Man” utilizes comparison and links the description of ways and customs to indexes of physical forms. The last directions that Jauffret mentions concern man in his raw state, who would grow up outside of society, an ancient figure that Victor of Aveyron (aka “the wild boy of Aveyron”) helped to revive.1 This discipline trying to establish itself bears a direct relation to exploration and colonization, as the libido sciendi (Augustine’s famous “desire for knowledge”) is at the very least increased by the discovery of “other people.” Joseph-Marie Gérando writes the Considérations sur les diverses méthodes à suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages (The Observation of Savage Peoples) in order to compensate for the faulty tradition of unorganized and biased travel narratives. It is time, he assures his readers, to “observe” man and to be satisfied no longer with dilettantism or prejudice. By means of the professionalism of the narrative, a field of knowledge will be constructed that will piece together the mosaic of the human species. For the dawning of scientific desire to occur, the first shock of encountering the savage was thus necessary, followed by the frustration with a literature that has too narrow a focus. This rather schematic history of the need for disciplinary organization is what is presupposed at the outset of this quest for knowledge. In the aftermath of these proclamations, the “observation” in question will progressively relativize and marginalize the problem of “natural man.” It goes without saying, however, that the term “savage,” applied both to distant tribes and to the wild boy of Aveyron, signals the potential (and altogether logical) inclusion of the “natural” in the “primitive.” As for languages, their history and function will be brought back into the vast pattern of anthropological description. These internal displacements will then allow two essential branches of the field to appear, which mark the development of the discipline in France and elsewhere. On one side, there is the study of physical traits (heredity, races, inherent capacities); on the other, we have the analysis of what is produced by people (objects, customs, practices). Throughout the nineteenth century, “anthropology” often designates the first path, whereas “ethnography” or “ethnology” most frequently refers to the second. It is true that in France scholars often assembled around the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle and its collections. It is Paul Broca who founded the Société d’Ethnographie. If the emphasis is on comparative anatomy and hereditary systems, then the understanding of human systems still remains to be seen. One member of this group, Clémence Royer, the high priestess of “Aryan” superiority, uses human remains, artifacts, and even linguistic changes to reveal the migration of populations.2 This method of comparing physical objects and elements (or practices and languages) is still active today in

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paleoanthropology, an area into which almost all of Broca’s former discipline from the nineteenth century has now withdrawn. The Revue d’anthropologie, at first an emanation of the society founded by Broca, has appeared continuously since 1890. Without an explicit critical return to its past, it has generally engineered this relocation in the direction of prehistory, where it prolongs procedures that have become suspect when applied to more recent periods. Physical anthropology, then, was not necessarily so distant from the social, although its determinism was immediately contested. In 1860 Broca will affirm that “people should stop believing that there is the least connection between the scientific question and the political question. The difference of origins in no way implies the idea of the subordination of the races” (Recherches sur l’hybridité 663). Moreoever, Clémence Royer is often taken to task for her attachment to causality in discussions and in her presentations. Anténor Firmin, a Haitian and a member of this very society, will write his essay De l’égalité des races humaines in 1855 as a “positive anthropology.” For him, races exist, but behavior does not proceed naturally from them. Nonetheless, despite all of Firmin’s efforts, the dominant tendency among the anthropologists who welcomed him was the declaration of a fundamental racial inferiority. Broca refutes the use of science by politics, in other words, the legitimating of exploitation (primarily slavery) by using supposedly objective data. He does this in the name of the independence of research. Yet this refusal does not mean that his discoveries are inimical to the notion of natural inferiority. On the contrary, it is the (political and scientific) dogma of “humankind” (Broca, Recherches sur l’hybridité 654) that authorizes him to promptly put the species into a hierarchy: “After this profession of faith, we will be able to say that the physical structure of the Negro is, in a certain sense, halfway between that of the European and that of the ape” (503). It is not necessary here to keep examining the connections between racism and scientific discourses. I mentioned these encounters in the first part of this book, and there are many other works that detail this fact. I provide these examples here simply to mark a French specificity. Associated from the outset with comparative anatomy, and regularly solicited by it, the discipline of ethnography will nonetheless develop at a distance from it. In the tradition of Buffon, physical anthropology will pay close attention to the inherited differences that distinguish man from animal, as well as the species within each kingdom. This branch of the discipline will also show interest in monsters (teratology) and in corporeal deformations produced by society (for example, the museum’s collection of conical skulls). Colonization is neither the only origin nor the sole limit for these studies. However, they do accommodate colonization very well, as the racial hierarchies demonstrate. The

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gallery of comparative anatomy in Paris still displays, as of 2011—despite recent “corrections” that have been made—a series of four “cranial casts,” of decreasing size, presenting the cast of a “Tasmanian” skull between those of a “normal” white man and a “dwarf known by the name of Bébé,” followed by that of a “20-year-old idiot.”3 The implication is quite obvious. From this point of view—metrical—physical anthropology joins the colonial morality of enslavement and total domination. Broca was by no means naïve: if he prohibited an appropriation of the discipline as a tool of political legitimization, his ironic mention of a “profession of faith” proves that he also knows how to act in the political field. Because it develops at a distance from the anthropology of the museum, French ethnography will for a time lose interest in Man in general. Gérando’s “savage peoples” will become the object of its obsession. Scientific documentation and scholarly expeditions are the tributaries of colonial expansion (of the nation or of other powers). Marcel Mauss, the great reformer of the discipline, takes stock of the situation in 1913, when France seems to be lagging behind the United States, Great Britain, Holland, and Germany. Among the English, “in every place they have colonized, there was at least one intelligent administrator, some zealous missionary, a colonist, voyager, or scholar who could collect, observe, publish” (Mauss, “L’ethnographie en France,” in Oeuvres 397). Monographs and objects are the products of colonization—who would be surprised by this? The “standstill” of anthropological knowledge in France is really a result of the loss of “colonies after Napoléon I” (404), difficulties encountered by the missions, the “decline of the spirit of adventure in our country”—in addition to the permanent “inertia” of the university (405). French ethnography should therefore be the science of the empire “extra muros,” and the reflection of “France, a great scientific power, and a great colonial power” (405). Mauss certainly wields the argument of greatness with skill when he asks the state to institutionalize ethnology. It is striking that Mauss, who took a political position on the socialist Left, never denounced the empire. In his work as a journalist, one finds instead the same comparison with England, where he reveals that “in terms of external politics and colonialism, the French bourgeoisie has been inferior to its task” (Ecrits politiques 239).4 Mauss, the central figure of the new ethnography in France, lodged his discipline in republican colonialism. He was directed to do this, not merely on the basis of an individual choice, but because “ethnography, the discipline of so-called primitive peoples” (395), had a duty to be an offspring of the colony. In the United States, the approximately contemporary counterpart of Mauss is Franz Boas, who is inscribed in a different disciplinary formation. Metrical anthropology dominates to such a degree that it will morph into an

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invasive pseudo-scientific discourse on race. Knowing whether blacks—and more secondarily, Indians—are naturally inferior beings becomes an obsession in a country reconstructing itself after the Civil War and perfecting its modes of segregation. Boas vindicates a “general anthropology,” as he indicates in the title of the great manual he directs in 1938. The study of physical attributes enters this work without contestation, but in order to clearly establish that human societies are not determined by biological inheritance. In 1911, Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man is built on the recognition of race or fixed corporeal characteristics and the refusal to draw conclusions about the accomplishments of peoples. Race is distinct from culture. Anthropological thought must function to bring about the death of “race prejudice.” What the case of the primitive teaches us, and moreover prompts us to verify, is that the taste for “licentiousness,” “shiftless laziness,” the “lack of initiative” (Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man 253), all those faults with which black people have been rebuked, are themselves the “expression of social conditions” (271), and not of racial conditioning. Boas thus accepts physical anthropology in his method so that he may better focus on the study of cultures. Versus the move toward French autonomy, American anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century will proceed through internal differentiation. Yet metrics are depreciated on principle. Once the evidence of the nondeterminism of race is established, mainstream American anthropological practice will no longer need to revive the biological in a grand gesture of conjuration and will devote itself exclusively to the examination of social practices. Two figures will consequently haunt Boas’s work: the Native American and the African American. In this primitivist phase that marks ethnology, the “Indian” will become Boas’s somewhat unique “field” (the Kwiakutl, Dakota, Tlingit, and Inuit nations, in particular). Despite the modifications that the presence of Westerners made to Native American ways of life, it is rather the African American who will serve, for Boas, as the primary example of a former primitive transplanted into an external civilization. In both cases, the colonized person is anthropology’s other. This does not mean that the scholar must become the accomplice of domination, but that he can scarcely exist without domination already having been established. Michel Foucault makes a rather tepid point when he remarks, in Les mots et les choses, that anthropology is linked to a temporal state of “our culture,” adding that “this is not to say, of course, that the colonial situation is indispensable to ethnology” (388). However, modern ethnology is a discipline whose birth was “allowed by colonization.” Allowed by historical possibility— in this case, a valid license was granted by a power that was happy to make use of statistics, documents, and interpretations: such is “the interest of the

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administration and that of science” (Mauss, Oeuvres 428). Recent studies have shown that scholarly practice in France and Germany inherited attitudes adopted from travel narratives, which they sometimes did not even admit.5 Yet we are not speaking about a legacy here; insistently, ethnology was formed and reformed in relation to the colony. From the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme to Marcel Mauss, the discipline of anthropology finds its principal terrain in colonial territory. Later, as Benoît de l’Estoile has clearly shown, the height of colonial propaganda that was the Exposition of 1931 in Paris “plays an important role in the process of the crystallization” of knowledge (“Des races non pas inférieures,” 393, 455). Then in the wake of the wars for independence, French ethnology will become more critical. The discourse is cast into radical doubt by those who practice it. In the countries where the method had been formed from the reality of the colony, the 1960s and 1970s will initiate a great trial against the imperialism of Western science.6 At the same time, this virulent accusation has not, to my knowledge, sounded the death knell for anthropology. On the contrary, this crisis has given rise to attempts to make the discipline’s epistemology more complex. The scholar took hold of the history of her science and reinforced the reflective examination of her commentaries. At the same time, a more or less moderate skepticism spread. Relativist ethnology is in itself ambivalent. It tends to focus on the situation of the observer and move toward the narrative (or the documentary) of literary (or cinematographic) fiction. Or else it confounds the difference between societies with an absolute opacity existing between different groups. This last attitude is, alas, dominant in current French practice today (that of the CNRS in particular) and serves a technocratic politics of expertise, which recuses comparison in the name of the irreducible—even though one only ever compares the incomparable.7 Whatever we make of this contemporary intermediary state of the discipline, in one way or another anthropology did indeed accompany historical decolonization, discovering problems anew and burying old ideas, while maintaining many of its practices. Here again, the scholarly discourse experienced a renewal in the colonial experience (its fall, in this case). The collapse of a political system did not in fact bring about the demise of its consideration. And it might even be said that colonization has never been so explicitly present in ethnography as it has been since the end of the empires. Already an epistemic foundation and a condition of historical existence, colonialism has also become an entirely separate object of study. The anthropology of Java or of Cambodia practiced by James Siegel or Ashley Thompson sheds light on the colonial relations that these societies have deformed in a productive

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way. The names of the researchers testify to a larger will not to conceal the colonial trace, out of fear of heading back toward a complicit silence. The personal and collective positions, for and against, cannot obliterate even today the fact that anthropology has always been constitutively linked to the event of the colony. This link has nothing to do with the situation of geography, history, or philosophy, disciplines that empire has sometimes passed through without serving as the sole resource. That the method established might contribute to the study of ancient societies, for example, is not contradictory. When Claude Calame and Florence Dupont or their local equivalents look at Greeks or Latins anthropologically, their objective is to counter the colonial West (from the Renaissance to the contemporary moment) by separating it from the classical age it had equipped itself with to establish its supremacy. The colony is there; the value granted to it varies. I will not speculate about a future where anthropology would renew itself far from empire. I doubt that this is possible. Even the “anthropology of contemporary worlds” proposed in Marc Augé’s Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains, to which I will return shortly, starts from the assertion that “every individual today is aware that he belongs to the same planet” (dust jacket). This “today” refers to the phrase of globalization, which has been thousands of years in the making, and whose primary statements have been assembled by Laurent Ferri in his anthology.8 In the context of a rereading of the disciplinary past, this sentiment of unity, these difficult encounters also decidedly evoke the “discovery” of the “new” world by the old. No futurology, then, but rather a question. In what way does the defining link between colony and ethnology allow the latter not only to speak the former, but to speak it better than all other scholarly discourses? This interrogation, let us immediately note, concerns a hypothetical discourse returned to life (un éventuel discours redivivus), after having demonstrated the validity of its critical method. What Lévy-Bruhl says about the primitive served the performative elaboration of the Western “we” at work in colonialism. Ultimately, interpreting possession (colonial or otherwise) ethnographically often seemed to fall short. I have indicated these difficulties, which are related to rationalist exposition. It is now clear that they take on a particular meaning in a discipline born from colonization. More is needed than a reversal of values, or the dogmas of cultural difference (which, we have seen in passing, have not always run counter to domination). The indispensable critical return to scholarly practices must occur, but not so that one may be easily exonerated. Likewise, to say that everyone was colonial in the past will not do, since ethnography was too closely linked to empire, and anticolonialism did

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not first appear just yesterday. I also have the impression that the rereading of the past by anthopologists often serves to establish the truth of the contemporary discourse: we recognize past errors, thus we will not commit them. However, historical knowledge must be activated in this case. Criticism fails when it is dogmatized. I welcome this precaution, preferring that criticism become frozen neither in the position of a prior principle (after which, all will be remade as in the past), nor as a moral doctrine (that would censor all comparison in advance).

Reformations In sum, anthropology, at least during the first part of its disciplinary history, spoke the colonial language all too often. By doing so, it did not say very much about a phenomenon its descriptions evaded. For Mauss, Michel Leiris, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, colonization is both what allows ethnology to take place and what, once brought to term, will prohibit it (in the dissolution of ancestral cultures). The colony as condition of possibility does not enter the field of study but instead remains outside the frame. As a deadly entity, the colony must be erased if one is to render the force of the primitive or the virtue of the savage—even if it means reintroducing it as a countermodel to the West—absolutely separated, absolutely opposed to it. Theoretical treatises have the task of reconstituting a civilization independent from the political situation that makes it visible (Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie structurale or Leiris’s La possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar). Narratives, on the other hand (Tristes tropiques, L’Afrique fantôme), take on the role of evoking the concerns and phantasms of the observer, the disappearance of the noble savage, and the antagonism of worlds. Through its primary practice (the treatise) and its secondary practice (the narrative), the discipline in its golden age is thus incapable of speaking the colony as copresence. This is only logical, inasmuch as ethnography was essentially formed for “savage” peoples. The work of Alfred Métraux in Haiti certainly represents one of the rare exceptions. The inhabitants of the island are in effect considered indigenous enough to enter into the disciplinary lens, without it being a question of completely obliterating the production of a (post)colonial meaning. The exceptions, however, are not the last word in this story. After the epistemological crisis linked to decolonization, anthropology has sometimes closed itself off into what I call its standard state. I do not want to insist too much on this point, but it is obvious that this supposedly reverential attitude is of the same order as the former ensauvagement, except that it abandons the comparison of differences, the very thing, despite

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everything else, that was the strong point of Franz Boas, Marcel Mauss, Ruth Benedict, even Leo Frobenius. Contrary to the Third-Worldist myth, the refutation of ethnocentrism is not something won during the struggles for independence. It is inherent to ethnography: Gérando was already bemoaning the excess of “analogies drawn from our own customs” (qtd. in Copans and Jamin, Aux origines 79); Mauss encourages the colonial administrators to write, for they are quite “free from prejudices” (Oeuvres 431). The critique of ethnocentrism is thus perfectly compatible with universalism, even with the acquiescence to domination. Lévi-Strauss, in his major text, evokes the “doubling of the observer” in relation to the “indigene”: by objectifying the latter, the former separates from himself, both as an individual mixed with the people he is studying, and as a man bearing the possibility of alternative cultures (“Introduction” XXVII-XXIX). The scholar participates and takes his distances; he recognizes himself in his object and must free himself from it. A “fragmentation” of anthropology results, which then is only equal to the “diversity of ways and customs” (XXIX-XXX). Thus does Lévi-Strauss sketch the outlines of a “new humanism” (XXIX). This quest is no longer fashionable for standard research, but its description nonetheless reminds us that fragmentation is no guarantee against unification. The classical ethnographers did not believe in the “immediate” unity of humankind, without which they would not have engaged in their profession. By prohibiting the bridging of differences, one certainly avoids doctrines that served as the armature of the duty to civilize. One also avoids asking troubling questions, while offering a sacrifice to the logic of research specialization, the most effective way to stifle thought. I am not attempting to take a position for humanism, old or new. I am simply pointing out that merely bypassing a problem is not defensible. And I would add, of course, that the dogma of the radical insularity of peoples can have no relation to the colonial encounter. Fortunately, the discipline does not stop its babbling. We have just discussed the numerous reflexive attempts to look back at the scholarly tradition or elucidate the dynamics of modifications (whether or not they are part of the transfer of colonial power). Yet the specular return to the past most often relies on a history of fields of knowledge, which intersects with ethnography but does not limit itself to it. Studies that focus on the internal and external alterations of the discipline do in fact say something about the colony, despite possible reservations (such as my skepticism regarding the heuristic contribution of the category of métissage). The question, however, is whether these words come from the discipline in its organization or from individual positions. If we do not want to strike from the record the entire (ancient and contemporary) history of ethnology, the value of words can be gauged

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only within the particular discourse that made them heard in the first place. Today it would thus be strange to assign anthropology the task of speaking the colony. Real encounters will only ever be accidental. Marc Augé has perhaps laid the foundations for a new reformation. If this is the case, ethnology would once again need the colony in order to reinvent itself—but it would leave the colony outside the field of study for the most part. In Le sens des autres: Actualité de l’anthropologie (A Sense for the Other: The Timeliness and Relevance of Anthropology), Augé in effect rereads the anthropological passion for the discovery of alterity. He takes a position against the ordinary approach, which considers other people as identical—and against the synthetism that would find the same at the heart of the other. This reflexive homage to scholars from the past serves a methodical revival, where “different worlds” (des mondes) are recognized as being “contemporary.” This declared coexistence of universes that had been considered discrete up until now is postcolonial, in the chronological sense of the term. The ethnographer can take the metro or cross the Jardin du Luxembourg to do work there as one would in Black Africa, since colonization (as a historical phenomenon or catalyst for epistemic critiques) has created a shared tempo. Contemporaneity is due to the closing of the time of the colonies. A necessary past, a sign of the present, but surely not an object for the future of a discipline. Here, too—here finally—anthropology does not enjoy any natural facility of expression. Its fixation with colonization, and then with decolonization, does not make ethnology the privileged spectator of this double experience. Does so-called indigenous anthropology change the lay of the land? Nothing could be less certain. First, we must come to terms regarding the name. If it is a question of admitting that a colonized person, or a descendant of colonized persons, who does ethnology is an indigenous anthropologist, then the expression would primarily have a descriptive value. In a given political field, one could convince a country to equip itself with indigenous ethnologists in order to encourage university research, stop the flow of brain drain, thus privileging the national elite, and so on. Yet in what way would the indigenous ethnologists be functionally practicing a different ethnology? Does the hypothetical rift between the socially demarcated origins of (colonized) participants and the historically majoritarian origins of the discourse (the colonial powers) suddenly create a new epistemological zone? Assuredly not, since we have recognized the possession at work in colonization, and in particular, its tendency to place surprising words in the mouths of the enchanted. The interval opened by the indigenous population in anthropological practice becomes effective only through construction; it is absolutely not

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a given. No more so than is the apparent belonging of the autochthonous observer to his own terrain. His work decenters him, exiles him in advance. Let us try to imagine, however, an indigenous anthropology that would construct its speech—even if polemically or destructively—in relation to the collective organization of a discourse of knowledge, and which would move beyond simple ethnic or national identifications. The necessary critique of usages can be articulated with a reformulation of the disciplinary practice, in the direction of indigenous fields of knowledge that had been minimized, denied, or attacked. Linda Tuhiwai Smith similarly proposes, in Decolonizing Methodologies, an approach to the Maori people by themselves, after a critical acquisition of modes of understanding that she qualifies as Western. Even in this exemplary case of a double immersion in both colonial discourse and indigenous traditions, deliberately constructive and methodically interrogative, the goal remains to not speak the colony. It is even more important, for strategic reasons, to denounce the colony vehemently, in hopes of putting an end to it, and then to restore a supposedly native understanding—but which is spoken in a conceptually mixed apparatus. Which signifies, yet again, that reformation needs the colony, needs to not render its advent, in this case to benefit an indigenization, that is, a fiction of renaturalization, and the erection of a counterimage. After all, before becoming the dictator of haïtianité, Jean-François Duvalier wrote numerous essays of indigenous ethnography.9 We are a long way from any real displacement of the meaning of ethnology. Beginning in the 1970s, with L’autre face du royaume, V. Y. Mudimbé will seek to move beyond spontaneous equivalences and to generate a revolution of knowledge practices. It is symptomatic that as his research progressed, Mudimbe came to connect the parts of knowledge in different ways. In the beginning, he relativized the importance of ethnology as such, a “discourse mired in an order that founds it and explains it” (L’autre face 9). Mudimbé departed from a Marxist, schematic, and illusory orthodoxy, where “ideology” reveals the processes of alienation. Yet there was also something else, which the following reveals: “Ethnology is but a pretext used to launch an interrogation, namely how Africans might carry out, in their own land, a theoretical discourse that would produce a political practice” (10). Ethnology has been a pre-text in that before the invention of francophonie, it gave us the first texts in French (or any other colonial language) about Africans. French also presented itself as the theoretical language for colonized peoples—history, geography, and economy did not enjoy the same conceptual reputation and counted fewer converted philosophers among their ranks. The attempt to transform scholarly practice might therefore be rightly said to begin with anthropology, and it had nothing to gain by stopping

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there. As his work developed, Mudimbé was led to traverse once again fields other than anthropology. “Interdisciplinarity,” a movement “opening up the contribution of other disciplines for us,” becomes a condition of divesting anthropology of the colonial, and also of ridding it of “the order of repression” in the disciplines (Mudimbé, L’odeur du père 171). If the objective is “to undo the norms of an epistemological universe inherited from colonization” (171), then the metamorphosis of anthropology is ineluctably the prelude to its disappearance. In which case, anthropology would have nothing more to say about the colonies than the extinction of its own voice.10

Ch a p ter 9

The Impossible Colonial Science

For all of its imaginable points of acquaintance, there is nothing about anthropological discourse that makes it particularly adequate in relation to colonial diction. On the contrary, in the multiplicity of its postures, anthropology always requires recourse to a disciplinary exteriority. The project Marcel Mauss announces, where research would be joined to imperial expansion, is exemplary on this point. It was a matter of simultaneously legitimating, perfecting, and instituting a process of knowledge—and also of inserting that process of knowledge into a larger space. At the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of a “colonial science” truly emerges among the principal European powers. Ethnography, which preceded its emergence, is able to find a new means to expand within this new ambition; but it had no reason to fall in with it completely. With a degree of opportunism, then, Mauss affirms the future colonial value of his discipline together with its antiquity, dating to the Renaissance: “Ethnography . . . is a science of ancient date in France” (Oeuvres 395). This is one way both to make something fashionable and to preserve it. Anthropology may be associated with different phases of colonialism (from the New World to the present); however, it would not perish with colonial science.

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Colonization of the Sciences While awaiting its potential failure, a field of study that is defined as “the description of so-called primitive peoples” may at least participate in the global intelligibility of the colony. Anthropology provides useful information about the governed individuals, in particular those who are “less civilized.” To this mass of empirical knowledge are added the more practical observations about the behavior of the colonized, as well as the facts brought back from expeditions (concerning geography, flora and fauna), and the history of conquests, among other things. Colonial science situates itself in this region. While respecting the prerogatives of each discipline, colonial science proposes a horizontal organization: nothing that is colonial is foreign to it. Let us catalogue, assemble, and coordinate, colonial science says. The first textual examples of this presumed collaboration are found in the manuals and reports of the work done by learned societies. The point of departure is an encyclopedic knowledge localized to the colonies, making it possible to foster “the spirit of adventure” evoked by Mauss, while also preparing the work of colonizers at all levels. La France coloniale, edited in 1886 by Alfred Rambaud for the Librairie Armand Colin, published a series of monographs that synthesized information about different territories, addressed in terms of their physical, demographic, and ethnic characteristics. This work, whose section on Algeria is lifted by Les colonies françaises, which Larousse will publish at the beginning of the twentieth century, is akin to a tourist guidebook intended for a broad readership. It complements the doctrinal treatises that are published in this same period, from La colonisation chez les peuples modernes by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (1874) to Les colonies françaises by Louis Vignon (1884). The parallel between works of colonial science and books intended for tourists is visible throughout the historical fable that underlies La France coloniale: as the country that is heir to Rome, France assumes its civilizing mission, and so on. All of it coincides with Jules Ferry’s political proclamations concerning the so-called duty of superior nations to colonize inferior ones. The societies and institutes dwell on more precise points. Their acts contain studies with the most discontinuous details; they take up the minutes of contradictory debates coming out of conferences. The point seems to be less about rapidly compiling encyclopedic information and more about establishing an operational and normative discursive group. On the international level, during the decades between 1870 and 1910, these groups assist in the professionalization of colonial questions. Travel narratives and diplomatic correspondences are documents in which notes on attitudes, climate, eating

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habits, or languages are necessarily mingled together. The colonial institutes reorient this traditional imbrication within the field of disciplinary and academic knowledge that had been created in the preceding years. Instead of mixing everything indiscriminately together according to the singular or exemplary experience of an author, observations are brought back to specific fields of knowledge. This rapprochement then functions at the supraindividual level: from these juxtapositions a meaning will emerge that will assure the articulation of a superior, collective, and transmissible mode of knowledge. Colonial science has the ambition of saying everything about the colonial possessions (contours of the earth, population, government, transformation of the indigenes, acclimation of different groups, agriculture, etc.). It remains to be seen whether it arrives at the ends it declared for itself. Diversity is a condition of the exercise of colonization understood as a unitary event or action, that which is appropriate for all colonized peoples. It is thus useful not only to distinguish between the different nations in one space, but also to compare the empires among themselves. In one year (the first year of publication, from 1897 to 1898), the Revista Portuguesa colonial e maritime (Portuguese Colonial and Maritime Review) accumulates narratives of exploration, monographs on Vasco da Gama, a discussion about the climate in the Congo, an examination of the educability of blacks, and a guide to growing kola trees. In 1905, the Bulletin de la Société belge d’études coloniales (Bulletin of the Belgian Society for Colonial Studies), which was published in Brussels, reports an oral tale from the Belgian Congo, describes the hunting practices of the governed tribes, presents an overview of Manchuria, delivers an analysis of the importance of cotton in the British Indies, exposes the methods of racial segregation in South Africa, and sums up the state of research on the trypanosoma parasite that causes sleeping sickness. I could list many more examples. In these scholarly publications, the colony is effectively the site of encounters between worlds. Epistemologically, it is an interzone where heterogeneous discursive practices mix and mingle. Colonial science, by virtue of its international vocation, is not a single discipline (it uses texts whose methods escape it), nor is it a true doctrine (it lacks even the slightest level of declared consistency, in terms of a point in space or time). This eclecticism is not considered a stigma. When Karl von Stegl reflects in 1904 on the Kolonialwissenschaft (colonial science), he partially repeats the gesture of F. A. Wolf, who, a century earlier, had praised the Altertumswissenschaft (science of antiquity). In a text with major consequences for the university, Wolf recommended knowledge of Greek and Latin through the study of grammar, history, philology, numismatics, or epigraphy. Only the alliance of many “disciplines” allowed for an acceptable view of the ancients,

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incidentally in relation to the moderns. At this level, colonial science would appear to be neither isolated nor in contradiction with the dominant epistemic framework. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the teacher and colonial activist Henri Froidevaux seeks especially to gather together different scholars from among the imperial nations. He wants “colonial departments, formed by the reunion of different existing chairs, each endowed with its own individuality” (Compte rendu 508–9). Moreover, for this project “the professors will continue to belong to a specific university” (289). Students will move between the immobile universities: one “will ask students of this [university] to go study in that one, and vice versa” (289). Yet colonial science was not the science of antiquity, however valid any one of its segments may have been. It is a colonial science of the colonies that is elaborated when Wolf was defining—in discontinuity—a “modern” science of “antiquity.” The disciplinary juxtaposition of the colonial proposes a unity that resides not in the fiction of absolute knowledge or in the theoretical circumscription of an external object or in the establishment of methodological positions. The main justification is to mirror the bifurcated production of a discourse that is scholarly and colonial. The so-called colonial science thus reveals itself to be tautological. It repeats its existence, which it makes into everything, and says nothing other than itself. Instead, colonial science forms a site where snippets of words, parts of disciplines, branches of discourses, are nestled together, and in such a way that allows them to partially designate the colonies. Yet it is not this so-called science that says it. It consolidates in a more or less vague manner, without having a defining practice. Colonial science is content to set the stage for enunciation, while issuing an insistent message (the colonial makes science, science makes the colonial). A simple institutional space for the multidisciplinary, it is not a science in the same sense as a human or a social science is. Nor is it a science in the sense of a determined attribute of the Scientia mundi, since it has renounced the pretension of the universal in the colonial particularism that colors it. Colonial science is not even a renewal through an aggregation of discourses: the merging (of academic centers, reviews) does not touch on its own individuality. The vacuity of colonial science explains why it did not last, such as it was. It had to disappear with the empires because its function was to assure a permanent background noise in the domain of knowledge, to the degree that the social structure commanded it. Its compromising of principle did not kill geography, ethnology, or even demography. As for colonial science, it was nothing more than a referential apparatus, silenced with the political institution that generated it. The ideal site for the birth of this pseudoscience (the British Royal Colonial Institute, the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft,

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or the Société Belge d’Etudes Coloniales) is, more than anything else, a group assembled for the propagation of colonial faith. In the wake of the conquests in Indochina, Orientalism—which inherits the self-affirmation of the West—receives renewed support, even in metropolitan France, resulting in the creation of the French School of the Far East (Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, or EFEO) in 1898. Yet although Oriental studies were built on the polytechnical model and independently from empire, they propose an alterity, unifiable, to be sure, which they construct and manipulate in such a way that they become institutionalized. This differential relation, even if it was reified in a reductive opposition, made possible an internal discourse that regulated the functioning of the larger discourse; the dynamic of generalization stems from this, as does its potential reformation. For its part, colonial science dealt with the question of alterity only in terms of uncoordinated knowledge practices, which it did not understand. In this case, the multidisciplinary is situated on an autonomous plane that does not encounter the tautological space. Foreignness is not limited to differentials or variances (in series or in discontinuity). Within the phrase I have described, the statements of colonial science function to guarantee the effectiveness of the practice of total assimilation. That which is called the West in this flatus vocis itself becomes unified in a totalitarian way. The nullity of the undertaking is eloquent in its inaptitude. I have mentioned throughout this book that the self and the other are both required for (colonial) possession to last. Mirror-like, political dogmas of integration signal a future disappearance into a large body, and they also characterize an imperious copresence of the present. Everything happens as if colonial science had skipped a step, and in particular as if it had not understood that colonizing jouissance demanded the infinite postponement of the end. In L’institution imaginaire de la société (The Imaginary Institution of Society), Cornelius Castoriadis reproached Marx for having believed that capitalism was completely reifying the proletariat, for having thought that this system was capable of completely reifying everything when threatened with its own collapse. Taking a different political direction, the famous pseudoscience had structurally fastened itself to the identity of the colony, without understanding that the principle of colonial expansion gets put back into discourse and phrases. This failure thus confirms that the West was never equal to a West ruled by a rationalist and unitary fable. Quite a lesson, so distinct from the conferences and evening classes organized by the institutes—postcolonial critique will reintegrate it without difficulty. That colonial science lacked any consistency was something that many had remarked even before the independence movements. The official version

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of this critique recommended waiting. “One cannot say that there yet exists, at the present time, an established colonial science. Froidevaux affirms that there is simply a colonial science in the process of formation” (Compte rendu 276). The seme of the incompleteness of knowledge is enveloped in a rhetoric that cannot conceal its lack of substance. The deferment of success also comes from the confusion between research and institutions, an illusion that is still alive and well in France and beyond. In reality, during these first years of the century when there was so much speculation concerning the unification of colonial knowledge, its fate had already been sealed. Beginning in this period, and for one last stretch of time, some sciences are colonial. Either they included a new specialty, or else they made use of the colonies structurally. Ethnology illustrates this second case in emblematic fashion. The first case covers a larger spectrum, from epidemiological inquiries into tropical diseases to reflections on the laws of exception in the overseas possessions. One might certainly also mention the Institut des Fruits et Agrumes Coloniaux (Institute of Colonial Fruits and Citruses) created by Vichy in 1942, the Histoire de la littérature coloniale published by Roland Lebel in 1931, or the Institut de Médecine Tropicale du Service de Santé des Armées (Institute of Tropical Medicine in the Service of the Health of the Armed Forces) founded in 1905. The list would be long, for France and for every other imperial power. Yet the inventory indicates precisely the colonization of parts of knowledge. At best, there were colonial sciences. Colonial science is less a kind of charlatanism or a propaganda machine than it is a chimera, a composite monster that was in fact futile. The juxtaposition of monographs never amounts to anything more than the serious amplification of variety produced by magazines. From La quinzaine coloniale, printed from 1874 to 1938, to the more ephemeral Togo Cameroun, from the 1930s, one finds approximately the same collision of subjects, only the information contained therein is not knowledge. Each of the “sciences” affected by the colonial adventure can thus spread outward to the general public or become popularized in the press. They still serve as the basis for the polytechnic style of education, created for the representatives of the state in the colonies. The great epistemic proclamations of the first decade of the twentieth century equally result from the development of a specific curriculum for colonial functionaries. This target audience is the subject of the three thick volumes published by the Bibliothèque Coloniale Internationale between 1897 and 1910, which bring together laws and rulings on this issue in the different empires. In France, the Ecole Coloniale is founded in 1889 and progressively becomes a grande école in its own right, with entrance exams and preparatory classes in the lycées. The training given

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varies depending on the time period and the course of study. For colonial functionaries, it integrates in a lasting way history, geography, law, economy, and languages—intersecting with the exercise of power in the colonies. A science of administrators is thus established, one that will make use of the collected data for the practical management of domination. We return, then, to the functional encyclopedic approach with which this chapter began. Colonial science wanted to detach itself from this, dreaming of the theory of a practice. In various ways, the Kolonialwissenschaft spoke of a dialectical relation, where life in the field and scholarship would mutually enrich one another. The report given in London during the International Congress of 1902 used the rhetoric of “the absolutely disinterested goal”— while immediately adding the interest of “demonstrating the practical applications” and “bringing [them] fully to light” (Compte rendu 508). The Société d’Etudes Coloniales in Brussels commenced this work with this constat: “To study the Congo” has become “a patriotic duty for all Belgians” (Bulletin de la Société belge 1). Whatever conceptual articulation existed, it always got carried away by a practical theory of colonial power, using the specialization of auxiliary sciences.

(Anti)colonial History in the French Manner The declamatory push of the 1900s did not produce any new (modes of) discourse, nor did it truly modify the polyvalent training of the administrators. In the field of the human sciences, and outside the special case of anthropology, it seems to me that a single discipline retained its colonial appendix uninterruptedly. That discipline is history. The reasons for this are obvious. History (even that which is said to be of the “present time”) requires a chronological outcropping, a break from which it interrogates the past. It thus had little trouble maintaining itself in the space of the colony, even after this space began to crack open in places. To look at only one symptom: the Revue d’histoire des colonies (Review of Colonial History), founded in 1913, absorbs Memento colonial in 1932 to become the Revue française d’histoire d’Outre-Mer (French Review of Overseas History) at the end of 1958, thanks to a pertinent and opportunistic analysis of the future of the colonies. In the twenty-first century, it is Outre-Mers (Over-Seas) and now devotes special issues to the Haitian Revolution. The first article of this review was written by the decidedly invasive Henri Froidevaux. He assessed the state of the sites for the study of colonial history in the French empire (“Les études d’histoire coloniale” 11–38). The champion of colonial science (as a broad, yet unified field in inquiry) fell back into his favorite discipline. He pinned his hopes on the

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accumulation of more intelligence. The history of colonizing endures, and all the more so since its primary use has passed from colonialism into criticism. The perennial staying power of the specialty, independent of the methodological reforms that it would not be able to sustain by itself, today testifies to the success of the historical discourse on the colonies, at least in francophone worlds. Another, more important reason for the choice of this discipline lies in the social and institutional role that history plays today, and in its influence on other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.1 Therefore one writes, and one exhumes much; this is a fortunate development. It is a worthwhile endeavor to evoke the exhibitions of indigenous peoples on French soil, the acute and persistent permeation of a doctrine, yesterday’s renunciations. But let us beware. If the historian sometimes speaks of the colonies, he must not be the only one to do so within the discourses of knowledge. The risk would be of always considering the phenomenon as in the past. The obligatory anteriority, the epochal break—are they to be read as an end without remainder? Did the colony disappear entirely? A number of authors—in particular, those working within the ACHAC group, which has enjoyed much media coverage in France—have recognized this danger.2 Their way of undoing the impression of antiquity does not lack force: power relations persist, they tell us. I would gladly agree with this position. For example, I have emphasized the resonance of the linguistic trap in contemporary verbiage and speech. But I am quite disturbed by certain conceptual supports on which they rely. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire invoke memory with insistence. There is nothing original in this, to be sure; indeed, there is nothing more commonplace than to resort to the work of memory to justify research. History becomes a medicine against amnesia; one confuses it with memorials: it’s quite in vogue, after all. It is then a question of “denial,” of “archetypes,” of a “collective unconscious,”3 in a somewhat risky manipulation of the psychoanalysis of peoples, somewhere between Freud and Jung. How is a memory established between individuals and nations? Through the edicts of the imaginary, we are told; and I see here a general reference to the “mental representations” of the Lacanian understanding of the term. The active members of ACHAC want to reveal to us buried, forgotten memories. History awakens the dead—and will change practices and superstitions, by a guaranteed diffusion in the teaching of the rewritten curriculum. The appendices of La fracture coloniale praise the actions of the “educational toolkit” (296), which contains a vade mecum on colonization, a genuine portable memory. Pierre Nora, who will direct the encyclopedic Les lieux de mémoire in the 1980s, is often quoted by the partisans of the memory-history creed. One

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must remember, however, that Nora’s point of departure is the “end of memory-societies … which assured the conservation and transmission of values, [in] church or school, family or State” (Realms of Memory/Les lieux de mémoire 2/I).4 Following the critique of Perry Anderson,5 the promoters of La fracture coloniale reproach Nora for minimizing empire (14–15). They could also have evoked Nora’s first, strange book, Les français d’Algérie, published in 1961. After all, Nora ended this book with this troubling affirmation: “The future of France depends on its own ability to rapidly erase the traces of its algérisation [sic]” (250). Would not the supposed colonial amnesia of Realms of Memory constitute a single system with this older exhortation? However, Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire believe they can recognize their own project in the “essential and founding work” directed by Nora in the 1980s. They would reject only the dark parts so that they might retain the method. Except that our authors understand in the maxim “Memory promoted to the center of history” (Nora, Realms of Memory/Les lieux de mémoire 20/XLII) precisely what Nora thought was revolutionary: an inculcation of values through education, the press, or the media. The memorial recentering—which deserves a serious discussion—does not mean that memory is reconstituted through simple historical remembering. And in the end, what to say about these supplementary, almost preprogrammed amnesias? The guardians of colonial memory still write with a citizen-horizon in view, and above all seek to institutionalize a dogmatic corpus. This awkward position on memory and history is typical of a certain rather clumsy recourse to apparently intangible antinomies. This agreedupon lack of theoretical reflection hampers a number of studies of colonial history—well beyond any one group or school. One emphasizes the gap between discourses and actions, laws and deeds, culture and reality. It should be clear that these oppositions strike me as rather ineffective. Conceptual malleability is often taken as consubstantial with history, which should not be too surprising. In this case, this malleability might differentiate itself from the not-too-serious work being done by those bizarre Americans on their campuses. In a single footnote, Serge Gruzinski eliminates the work of Homi Bhabha: Ah! The American style! Disqualification is convenient. The preface of La fracture coloniale discusses the subject at greater length but adds that the meaning of “postcolonial” is no longer very clear. Those “AngloSaxons” are inveigling our good sense … From the fifth floor of the Cornell University library, where I am writing this book, from this fortified outpost in my good city of Ithaca, I prefer to amuse myself by seeking mental comfort when it comes to anti-American cant. I become even more disturbed when I see historians of the second

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colonial empire displaying a tenacious propensity for loudly repeating one of the mechanisms of the domination that they claim to be only describing and denouncing. The silencing and the deafness are both overwhelming. Take two recent essays as examples of this large scholarly output: Marianne et les colonies (Marianne and the Colonies) by Gilles Manceron and Coloniser: Exterminer (Colonize: Exterminate) by Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison. These two works share the same desire to write the history of battle. They are in agreement regarding the inevitable “duty of memory” (devoir de mémoire) (Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser: Exterminer 336) and the “void of colonial memory” (Manceron, Marianne et les colonies 267). The authors thus seek a relative surpassing of historicizing history. And they accomplish the amazing feat, for several hundred pages, of considering colonial history only from the point of view of the metropole. In the three chapters Manceron devotes to slavery and the slave revolt of Saint-Domingue, the opponents of the regime of exploitation are nearly all the black Haitians’ spokespeople. ToussaintLouverture remains a silent character. The analyses devoted to anticolonialism will also avoid Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, or Aimé Césaire. These figures are quite present in Coloniser: Exterminer but are reduced to one or two quick citations, and then dismissed. Does the fact that Le Cour Grandmaison focuses on the nineteenth century explain such a treatment? Doesn’t he declare himself against “chronological closure” (22)? Doesn’t he solicit authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault? Curious omissions in these books, which aim to refresh readers’ memories. A curious censoring, more precisely—involuntary, I would like to believe—but painful, as if the slaves, the indigenes, had articulated nothing. More, it is as if the denunciation of colonialism remained a prerogative of Frenchmen from France. As if, in addition, there were no colonized people to administer the empire. In doing this, yes, we see an unnoticed continuity, that of speaking in the name of others. These essays, colonialist in spite of themselves, are published alongside works by historians that are more clearly open to criticism (such as Histoire des colonisations by Marc Ferro), but they are at least as consequential. I am not, however, indicting the entire discipline. I would only like to point out that, as they say in the newspapers, these few books are making quite a noise—and that this noise once again is attempting to drown out indigenous voices.

Postcolonial Studies This deafening noise has an effectiveness that is local, temporary, irritating. Fortunately, it is not irreducible. It makes us re-remember that colonial history in France often conforms to the image of its past, where it was born from

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the disintegration of the principles of colonial science. The vacuity of the colonial architectonic, however, does not at present lead only to the wellintentioned slipshod verbiage we have just been discussing. In fact, it also helped give rise to postcolonial studies. This vast field has consisted primarily of interventions launched from notable American campuses during the last several decades. These enclaves within the territory of the United States have allowed the passage, concentration, and circulation of ideas. The influence of the Indian-Anglophone diaspora is striking, but it is the American academy as a nonplace that is most decisive. The francophones, who have been more or less “integrated” into the field, such as Edouard Glissant, V. Y. Mudimbé, and Achille Mbembe, have taught and worked on campus. The institutional possibility of creating programs that are transversal in relation to departments (which are generally disciplinary), the need for periodic renewals of methodology, the importance granted to “theory” in the humanities (at least until relatively recently), the connection between struggles of minorities and faculty in the 1960s—these are some of the key factors that explain the consolidation of postcolonial studies in the Unites States. The conditions of the development of a discourse also relate to a national situation of teaching and research. The meaning of scholarly postcoloniality, however, escapes any geographical determinism. Like colonial science, it is a widely shared postulate, but it particularly brings together professors and students of diverse national origins (outside of associations or institutes), and it poses the question of speaking about the colony otherwise. Colonial science does not achieve the unity that is attributed to it; it left disciplinary borders intact. As for postcolonial studies, its point of departure is the failure of universalism. The postcolonial critic does not necessarily dance on the ruins of what has been called the West. Dipesh Chakrabarty asserts that it is necessary to “provincialize Europe,” but “in an anticolonial spirit of gratitude” (Provincializing Europe 255). The postcolonial articulates the possibility of a kind of thinking that can perhaps split open the rational and imperial edifice, but without seeking its total demolition. The affinity with the position of deconstruction is apt, although this is not the whole story. The crossing of borders, colonialism, and the gesture of Derridean thought are crucial in this regard. The postcolonial invites us to question disciplinary divisions, because a mere plurality of knowledge practices will not suffice. Postcolonial studies thus tries to equip itself with a discourse in which the object and the subject would mutually change one another. The disgraceful confusions of colonial science here give way to acknowledged and

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interrogated interactions. Postcolonial authors aim to transform knowledge just as the world was metamorphosized by the course of history. In this process, they experience themselves as subjectivities in the textual interlocution. Theory becomes, then, more than a label for someone like Bhabha. It is already a practice, for the demonstration by the indigene that the West has no special privilege over the concept. On the contrary, this disappropriation aims to change the very distribution between theory and practice. Bhabha’s writing, which splits sentences, slides in between synonyms, and forges neologisms, would also be an expression of the hybridization of the individual—and of postcolonial India. Postcolonial discourse is conceived as an instrument of knowledge with an adequate language (une parole adéquate). I am thinking here of the way that Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha rethink the relationship between the disciplines in light of the emergence of the subaltern. Spivak and Bhabha share a paradoxical approach. They testify to a concern for the other, which is rooted in their readings in French philosophy. Spivak translated Derrida’s De la grammatologie in 1976, adding an introduction that became almost as well known across the Atlantic as the text introduced. She finishes her 1999 Critique of Postcolonial Reason with an appendix on the work of deconstruction. Bhabha cites Derrida and Lacan plentifully throughout The Location of Culture, his most substantial work. With Spivak or Bhabha, the other must be preserved, and not reduced to the (Western, male) self. Spivak reproaches Baudelaire for constructing, in “Le Cygne,” a subject marked by the “blindness to the other woman” (Critique 152). Bhabha regularly speaks of an “otherness.” This obsession with the Other, which is inscribed in a lineage of ethical thought since Lacan and Levinas, will then be articulated with the critique of becoming-other as it was practiced by the colonial West. Edward Said is the obligatory reference in this field.6 Spivak and Bhabha point toward an other that would not be the subhuman Oriental of imperialism. They thus refuse a hierarchic alteration, negatively defined. The “subaltern,” the sub-other, must remake a strangeness that breaks with unitarism and the conceptual schizz. For the theoretician or the thinker, this experience must include a displacement in the order of discourse. It concerns going from one point to another, and producing meaning between the sites of enunciation. Alter goes with inter, but it does so in a quite different way with Spivak than with Bhabha. Gayatri Spivak begins her Critique of Postcolonial Reason with a polemical remark that starkly situates the reflexive ambition of her analysis. Postcolonial studies, which she was instrumental in consolidating, is in danger, she claims, of becoming commonplace. If it limits itself to the “representation of the colonized or to the fact of colonies” (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

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1), it perpetuates colonialism by denying subaltern speech. In addition, institutionally, “studies of colonial/postcolonial discourse are in the process of becoming a substantial sub-disciplinary ghetto” (1). This subdisciplinarization would mirror the simple juxtapositions of colonial science. Postcolonial scholars could let themselves fall into the trap and accept a ready-made place that would in no way affect the structures of the university itself. Spivak situates her ambition elsewhere. Instead of taking the postcolonial and making it into a semidiscipline, she would redistribute the quotas of knowledge, and then escape from methodological conditioning. Spivak is ironic in the preface: “I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary, but I can break rules” (xiii). This semblance of humility corresponds to a particular project: to make each discourse inhabit a foreign land and behave otherwise. The ethnologist’s native informant finds his heiress in an I that visits disciplines in order to reveal their blind spots from within. Spivak divides her Critique into four sections: “Philosophy,” “Literature,” “History,” and “Culture.”7 She asks questions that she considers inconvenient, assuring us that her readings are “mistaken” (9), when she reads Hegel from the point of view of his crude knowledge of India, for example. She opts for a “sabotage” of the disciplines. In this way, she constructs herself as a troubling presence, unforeseen, inside institutions, and she engineers rapprochements between instances of colonial forgetting in Baudelaire or Kant. Spivak remains nostalgic for comparative literature, whose death throes she examines in Death of a Discipline. Aware of the preeminence of European literature in the history of comparativism (Death of a Discipline 4–5), she celebrates the complication of the order created by area studies, but she would preserve in this configuration “the best of the old Comparative Literature: the skill of reading closely in the original” (6). I also think that Spivak would like to keep comparison as well. The alignment of disciplines in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason allows for a comparison in two registers. In passing from one domain to another, the reader is led to initiate hermeneutical work. It is her role to compare the comparable (colonial alteration). The agent of this discovery is the I-Spivak that has been formed in the internal decentering of each discipline, which is produced through comparison with authoritative discourse (Marx, Brontë, the great Western Indianists, and star scholars such as Fredric Jameson). The issue is thus the condition of the education of a postcolonial subject who would not be constituted by the Western other, but rather educated in the name of alterity. Spivak seeks another other, whose strangeness is made obvious by the “faults” committed against the codes. The difficulty, then, comes from the fault or the sabotage. But is Spivak breaking as many rules as she thinks she is? Does emphasizing the colonial element of Rudyard

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Kipling really run contrary to the practice of literary criticism? Not only is the so-called ideological approach an old story, but it is also one of the most common ways to not read the details. Elsewhere, Spivak rejects two divergent interpretations of the line “I think of the Negress” (Je pense à la négresse) in Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne” (The Swan). In her view, the Negress is not a simple reference to Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s mulatto mistress; nor is she a double of the poet (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 155). The Negress is the (indigenous, female) other who pays the price for the construction of the white, masculine poetic I. In rejecting both the referential interpretation and the allegorical reading, Spivak is not, however, the glorious saboteuse she dreams she is. In fact, she takes the side of literal designation: the Negress is “the Negress,” exactly this and nothing else; read it as it is written.8 There is nothing more revolutionary than this about the conclusions Spivak draws; they coordinate the examination of the lyrisches Ich (the “poetic persona” typical of Literaturwissenschaft) and a political reevaluation of the text; all of this has a fundamentally East German element to it. On the contrary, when Spivak exposes her disagreement with “the standard historian of India” (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 222), she is quite careful to say that she knows only the standard. She specifies that “it must be eminently clear [that] I am no a historian,” and that she is deprived of any “mature disciplinary judgment” (222). This attitude troubles me infinitely, I must admit. Is not immaturity a central theme of colonialism (and of all forms of chiefdom exercised over a people who have had their power stripped away)? The Negroes not mature enough to be free, the Orientals not mature enough to govern themselves? I am all for sabotage, but why claim immaturity? Why not make history implode while becoming a historian? Practicing a discipline without possessing any diploma or degree, working outside the authorized colleges or schools—to me, these seem more clearly destabilizing for the academic world than recognizing authorities before critiquing them. In short, consenting only to the “standard” and ignoring marginal minoritarian positions are quite practical ways to reserve critique for subaltern expression. To put it another way, Spivak deliberately countersigns the great unitary Western proclamations and rejoins the majority tradition for which the others do not exist—in order to claim a contestatory strategy. Throughout their history, the disciplines have been held together only through controversy; otherwise, they would collapse into doctrines. Yet there certainly exists an overwhelming consensus that constantly functions as if it alone possesses the right to speak. The omission of adversarial movement within the life of the disciplines therefore ratifies the final standardization of knowledge, beyond the reproaches addressed to the standard historians.

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The attempt at sabotage has meaning only in connection to a specific situation: Gayatri Spivak, an Indian woman and a professor, upsets the order of knowledge by the mere fact that she speaks, since in discourse, announced disturbances reveal, on the contrary, the tacit recognition of disciplinary practice (acceptance of the normative control of knowledge, mass recourse to proven operational categories, reappropriation of internal critique). The I is preformed by the history that the person of the author thinks she bears, and this is enough to determine the extent of the critique. It is only here that the erroneous, the mistaken, are located, things that are not effectively realized in Spivak’s book. From an individual position, irreducible and prior to language, one is satisfied to compare the different discourses of the other, to allow a voice to be heard that is insolent enough to capture attention and respectful enough to flourish in the university, such as it is. No bomb will explode, no train will be derailed, the saboteurs will destroy nothing. Academia only needs to make space for postcolonial critique. It is summoned not to demonstrate inferior treatment, not to create subdisciplinary ghettos. As a mirror of the universe, however, the university will consequently accept the difference and prepare for “the future of the humanities in a fragmented world” (Spivak, “Guest Column” 720). This future confirms the disciplinary divisions and gently shakes them up by introducing (in principle, not in fact) an established alterity. The dividing up of the world is a response to economic and political globalization, viewed as neocolonialism. Subsequently, Spivak prophesies an alter-academicism. A possibly imperfect multidisciplinarity will take as its mission the allotment of space to a predefined subaltern: universities will exist from time to time under the auspices of a recharged comparativism. The resulting discourse will then flow forth in an academic prose uttered for the benefit of others, understood in an increasingly vague manner. Conventional phrases might occur, in the style of the affirmation “It is obvious that self-interest drives globalization” (720). In its two current guises, this alter-academicism, in the American context that gives it form, does not break a single rule. It is logical that Gayatri Spivak plays a leading role in the humanities at Columbia University. Of course, transposed into a milieu like the French university, postcolonial criticism would seem devastating, or radically revolutionary. It would call into question a national politics based on careerism and the mutual interests of specialized micropolitics. However, even in the Amphithéatre Guizot at the Sorbonne, Spivak’s gesture would in fact remain inoffensive for the intellectual architecture of the disciplines. The errors of perspective in Hegel or Kant come from their historical positions, not from their philosophy. The latter will be

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thwarted by the disinterestedness it displays, although it has long been used to its relativity, without blinking so very much. Subaltern criticism, despite its claim, does not transgress a single disciplinary rule. It lists complaints in order to ensure its own existence through loquaciousness; and to other worlds it delivers the elements of an improvement of the epistemic apparatus. Spivak’s postcolonial scholars are located at the intersection of several traditions, but being more responsible for one particular fragment of space, they visit other spaces while keeping their (unquestioned) strangeness. Alter goes with inter, in the interruption of universalist totality and the intervals opened between the different parts of the world. This postcoloniality ratifies the divisions (of knowledge, of the universe) acquired with European expansion and the fall of the empires. The other other remains a project of the subject, such as the major conceptual traditions of the West have formed it. For Spivak, the postcolonial reformation of epistemic discourses thus includes a usage lagging behind the disciplines. This decentering (neither fault nor sabotage) allows one, inside the institution of knowledge, to prolong the empirical strangeness that the (de)colonized feel in a territory changed by the presence of empire. How this experience is constructed, how the proper is constituted, how a subject is formed before speech—Spivak tells us nothing about these things. Her silence explains the double register of her disciplinary usage (guarding against danger and effective innocuousness). These problems, however, lie at the heart of the approach taken by Homi Bhabha. “Otherness” is sought after in such a way that the reconstitution of a full subject (be it other) is impossible. In The Location of Culture, the maxim “Neither the One . . . nor the Other . . . but something else besides” (41) rejects the simple identitarian reversal as alteration and posits the necessity of a beyond, a besides. The passage across conceptual borders implies a fractured identity that is not satisfied with prediscursive empirical strangeness. The postcolonial beyond/besides, which is called “the hybrid,” “contests the terms and territories of both” the “One” and the “Other” (41). Bhabha wants this position to be both theoretical and practical. He thus glosses the “One” and the “Other” through references to political struggles (those of the “working class” and “sexual politics,” respectively). “The commitment to theory,” which serves as the title of the first chapter, takes up the Marxian will to change the world through philosophy. Marx’s celebrated injunction also figures prominently in Peau noire masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) by Fanon, one of the crucial thinkers for Bhabha’s work. Thinking hybridization would help to reconfigure the political connections between worlds, peoples, and subjects. The opening to the excess within the dynamics of identity would allow for the recognition of “cultural difference [as]

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the process of the enunciation of culture” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 50). Bhabha here separates cultural “difference” from “cultural diversity,” based on the circumscribing of “pre-given cultural contents and customs” (50). On the contrary, subjective identity and culture are contemplated in the movement of speaking that changes the speaker. The political stakes can be translated in a phrase: The theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. (56) The battle for the “difference of other cultures” is relegated to the level of “theoretical strategies that are necessary to combat ‘ethnocentrism’” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 100), but under its relativist or indigenist avatar, it falls short of “the excess of signification” that is “otherness” (56). “Otherness” rather than alterity. Bhabha’s Engish term, “otherness,” is a little bit less rare than the French term I used in the original version of this text: autreté. I selected this neologism in order to emphasize Bhabha’s lexical research and his voluntary distancing from “alterity.” It is worth noting that in 1936, Antonio Machado invented the word otredad (otherness) to designate the heterogeneity of being, an opening of the subject to the Other (Obras completas 2: 1120). The word will be taken up again by Octavio Paz: since “otherness is in man himself ” (El arco y la lira 173), I become able, through poetic revelation, to be an other. Not entirely unknown in a proximate Romance language, autreté ably maintains the connections with the fracture of the self of “otherness,” in the confluences of language and ethics. Whether Bhabha’s theoretical statements can be easily transcribed into political slogans remains to be seen. One can at least acknowledge the political quest in the tack of Bhabha’s text. The (post)colonial other becomes international: the hybrid reconstructs itself as alter in an inter-space. The analysis of cultural difference must therefore use a “discursive interdisciplinary transformation” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 234). Interdisciplinarity is not confused with plurality, since “it is never simply the harmonious addition of contents or contexts that augment the positivity of a pre-given symbolic or disciplinary presence” (234). Rather, it rests on the intervals between modalities of knowledge, creating new fractures that disorganize the architecture. One cannot imagine The Location of Culture being divided into several parts, entitled “Philosophy” or “History.” On the contrary, Bhabha links together Lacan and Walcott, Fanon and Lévi-Strauss, in a wholly original way.

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This practice of disciplinary excess in the invention of a new meaning is presented as an obligation for the epistemic articulation of colonial hybridization. The link between interdisciplinarity and the postcolonial subject is so intense that it requires a brief review of Bhabha’s argumentation concerning the opening of identity. “The Other question” is posed by the colony. The indigenes find themselves in a situation where the central power aggregates them to a national body from which they are at the same time excluded. The colonized are connected to the empire, although their (statutory, racial) difference is permanently marked. Bhabha finds in this colonial “doublethink” (The Location of Culture 158) the seeds of an unforeseen modification. According to the law and in their everyday lives, the indigenes are “almost the same” as the colonizers, “but not quite” (122, e.g.), or else “less than one and double” (139, e.g.). Colonial ambivalence produces a deviation, which immediately has a great consequence, since according to Bhabha, this double register produces both the impasse of colonial discourse and its purist incapacity to understand the reality that it puts in place. I am not sure that the event of contradiction was so dangerous for the colonizer, but I will return to this point shortly and now get back to the book’s argument. The hybrid is founded in this impossible summons (less than one and double). He draws from it the force of another logic, which he speaks as if it were a native tongue. The result is a subject of discourse that reevaluates binary oppositions, hierarchies, and impure purities. The fact is always procedural. The postcolonial does not proceed from a reunion or synthesis of preexisting elements. It forms itself through a discourse whose effectiveness ruins oppositions. It limits the colonial, as it is asked to do. In limiting it, however, the postcolonial also contravenes the sole desire of the colonizer: resemblance—perfect yet forbidden—gives way to an otherness that is not alteration, that must ceaselessly be continued in the future of an identity. With mimicry, Bhabha traverses Lacan’s texts on the mirror and identity. He attempts to posit a deranged, deranging imitation that is not the colonial miming of the Good Negro acting white. The scene of parroting is remade into the virulence of an imitation that draws its force from the rules of the imperfections that surround it. Interdisciplinarity in The Location of Culture fuels the performative transformation of the indigenous subject, Bhabha. Acting almost as one does in Western academia, he fails to accomplish this deed in full. His voice does not emerge from another region of the disciplinary content; it imitates and modifies. In this way, Bhabha associates the excess of knowledge with the demonstration of hybridization. The postcolonial scholar also imitates the colonial scholar, but he leads astray the organization of this knowledge. He introduces

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another logic that accepts what the West would tend to reject as confusion, since he produces a disciplinary difference—and wants to transgress even the diversity of the plural. The postulation of an “adequacy” is extreme. The theoretical difficulties of the category thus become the epistemological limits of interdisciplinarity. And yet in the course of this book, we have already encountered several problems with Bhabha’s hybrid. Its heuristic utility was not always so convincing, as if a (counterproductive) disjuncture between the argumentative substrate and its interpretive actualization made itself apparent. I have already expressed doubts regarding the appropriateness of the biological reference, a remark that also holds true for métissage. In both of these instances, however, the value of contradiction eluded us. To believe that the unitary, rational West (even before colonization) is in fact innocent is to subscribe a little too much to the doctrinal corpus of the colonizer. Bhabha reckons that colonial Europe collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, whereas it in fact built multiple sophisticated systems of control, which acknowledged the impossible in order to limit it. The imbalance inside unitarism is the West, if the West exists. This other logic thus lost the privilege of its postcolonial birth. And the theory of hybridization minimizes the tearing out of speech that occurred in the system of colonial repression. The theoretical difficulties of the category in this way become the theoretical limits of interdisciplinarity. We need to scrutinize hybrid logic once again—in action. A first assertion, in the context of social struggles (more than colonial struggles), will detain us in our return to the invention of the hybrid: “It is not self-contradictory, but significantly performs, in the process of its discussion, the problems of judgment and identification that inform the political space of its articulation” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 43). One could have found here the description of a third that is neither the one nor the other, but instead the one and the other. No. Not here, not contradiction: it is Western and counterproductive for itself, and unintentionally conducive for its overthrow. Yet I repeat: this hybrid is not contradictory. Such insistence makes a strange partner with the incessant repetition of the term “identity.” I know that in America especially, speakers understand “identity” as a relation to the other. (If students from the United States cross your path, ask them to define the word, and you will see.) I also know that Bhabha speaks of the opening of the subject. Nonetheless, a noncontradictory identity—this is what appears to be not so far removed from what Aristotle wrote in Book Gamma of his Metaphysics. But let us go further. The hybrid, the interval between the one and the other, is not a “third term resolving the tension” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 162) between the oppositions. A third term that becomes disqualified

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or canceled out—Bhabha’s understanding of the hybrid thus has the same value as “synthesis” in Hegelian sublation (or Aufhebung). Yet I think that the hybrid is quite precisely beside the third term—at least as Plato evokes it in the Timaeus: triton allo genos, “another third kind” (48e-40a). In this celebrated passage of the dialogue, Socrates, who is discussing the universe, is interested in the formation of matter. He and his interlocutor had previously distinguished the intelligible “model” (paradeigma) and the sensible form that produces it by imitation (mime¯ma). Socrates considers it wise to add another, third kind that makes the impression of matter possible, which is called kho¯ra, at once a strange region and a womb or matrix. The word kho¯ra enjoyed a vogue during the last decades of the twentieth century, due to the commentaries of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. I emphasize this fashionability not to claim one of these interpretations (or those that they have nourished), but rather to indicate another site of intellectual passage in the history of ideas. Plato, then, annexes a “third kind” to his theory of imitation, very “difficult” to conceptualize (Timaeus 49e), which is neither the one (noetic and superior) nor the other (an inferior copy, subaltern) (cf. 52a-52b). The triton allo genos is in no way synthetic. Rather, it is produced by Socrates’ reasoning, as a necessity contravening the duality in the mimetic process. The kho¯ra is a remarkable site between the one and the other. Or should one say, with Bhabha, “the topos of hybrid enunciation” (The Location of Culture 232)? The appeal to Greek (topos) duplicates the play on words (topos, place or site and rhetorical commonplace) of kho¯ra (site and womb). Here, Bhabha’s hybrid moves even closer to the Timaeus. Socrates affirms, at the end of his discussion of matter, that the “other third kind” allows itself to be grasped, with great difficulty, by a new mode of thought: a mixture between “intellection” and “opinion with sensation” (Timaeus 52a). Otherwise put: “a kind of bastard reasoning” (logismo¯i tini notho¯i) about which philosophy does not have a great deal to say, so far has it ventured beyond the pale (52b). The Greek expression must constrain. Logismos means “reason” and is derived from logos, which also refers to speech, to language. As for nothos, this adjective designates the indistinct, the dubious, the counterfeit. And before this, the “bastard,” yes, the child that a master gives his slave (in the Iliad). In the classical age, the nothos is the offspring of the Athenian and the foreigner. Plutarch refers to this political category in his Life of Themistocles: Themistocles was a nothos because of his foreign mother. In 1559, Jacques Amyot translates the word with “mestif ” (métisse), in the period when the term takes on its colonial meaning in the Romance languages. For the “other third kind,” one must resort to reasoning as murky as the métissage of peoples

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and worlds, as “hybrid” thought—as an old and authoritative French translation chose to say this word.9 Yes of course, Plato does not aim to base his entire philosophy on the hybrid. Plus he suspects the intelligibility of this nonsynthetic third. Ultimately, his kho¯ra is a matrix (matricielle: womblike). All the same, I have the impression that Socrates’ hybrid and that of Bhabha share a family resemblance. Is this troubling? Let us immediately eliminate the (neo)colonial hypothesis: Bhabha is only repeating, or at best accommodating, Plato. The explanation provided by postcolonial mimicry then remains. Bhabha, a hybrid subject, would surrender to an imitation and a difference that would change the point of articulation of the philosophical discourse. But how would we then have a discourse that “transforms the conditions of enunciation at the level of the sign” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 354)? I set aside the biographical assignation of the indigenous speaker, which would not suffice whenever it is a question of the “process” of speech, and one wishes to refute “pre-given identity” (64). I have a strong feeling that Bhabha renews Plato when he considers the hybrid noncontradictory in order to attempt a discourse about him. He renews when he proposes a logic to say the other third kind. He renews when he critiques mimetic degradation in favor of a different site of imitation. And he renews when he avails himself of hybrid, métis thought in order to designate that which escapes bipolarity. Bhabha modifies Plato’s argumentation, transforms him even—agreed. Yet each time that Plato is reexamined from top to bottom, turned inside out, opened and sewn back together in a different way, the operation is called Neoplatonism. Another Marsile Ficin, another Plotinus, Homi Bhabha finds what he needs in Plato to remake him for his time and his polis. I say this with a great admiration for Bhabha’s skillfully devious text. Yet I have doubts about the postcolonial necessity (historical and geographical) that would have created this hybridization, unless Plato is not a part of this xenophilic European corpus Bhabha discusses in his first chapter (along with Montesquieu, Barthes, and Lyotard, among others). Why not? But, regarding this point, who will remain in the camp of the “western logocentric sign” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 45)? Nobody and everybody, since the West no longer exists, that is, no more than the East. In sum, the text presents us with several possibilities. One may grant Bhabha the privilege of hybridization—in spite of everything—because of the simple fact that as a postcolonial Indian he modifies speech. In this case, the demonstration would become exclusive—a scarcely credible point of arrival, considering that the final lines of The Location of Culture repeat the word “human” four times, and that the preface to the new edition calls for “a

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vernacular cosmopolitanism” (XVI). Or the transformation of enunciation does not correspond to the analysis given, because in fact, speech—even in Europe—never was the unanimous rational logos; nor was the other always mute, nor always an inhabitant of the islands. Or perhaps the differential renewal is postcolonial because it is uttered in the interzone of Naipaul, Fanon, Derrida, or Foucault; but it is only potentially postcolonial, not necessarily so. The hybrid designates an experience of exit from empire, and a different other, and so on. So does the postcolonial (failed imitation, denial of humanity or citizenship) lose its primary quality, becoming transformed into circumstance. I am not counting out the possibility of an articulation that would combine elements of the three resolutions I have just given. There is, in my view, an academic slant to Homi Bhabha, “Academy” naming the site of enunciation of all Platonisms. This inclination does not invalidate his reasoning, but it does separate it from the unicausal colony. Consequently, the interdisciplinary determination of the discourse will have great trouble claiming the intervals or interstices produced by hybrid subjects. The inter must connect to an academic (Platonic) logic of the third term, which rationalizes the nonrational while mixing types of knowledge. Such a project, in AngloAmerican Academia, remains both possible and outside the norm. It does not seem to me, however, to be produced by postcolonial hybridization alone.

Ch a p ter 1 0

Who Will Become a Theoretician?

The work of Homi Bhabha diverges between what it says and the saying of it. Interdisciplinarity is in no way adventitious, but its ambition must be distinguished from the concept of hybridization that it explains. In general, the new forms within the Anglo-American university must pass through interdepartmental clusters. Bhabha moves beyond the logic of the multiple, where Spivak decided to remain. The inter is not, however, commanded by the hybrid, nor is it secreted by an internal necessity for postcolonial enunciation. If interdisciplinarity is reappropriated by Bhabha, there is nonetheless no constraining postcolonial nature that leads to the creation of an in-between—as the Neoplatonic renewal of the third demonstrated.1 In addition, the crossing of disciplines is a demand of thought that corresponds to a moment in the historical production of discourses. Postcoloniality is understood within this epochal phenomenon, but it is not the determining factor. Bhabha certainly gives in to a common temptation here: he tries to reinvent a method as a function of the problem he needs to solve. He strives to establish the complete coherence of his practical theory.

Inadequate Indiscipline Bhabha wants to deliver a text that would be fully adequate to the colony. In doing so, he reveals that this quality is also inadequate (hybridization as 181

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the nothos logismos, or as dialogism). The fullness of Bhabha’s essay leads us to think, if this was not already clear enough, that the best possible vocation for knowledge about the colonies is an adequate inadequacy. This oxymoron was first called for by the phrase of possession and the copresence of contradiction in the colonial adventure. It is reinforced, in particular, in the defectiveness at work in the conceptual discourse. The assemblage of oppositions becomes the decisive criterion to judge the pertinence or value of a discourse. For my part, I claim the inadequacy of my speech. Not that I want to move in the direction of an objectivity that in advance should maintain a distance. Separation is precisely the pursuit of a retraversal, the obvious departure from the continent that has been crossed. The disjunction comes afterward; it designates an exit from colonial space (through the struggle for independence, epistemic transformation, etc.), which will at least have commenced. The time has come again for me to be more specific about what I am trying to do, for my own sake, and for that of this book. Bhabha with theory and Spivak with critique indeed designate the space of intellectual intervention where the epistemic diction of the colony occurs. We can claim a critical, theoretical discourse. My goal is not to remake the doctrine of the Frankfurt school. Let me simply remind readers that the Institute for Social Research was the site of a real exchange between disciplines. The role attributed to literature and philosophy still holds my attention. Kritische Theorie attacked social constraint and power. Max Horkheimer thus situated critical theory in opposition to the “conformism of thought” (Traditionnelle und kritische Theorie 56). These questions retain their full value today, independently of the (quite dissimilar) doctrines that were put forward by the Frankfurt school decades ago. It seems important for critical theory to continue to pass through a critique of its theory. This includes a questioning of the institutions of knowledge and of methods or discourses. I am advocating critical excessiveness, which would be the time of our thinking. Regarding the colony—but not exclusively—the objective is to pass the disciplines through a sieve, and to move beyond their defining protocols. Indiscipline is a term we have played with for a long time in the review Labyrinthe; it almost became the subtitle of the journal in 2001, occasionally reappeared in the section devoted to Jacques Rancière, and has figured in the argument since the first issue I edited, in 2003.2 Since Labyrinthe is not a publication with a manifesto, the members of the editing board do not entirely agree about indiscipline, nor do they attempt to think about it in the same way. I claim from indiscipline the mark of an epistemic negativity that results from its methodical formation. No preconceived negation. The very structure of the disciplines makes them

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inoperative at a certain point, and at certain points. From there, indiscipline grows and could project us into a heterodox enunciation. It is useless to claim to discipline if one primarily wants to reject methodical forms of coercion. Native speech and dogmatic originality are historical constructions, in the same way that sociology and philology are—and not necessarily more productive in the light of their limitations. It is better to establish disciplinary incapacity in actuality (and the impotence of specialization all the more so) in order to gain from it the strength for a reformation. In this way, a theory is empowered by its own critique. Let us understand what we are separating ourselves from, and why.3 This is what I wanted to risk in this work. My use of “I” is significant: it has a collective ambition, one may presume; but it has no universal calling. The critique of other discourses is a theory of its singularity. I make no attempt by this to inform Gayatri Spivak how she should write, but I do question her choices and take from them some thoughts for myself. Relativity is not relativism. The differences in expression prevent me from speaking either of others or to them. I think that the examples of Spivak and Bhabha prompt us to reformulate the interdiscipline, or indiscipline, otherwise, in an understanding of colonialism. In my view, the critique of institutional discourses wears itself out from disciplinary exhaustion. It brings to the surface the indication of the norm or the restriction. It will not do to forget history, for example. On the other hand, it is strange to devote oneself to history as a transcendental force, neglecting the polysemous uniqueness of the word in French or English. In thinking the postcolonial in its historic reality, the scholar confronts the usage of historical protocols. I thus consider chronology to be one thing and history to be something else. I will not now hide the fact that I myself constructed the periods and the events that interested me: the colonial continuance of slavery into the twentieth century, mulatto eloquence and the “opening”/ouverture of black speech, the gradual improvement of the linguistic trap, the repeated revisions to ethnography. These constructions critique historiographic unitemporality or the taboo against interpretation. Hasn’t the nonsense (so popular among scholars) of pitting discourses against facts, of opposing words with acts gotten old? University standards, however, must not limit critique. Alter-history is itself prone to be altered in a wave of epistemic negativity. Spivak satisfies herself with too-easy examples, as it were; Bhabha emphasizes the temporary value of his analyses, but he is too concerned with locating himself in a history of thought. He specifies the relation between the postcolonial and the postmodern (or the modern) in his final two chapters. When he reads in Derek Walcott’s poem, “the great

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history of the languages and landscapes of migration and diaspora” (Bhaba, The Location of Culture 337), and—in general—when he writes about the creation of hybrids, nothing is said about the process. When does one become hybrid? At the beginning of the empires, at the end, after them, at each of these times, according to the specific moment? Once and for all, or on different occasions? Are there functional differences between the colonial powers? The silence on these points is only the consequence of an insufficient attention to the production of history by knowledge—in addition to peoples, circumstances, and facts.4 In short, critique demands to be reconfigured. Since the eighteenth century, it has been claimed by politics, philosophy, and textual (and artistic) commentary. These concurrent evocations are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they help to organize an activity that uses divergent aspirations to great effect. The critical practice I am imagining separates itself from social prescription and uses conceptual analysis as it is practiced by philosophical argumentation. It would then reintegrate a part of the discourse analysis that the reader is prompted to provide in his interpretations and judgments. “Literary criticism,” pushed to its limits, is my primary choice, because it is in itself an opportunistic multidiscipline (or an indiscipline).5 Never unified among its proliferating postulations (philology, rhetorical analysis, stylistics, specialized history, poetics, journalistic narratives, etc.), it offers us a deliberately chaotic spectacle. This disparity, once one has abandoned totalization or hegemonization, provides the opportunity to explore critique as a discursive behavior. Is not literary criticism the establishment of the connection to a work being addressed in the transport of its reading? The range of critique is engendered by literary energy, which disassembles knowledge. Here, to say literature is to say non-knowledge (non-savoir), or at least knowledges (savoirs), or effraction and diffraction of all knowledge (connaissance). Through its thinking, literature manages to deplete established discourses. The event of its signification abandons the circumstances of its appearance. Through this feat, it lives outside of the Academy, that site where a few rare writers go only to die. Literature is also always landless (hors sol): from this position it shows us the strangeness of a critical situation where another word might be attempted that would speak the interaction of worlds and colonial intercession.

Another History of Postcolonial Critique I hope to have sufficiently illustrated the desires I have just formed, once again, in a more didactic mode. They should be considered propositions,

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which I would like to see debated and transformed—even if one must indeed believe in one’s own statements, right? In the previous section, we have therefore just ascertained the cumulative importance of the adequate and the inadequate. By seeing in indiscipline a shareable exigency, I have not stolen a privilege of theoretical enunciation from the colony. It is a matter of pursuing the critique of the colony all the way into the defection of the postcolonial. To help us do this, we will first return to two other discourses that make use of history and literature. Written long before this book, they could serve as alternative models of literary criticism. They testify to the urgency of textual behavior, outside the forms given here. Les théoriciens au pouvoir (The Theoreticians in Power) appeared in 1870. Demesvar Delorme, a Haitian, wrote the book, which takes the form of a long dialogue of more than seven hundred pages. Delorme studies the hypothesis being discussed by the best “men of [political] imagination” (Les théoriciens au pouvoir 3). Two friends, Paul and George, engage in a debate. They plunge into history as they travel across the island of Haiti. Three “epochs” are systematically brought into consideration: Greek, Latin, and French. The chronological division bears the traces of the educational model of the French humanities, but Delorme inscribes Haitian reality and contemporary events in the very course of a meditation that seems to be disconnected from his place and time. The tripartite division in the style of les lettres classiques is in fact a strangeness allowing a parallel return to the current moment. A sequel is announced at the end of the volume (“We will meet them a little later, perhaps” [732]), which might have explored the consequences of the historical scheme in the present state of affairs. In addition, in the first portrait (Pericles), the two interlocutors compare antiquity and modernity. Several pages are thus devoted to the United States in relation to the other countries of the Americas (48–53). This provides the occasion to evoke Haiti as “the attempt,” by a “new race,” to achieve “autonomy” and establish “its own civilization” (52). “Independence” is an effect of the fight “for the principle of the equality of the races” (52). The focus on the Greeks, Romans, and French cannot be reduced, therefore, to a desire for whiteness, nor to contempt for the race question or Haitian particularity. The periodization used would today seem rather dubious to many thinkers, but understanding it as a simple mark of subscription to the great civilizational narrative does not suffice. Delorme goes to the most classical period, to the supposed foundations of European culture, in order to claim their contributions. The entire Haitian nineteenth century is traversed precisely by this idea: black people have no less a right to have Greco-Latin antiquity be reborn. There are no natural lineages in this matter. My ancestors are not naturally the Gauls. Haiti has

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exactly the same capacity to activate a part of Greece as did Erasmus, Rabelais, and Michelangelo. The claim made on a chimerical past also becomes significant in this intellectual undertaking. Delorme sings the praises of France, a bit too much for my taste, and likely for yours as well—a point to which I will return. Let us be sure to note, however, that the French part begins with the Enlightenment—the French Revolution, especially—and that the ancien régime and the empire are omitted. Delorme engineers a significant selection and reorients France even more than Gratiant does. Moreover, Delorme complicates the development of his essay by introducing multiple digressions toward the contemporary. Both the tripartite structure and other statements concerning the gradual advancement of civilizations confirm the linear model of time, which, without being “the Western conception,” as I have repeated throughout, does in fact constitute a major representational feature of European modernity. The excurses, however, happen to challenge this massive apparatus. As George says, the discussion regularly surrenders to “a prodigious leap,” between, for example, Pericles and Ulysses S. Grant (Delorme, Les théoriciens au pouvoir 53). The “prodigious” (prodige, also “wonder” or “marvel”) names a quality of history that escapes the fable of progress. In this way, a distant event can be connected to what would seem to be an incomparable situation. The author responds to a unified history by constructing a temporality that splits apart, thus displacing the grand narrative. These forking paths are truly in solidarity with a traditional humanism that takes a perennial view of the nature of societies and peoples, and thus authorizes itself to close the gaps of dissimilarity. This much is certainly true, and much more to my mind, since most of the digressions emerge from offstage in the historical theater: in general, they are provoked by the forgotten—America’s Indians and slaves. Another striking example: the French era begins with a “Before ’89,” which presents the Enlightenment before the Revolution. This section of the text is preceded by a visit to a cave, understood as a religious site for Carib Indians (Delorme, Les théoriciens au pouvoir 386–90). The site inscribes the testimony of a denied past. The cave is the representation of the vestiges succeeding colonization; it speaks of “those tanned Indians of the Mexican peninsula whose very history, almost entirely erased by blood, now exists only in confused traces” (389). The traces, interrupted, characterize the history of colonized peoples. The walls of the vault are nonetheless covered with “inscriptions” that are “perfectly readable,” abandoned ever since the “sixteenth century” by “Europeans” (389). The Haitians, Paul and George, verify the rarity of the discontinuous traces of Indian history and their substantiation by the “dates and names” (389) given to them by the colonial conquerors. In the candlelight, at

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the stolen site of an obliteration and a recovery, the two characters remake the history of the European Renaissance, discovering its dark side—the colonial massacre. The Indians are recognized as the authors of an “original civilization” (396) that is all but lost. Paul and George, descendants of slaves brought over to replace the indigenes in the workforce, are the ones who say this. Delorme thus accomplishes still more than he perhaps thinks (the evocation of the “slow steps of progress”). His text gives an account of the interruptions of linear history by subaltern narratives. From this place, in this cave, from offstage, he reconstitutes a new history that integrates the fate of the colonized and reassembles the facts in anachrony—to read these “Carib druids” (386), “this Luther [as] a Robespierre of the dogmatic and religious order” (395). Delorme is closest to our contemporary moment in his writing, if not in his descriptive reflection. Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently situated his own method in the encounter between two levels of history. What he calls “History 1” corresponds to the critical narrative of the rational progress of power such as Marx configured it. Chakrabarty finds in this a positive value from the Enlightenment, provided that its unitarism be immediately accepted and challenged. Such is the work of “History 2,” which is born of “the infinite incommensurabilities through which we struggle—perennially, precariously, but unavoidably—to ‘world the earth’ in order to live within our different senses of ontic belonging” (Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe 254). Delorme confirms the break with precolonial history among the indigenes and there locates a power for rewriting history, akin to what Chakrabarty calls a “universal narrative” (254) and a migration of meaning through fragmentation. As one might imagine, I consider Demesvar Delorme as an author entirely apart from today’s postcolonial theory. The articulation between current research and Delorme is a supplementary homage to his subterranean manner of refashioning history, at the very moment that he seems to be sacrificing to the disciplinary procedures of the Weltgeschichte that was then at its zenith in the work of Leopold von Ranke (progress, stages, centrality of Europe). Les théoriciens au pouvoir takes up the cause of the contemplators, writers, and philosophers in the exercise of the public thing (the res publica), but the book is also an appropriation of theory. The independence of the black people of Saint-Domingue, “born of African blood,” finds the “proclamation . . . of the social verities of 1789” as a “point of departure” (Delorme, Les théoriciens au pouvoir 52). As such, France “theoretically supported” the rebels “in this first struggle” for racial equality. The Haitian Revolution rises out of the theory of 1789, the event and its doctrine. The motif of disciplinary exchange would keep us from making Delorme into a postcolonial critic. His book adopts the form of the philosophical

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dialogue in order to discuss politics and history. Literature plays a bit part between these discursive gaps. Lamartine, in the book’s final portrait, is celebrated in particular for his “language,” which escapes “the disciplined and somewhat courtly language of the seventeenth century” (Delorme, Les théoriciens au pouvoir 614). Paul praises the coherent project of the style, the argument, and the political attitude: “Lamartine continued the great principles of the Revolution, accomplishing this in his art and his language” (615). The role continually attributed to style—as an object of commentary and the substance of thought—also becomes the final common trait linking Delorme’s thought and the theory of the day. Demesvar Delorme inaugurates postcolonial theory. Now let me immediately retract this statement that I have just proposed, in order to analyze it, to contradict it. In this instance, primacy is not given; I have constructed it in the interpretation. The connections that I have established were, to my mind, truthful ones; it only becomes possible to articulate them, however, from the position of this time we call ours. Likewise, the reading that I offer produces my own speech as a nonindigenous postcolonial: it activates the reformation of possible histories through the interpretation of narratives. Moreover, the retrospective gaze supposes the advent of texts linking the theoretical, the critical, and the postcolonial. Inauguration can function only as a trompe l’oeil. We can admire art only on the condition that we recognize the gap it opens in the real. Delorme is the first, meaning that most likely he had predecessors, whose anteriority will once again require confirmation and reconfirmation by interpretation. The event gets reiterated in thought. Many and various first times are required. If I consider the wider context, and not only that which relates to the colony, a problem we have already encountered returns: why is it that the postcolonial is so eager to think itself the first, today? By mentioning that Bhabha pays homage to Fanon, one emphasizes that the theory of today benefits from that of yesterday. Bhabha’s concern is not so common; at its source, he still designates a text dating from after the war, not before. I have given a broad explanation, at least in the francophone context, concerning the tendency to protect innovation, as a tactic. The situation becomes extrapolated—and I am worried about the surreptitious occultation of the past that it involves. The attitude is both very contemporary, tied to the artificiality of phraseological ephemerality, and colonial, in the forgetting it accomplishes. When I qualify Delorme as a precursor, I hope to be taken seriously, I suppose. By claiming Delorme in this way, I am primarily trying to undo the unity of today. It is not a question of returning to Demesvar Delorme. His complacency regarding France is rooted in an idealization in the literal sense, which disturbs me no less. The black

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universalism that he incarnates, this Enlightenment and Revolutionary extremism, shared with other Haitians, such as Anténor Firmin or Louis Joseph Janvier, is it still up-to-date. I wouldn’t say it is.6 The moderate rationalism that Delorme casts in revolutionary hyperbole has no points of contact with the power of violence that I find in social and political organization. For all these and other reasons, I am in no way dreaming of a reaction where works would go to recharge themselves in the thought of predecessors. However, I do believe in the usefulness of seeking out half-erased traces, in order to initiate discontinuous histories of our pasts and our presents. The title Delorme the First would not make sense in itself, but only in the consideration of colonialism. The trompe-l’oeil primacy fractures today’s originality. It demands that we offer up our theories to historical criticism. Prompted by these pages to situate the aim of my book more firmly, I would sum up the illusory and real problem that Delorme’s anteriority prompts us to consider. First, I recognized a substantiality of history in the postcolonial, to such a degree that I took my inquiry back into the past, all the way to slavery. Next, whereas there is a chronological existence and a density of time, history is created precisely from the reformation of what has already been formed, by the gestures of actors or by discursive gestures. This is how history gets told. It escapes discipline in its capacity as lived value. This is also true for scholars, by the very nature of their own statements, which must consequently examine the histories they are peddling, using, reinventing. The primacy of Delorme is thus a provocation, a call to other types of speech allowing for the opening always to be started again. The recommencement implies the choice of a diction that abandons the pure origins just as much as the uninterrupted tradition. History, at this price, can escape from revisionist manipulations, the dogmas of a tabula rasa. Reconstruction, confirming its work within the temporal parameters, is valuable for the colony. The colony does not derive entirely from its historical reconstruction, according to a phantasmatic causal linearity that I find suspect. The colony deserves the proclamations of its specificity, indeed of its singularity; it must not be the beginning and the end. If this book proves to be postcolonial, it will also be so for the reconnection between the colony and its beyonds. In other words, the critical theoretical history of the colony can free itself in a premeditated consummation.

Theory of the Invisible It is thus toward a certain end that we are headed, but this end is not really a conclusion. And as one should beware of limits and edges, I have decided to call the space between here and the (real) final pages an epilogue. An

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epilogue, as outside the work. Or an improbable synthesis of all that I have said, and of everything else as well. In any case, here is another critic of theory, Ralph Ellison, to whose celebrated Invisible Man this epilogue now turns. It is worth clarifying that the celebrity of the novel is quite relative in France, which can perhaps be explained by nothing more than the traditional lag of the hexagonal publishing world. Published in 1952, Invisible Man, is to my mind the greatest Bildungsroman of the period. The narrator, a black man from the American South, moves from impossible situations into inextricable difficulties. His age, city, and occupation all change; he is a student in high school and college, unemployed, a spokesman for a nebulous Brotherhood, a renegade. And always black, he progressively comes to learn what the prologue announces: he is invisible. The opening lines speak the phrase of possession with irony: I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. (Ellison, Invisible Man 3) The entry into the subject matter is symptomatic of Ellison’s art, which is marked by its intensive complexities and folds. I am rereading here within the perspective we have established in this book, a few moments away from parting; not all of Ellison will be included. But let us reread: the “I” calls itself invisible and then immediately rejects bewitchment, the magic of the cinema or that of literature. The cause comes from a refusal of vision. Is this to say that the black narrator is produced only by blindness? Are we then in Sartrean territory, with an inferior black man “thingified” by the white man’s dominating gaze? Certainly, Ellison evokes these discourses. He also brings to the surface their unitary and rationalist reduction, through the exercise of language. “I am not a spook.” The writing alters already here, since “spook” evokes not just “ghost” but also the offensive racial slur. I am not this spook, this ghost, but perhaps I am the other, the black man. “To possess a mind,” after the reference to Poe and his “haunting,” continues in this same register. Those who say what “might even be said” are the white colonizers, finally granting a soul or an intellect to the indigenes, after having stripped them of it (via slavery, theological controversy, or ethnography). It is even possible that the “I” who speaks already possesses a mind: that of the reader. The last sentence of the novel will ask us: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581). The “lower frequencies,” broadcast from

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the cellar where the narrator lives, also function in a subliminal way in the minds of those who hear these words. Comparing the first and last pages brings forth another difficulty. In the end, the “I” admits he has not overcome the problems he encountered. He fears the recriminations of the public, who expected more than mere talk. He then justifies himself by asking a rhetorical question: “Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do?” (Ellison, Invisible Man 581). The prologue, supposedly uttered at the same time as the novel’s epilogue (that is, the revelation of invisibility), assures us, however, that “I am a man of substance.” Ellison plays with the contradictions of writing. Since he has substance, the “spook” is a Negro, and not a literary ghost; but as narrative voice, he has no substance, and he is also that specter that possesses the mind of the reader. The spook is a spook is a spook . . . Invisibility does not thus equal the blinding of others. From being visible, the “I” became invisible. “Well, I was and yet I was invisible, that was the fundamental contradiction. I was and yet I was unseen” (507). Social enchantment becomes displaced in the passage to literature, which creates an additional fantastic future (devenir) for the “I.” The irrational is conjured up in the sense of a resurrection of the impossible, which actively participates in the formation of the New Spook—as Alain Locke spoke of the New Negro. The disembodied voice results from the result: it is the accession to a language that surpasses the ventriloquist possession of postcolonial and racial power. The material between the two boundaries of the prologue and the epilogue forms a black logos, the discourse of the quasi slave (presque esclave) progressively exiting from the world’s view. I have just multiplied the questions concerning vision because Invisible Man provides a theory of social (non) seeing. Théo¯ria has always been connected to spectacle, and for Plato, to the contemplation of Ideas by the soul. Ellison derides one theory in favor of another. His main character spends a long period within a political movement, where “theory” is considered both essential and dangerous. Jack, the head of the organization, at first tries to promote the narrator, calling to order his comrades who resist. Are they “skilled theoretical Nijinsky[s]” (Ellison, Invisible Man 349) or “a bunch of timid sideline theoreticians arguing in a vacuum” (351)? When the wind changes direction, and Jack hears the reproaches made against the “I,” the term “theoretician” resurfaces, derisively; the “I” was only asked to be the speaker, the spokesman of ideas before the crowds ready to be recruited. The theory of the “Brotherhood” corresponds to what Marxist organizations were doing at the time. Supposedly indispensable, theory is the privilege of the elites; in the case of the narrator’s polemic, it becomes synonymous with inaction, with contempt for experimentation.

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The “I” learns to not depend on anything in all these political returns and detours. On the contrary, his thinking consists of a critical theory of society and of its contestations (by religion, the union, the political party, and even the racial struggle of the black activist, Ras the Destroyer). It is theory, because both black and white people are caught in the specter of the visible and the invisible. The “I” that speaks to us is that eye that sees itself become invisible. Among so many highly comic episodes, the most eloquent, to my mind, is found in chapter 10. The narrator has succeeded in finding a job in a paint factory. In the basement, he helps an old black worker who soon becomes wary of his technical competence. The goal of all their effort is the production of a perfect color called “Optic White.” Brockway, the artist of absolute whiteness, is devoted to the company, and a violent opponent of unions. He boasts of having found the slogan for Optic White, “If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White” (Ellison, Invisible Man 217), a line the “I” reads as “If you’re white, you’re right.” I should also do justice to Ellison’s comic descriptions of the subterranean machinery, which requires two black men to produce the perfect white. The “I,” decidedly not convinced of the necessity of fabricating a paint that can whiten the least “chunka coal” (217), will be punished by Brockway, who triggers an explosion in the pipes. Brockway is guilty, but he uses the narrator to unleash the accident, telling him to turn the wrong valve wheel—the white one, of course (229). In this rich passage, Optic White is what interests me the most. It is literally a “way of seeing” that is reserved neither for the former masters nor for their contemporary servants. Its counterpart, Optic Black—the “black racism” of Ras the Destroyer in Harlem—remains void of seduction for the narrator. Ras unknowingly plays the role of catalyst for the Brotherhood, which uses him in order to radicalize the struggle (see chapter 25). Ras is not a blind seer like the great orator Homer (!) A. Barbee, the black pastor who makes such an impression on the “I” as a student at his black college. Ras is a visionary who sees nothing coming. He remains Jack’s pawn, the political leader whose glass eye the narrator notices quite late (“a buttermilk white eye distorted by the light rays” [Ellison, Invisible Man 474]). Optic White sees white everywhere, Optic Black exalts black power, the glass eye wants neither one (“Black and white, white and black. . . . Must we listen to this racist nonsense?” [469]). One-eyed Jack will not prove to be any more lucid than his political enemies, and the “I” hesitates, asking: “Which eye is really the blind one?” (478). The “I” will find an unexpected and unsatisfactory way out of this great spectacle, but to which he will consent nonetheless. Wanting to escape from

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Ras, he wears sunglasses and notices that no one any longer recognizes him. Or rather, he is identified, but poorly. The simple act of hiding his eyes behind tinted glass changes the “I” into a protean character named Rinehart, part-time pastor and “Spiritual Technologist” (Ellison, Invisible Man 495). The Christian supernatural, with its “invisible,” its “seen” and “unseen” powers, manages to reveal to the narrator the advantages found in the malediction of invisibility. After the riots in Harlem, the “I” takes refuge in another cave, a basement that he lights with countless lightbulbs, and where he elaborates his monologue. The end of the novel recalls the great attitude types by the names of the heroes who bore them. Jack, the political man; Emerson, the owner of Liberty paints; Bledsoe and Norton, director and trustee, respectively, of the Black College; all are cited for “the beautiful absurdity of their American identity” (Ellison, Invisible Man 559). In this recapitulation, invisibility forms a system with the blindness of the social body. The individual recognition of invisibility displaces the problem of the “political situation” onto the “I” itself. Can one escape “the real soul-sickness of the soul” (575) that follows social possession? “It’s worse because you continue stupidly to live. But live you must. And you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase” (576). The next phase remains the problem. The “I” admits that “after having been ‘for’ society, then ‘against’ it” (576), he opts for his underground no-man’s-land, for the transmutation of speech, in the utopia that literature, perhaps, can secure. This retreat, which is in no way a renunciation—I can say that I really understand it. I imagine that it dismays partisans of committed literature. Yet part of the force of Ellison’s narrative is that it refuses to conclude, and I would like to keep that sense of adventure open. Yes, but what is the next phase? This becomes a question for the long term. In particular, it is linked to the construction of each “I” (and each one can be more than itself) within society’s constraints, such as the postcolonial. The narrator’s theo¯ria passes from the contestation of society to the critique of critique. It creates a sense of ghostly and demonic transformation. The man whom the blind cannot see will be the invisible voice articulating itself in our reading. The protagonist must take responsibility for himself, and we must, in turn, produce ourselves and persist in the space that we inhabit. Invisible Man positions the wealth of meanings that remain for us to construe. Nothing prevents us from linking these final positions to other essays Ellison wrote, and then extrapolating from there, as Danielle Allen has recently done. In her book, Talking to Strangers, she links the Little Rock crisis, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Ellison. She proposes a reevaluation

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of the trust in American politics, which would move beyond the (racial) differend in favor of a xenophilia, a friendship with others. Aiming to democratize democracy, Allen records the necessary changes in habits that would change political violence through the improvement of citizenship. This, she assures us, would be the response of the “I” of Invisible Man, which “aspires to brotherhood, and proposes techniques for attending to the intricacy of our world, and reciprocity among citizens” (Allen, Talking to Strangers 118). While admiring Allen’s desire to reunite the multiple, I remain skeptical about the proposition that the narrator would be making here. Rather, I think that Danielle Allen takes up the contradictory example of the invisible man, and that she tries to think “the next phase,” the after of postcoloniality, where race is more difference than deviation. The work of activists such as Elizabeth Eckford and of writers such as Ellison is historically renewed here, in another contemporary. The pursuit of the critical theory of narrative can also give rise to external rereadings. The phrase of colonial possession is concretized in the subcategory of invisibility or appearance. One example of this would be Camus’s The Stranger, in the ordinary xenophobia of Meursault, who always speaks of Arabs in general. He does not see one who is not another. This occurs throughout the story. Glancing at chapter 6, which closes the first part of the novel with the scene of the murder on the beach, we read: “a group of Arabs,” “Arabs,” “two Arabs in overalls,” “the Arabs,” “the Arab,” “the other Arab,” “our two Arabs,” “the Arabs,” “the Arab,” “the Arab,” “the Arab”—and “he” or “they,” of course.7 The vague distinctions are due to a more Western outfit (“overalls”) or a physical particularity, a part of the body (“widely spread toes”). Then Meursault kills his indigene because of temporary blinding: The Arab drew his knife and held it up to me in the sun. The light shot off the steel and it was like a long flashing blade cutting at my forehead. At the same instant the sweat in my eyebrows dripped down over my eyelids all at once and covered them with a warm, thick film. My eyes were blinded behind the curtain of tears and salt. . . . My whole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. . . . I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew I had shattered the harmony of the day. (Camus, The Stranger 59) The murder on the colonial beach comes from the onset of blindness, the invisible disappearance of the omnipresent other. Naturally, I say this for my own sake, prolonging the words of the invisible man differently, and responding to his question. He was indeed also speaking for me.

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Ellison’s fecundity, in both his critique of theory and his theory of all criticism, reveals to us another precursor, effective and impossible. It also brings us to the threshold. Literature, which splits knowledge apart, returns us to the consequences of an epistemic discourse about postcoloniality. Defection is not failure, and I prefer to seek out the nearest inadequacy rather than claiming to totalize the colony in theory. This is what the poetic crisis teaches me. I must interrogate language, examine its uses and usages (phrase, speech, verbiage, institutions), and try to produce meaning through language. A discourse of knowledge, undisciplined, is invented at these sites, taking its strength from events, traditions, and books. The colony, slavery, and racism are so many social commands that aim for the maintenance of order, in one way or another. Like the narrator of Invisible Man, it remains our task—using our means, our words, and our luck—to invent a singularity that shatters political prescription and its rhetoric. I do not think that the colony is the greatest form of coercion today, nor the most pervasive. Yet the success of its operation of silence, its unquestionable core, prompts us to speak about it, anew, again. Like you, I speak to be myself, and to open a way in what has already been said, already been thought, which alters and persists. If we live in postcolonial countries, it is up to us each time we speak to prove to ourselves that we can pass through them and beyond.

After the Afterward

Silence is so often eloquent. To not speak of the colony, to evoke it as little as possible, as happened for several decades in France, may entail the unremitting return of a jargon that has already been heard so many times. In public speech, in the clamor of the media, in language teaching, scholarly discourse, and literary texts, a postcolonial phrase still persists, with its own accents and syntax. So-called rational thought exploited the indigenes in order to write its own progressivist legend, giving them the poisoned gift of permanent possession, or of languages booby-trapped with a supplementary usage. In turn, a ready-made speech organized in advance the utterances and thoughts that occupy discourse all the more when one is unaware of them. This is why silence makes more noise than it thinks it does. One does not get rid of a social and political prescription by claiming to know nothing about it. In this case, the great, dominating parlance would become the sole forge of our language. In the contemporary space of thought, where linguistic anonymity was celebrated—whether collective or preindividual—I might perhaps seem to be returning to an autonomous conception of the subject, or even to a certain romantic solipsism. It is not a good idea to insist too much on what one is not, which comes across as a deliberate denial; as for the attraction for something like the “self,” emphasizing that one has gotten rid of it can itself indicate a pose. Certainly, each speaker also speaks the language of others. Even literature mobilizes the 197

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statements and dictions that precede it. The problem lies in the difference of enunciation, and the form of the discourses that are recycled. I think that arranging anterior words and fragments allows at best for the emergence of a verbal singularity that modifies the ordinary. Even if one refuses to admit it, the question of a company of speech would nonetheless remain just as resonant. It is not only, or not exactly, language (le langage) that speaks me, but rather usage, phrases, whose impact varies. Neither the linguistic argument of a common linguistic substratum nor the linguistic claim of a system that preexists the speaker regulates the interrogation of the provenance, the value, or the range of the elements utilized. No need, then, for a return to the absolute subject in order to worry about the materials that make thought possible. Examining (post)colonial usage allows one to situate regions and zones of discursive thought where one does not want to remain. It is up to each of us to find one or more voices that break the noxious harmony of social domination. Or not, if we want to submit to the side of power over others, in the wretched jouissance obtained by the force of general debasement. The price of this is steep, as we know in France: a disintegration of the plurality into the conflicting mini-mes of the grand political consummation. Nothing prevents us, however, from taking note of what we have read and said together. At most, critical knowledge liberates a few bold people. No ideal image of some immediately attractive good; just work, in the substrate of thought, through books, and on oneself, with its fatigue, which would make it seem less seductive, at least on the surface. Research, at least, needs an illusion: that whatever is valuable for a handful of people (and sometimes only for the author) is also valuable for the unknown reader. I still want to think and to live better; in this case, to identify all the instances when words seem to surpass my thinking but are in fact inscribing me in the illocutionary netherworld made of the coercive forms that I also am fighting. It is thus not only a question of understanding, but of producing, even partially, a way out of these closed fields. Likewise, this book at least testifies to an effort, that of freeing oneself from a phraseological colonization. Not only to analyze it, but to submit it to the test of writing in order to construct myself in a rupture with the patterns of nonthought. To those who would expect to find a symbolic cure, a palliative, within the problem of language, or a disregard for the struggles taking place at the more “realist” level of the sociohistorical, I would immediately return the compliment: in general, is not the quest for social recognition, whether in documentary or pecuniary form, a simple material compensation for a problem that persists in thought and discourse? Political society also plays a role in the ordering of words, and I sense a power and efficiency that are vaster here than in the so-called practi-

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cal struggle. There is certainly no absolute emancipation in the latter, since any undertaking of this kind remains subordinated to the unitary concept of liberty in itself. It would nevertheless be strange to take advantage of this negation of emancipation for the benefit of total servitude, which could only rest on a relativity of forms of subjugation in order to function. To escape does not mean “to be free,” but neither is it nothing. This is called marronnage in the colonial context, where slaves would escape to all sorts of elsewheres. I would at least have attempted an analogous escape, to remove some of the colonial ballast from our words. It is an attempt that would at least be useful for others, who for their part might seek to break with the social order of language, to create in language the utopic condition for thinking that resists political prescriptions. From this perspective, the colonial is to be considered as a linguistic event being associated with factual circumstances. By means of social sedimentation and the discourses we practice, we in the United States, France, and in territories now separated from empire, are equally disposed to live in and of the colony. This is one of our commonalities. Postcolonial studies therefore cannot concern itself only with the indigenes of yesterday or of today— under penalty both of losing its constitutive meaning of domination and of naïvely repeating the separation of bodies imposed by the colonial powers. Similarly, political inversion (as in the revenge of the conquered), and the simplistic formation of a literary countercanon (in the name of a “writing back”), are two shortsighted tactics. So, too, for métissage, which ultimately adorns itself only against the grain of a purism; one must still admit this fact, whereby métissage celebrates the mixing of substances isolated in some historical yesteryear, then subscribes to the hybrid unity of the multiple, and finally considers everything as complementary colors and decorative alloys. The difficulty does not arise from the allocation of roles; it proceeds from the system of the partition itself. Finding a phrase of possession at work, in addition to this theoretical configuration, I push the logic further. Even as I have kept the disjunction that creates enchantment, I have explained how the effects of reciprocal haunting prevent us from simply breaking with it once and for all. No vocation, then; no nature, no frenzied destination. A black African or a white European is not called on to speak inasmuch as he is black or white. (Post)colonial usage and the tradition of indigenous critique are neither innate nor inexorable. On the other hand, yes, the structure of domination allows more play for those who are presented as the ones in power than it does for the others. In this sense, speakers put in the position of the indigene have to respond more quickly, more clearly to the parlance. I must insist, however, that there exists no automaticity between the referen-

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tiality of those speaking and the speed of their discourse, no reserved domain of (post)colonial studies. We are numerous, those of us who can demand reparations through our language. In French, not only prefabricated maxims, sayings, and judgments, of course, but also laws of syntax, vocal inflections, and large sections of vocabulary are directly indebted to the experience of the colony. When education, media, treatises of all kinds, novels, evasive statements, laws, and political proclamations perpetuate both the phrase and the idiomatic usage that allowed for expansion, there is indeed much at stake in the colonial empire of language. Those of us who write in one of the languages exported to the colonies have the task of making the extraordinary resound, the job of crafting speech that breaks with the order of words. More specifically, literature is accustomed to these ruptures, which in actuality require the denunciation of programmed enunciation. Such is the source of my interest in the texts of Ralph Ellison, Hélène Cixous, Pierre Guyotat, and Gilbert Gratiant. The role of literature in our inquiry should not be surprising. There are, however, other possible singularities: one’s personal distancing from daily babble, or critical deviation, for example. In any case, let us no longer be content with preestablished harmonies, any more than we are with mere disturbances or complicit silence. The attempt at other forms of expression or the implementation of singularities will not prohibit transmission. Knowledge is not information to be stored, spent, and recycled. It is not enough to resuscitate the history of disregarded facts to refresh memory. One must be careful when constructing one’s thought—whether the maximal minimum that every teacher should have in mind—without which the best data banks would remain pointless lists, a pretext for deforestation, or the exceeding of bandwidth. Nevertheless, in order for knowledge to be deformed by thought, there must, of course, be some form. To critique one kind of limited educational program, as I have done in this book, does not in any way mean neglecting the past. Whatever our age, we still have to learn, in school and beyond. In terms of the colonies in particular, we must rediscover those black poets who wrote in Latin, those slaves who testified in the archives of a trial, those men and women of letters from Asia who responded to the Jesuits, those murmurs of legal aliens caught between the system and their marginality, those words of rebels who raised their voices before their masters, the unexpected tone of the colonists despite themselves, indigenous soldiers who sent letters from the front, the songs hummed at the outskirts of colonial cities. Outside this field of study, other visual, aural, olfactory works should also be considered. Certainly not everything is valuable. The project of discovering a world that has been cen-

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sored for a long time cannot aim at pure substitution. Put simply, Toussaint does not erase Napoleon. Yet for those still worried about replacement, I would ask what is it that feeds their fear. Is it their own uncertainties about the “patrimony” they are defending? Is it what they think they understand about others? The archives of this material are very dispersed and hard to access (especially for the first French colonial empire). Even if this situation has already improved since the original publication of this book in 2008, a large portion of the work of collecting and publishing remains to be done. This book takes up a double cause. The knowledge of colonial activity— as with any other social and political prescription—takes on meaning only through the test of a discourse surpassing the unthought of its parlance. Two temporalities are opened up, which do not necessarily coincide. The description of a struggle, its officialization even, does not in itself suffice to prevent the perpetuation of an imperial phrase or usage; the sudden clamor of a poem or a slogan does not in itself bring down the prison walls or the (neo) colonies. Moreover, the linguistic event only has the duration of its utterance. Nothing is ever said once and for all—not even last words. One must read, hear, listen, say, reformulate, recommence. However, a new era is at hand when the insistence of description fuses with the moment of expression. The more we recognize the colonial in the name of its post, the more we must think it by enunciating it beyond its phrase, its rhetoric, its usage, its discipline. Our wes are also inferred through such a process, which redistributes the places among our “contemporaries.” An apparent paradox follows from all this. “Postcolonial speech” aims to confirm the colony and to get rid of it. As soon as discourses—francophone discourses, perhaps—communicate with the world’s babble, and are formed by redirecting the prescribed rules, then the instant of another afterward becomes conceivable. If the expression of the (post)colonial deserves to lose the parenthesis that, to my mind, most often persists,1 it signifies at once that the post hoc of the postcolonial is henceforth possible. To pierce parlance with full knowledge of the facts—this is what I have tried to do—and through this gesture to renounce its unceasing repetition. While we are postcolonial, now is also the time to live after the afterward.

Notes

Prologue

1. This war will for a long time be referred to as “the events” or, to use an expression found in Les parapluies de Cherbourg—a film contemporary with Le joli mai—“what’s happening in Algeria.” 2. The French word parlure, which has been translated here as “parlance,” refers in general to the sociolect of a given group of language users and has most often been used to describe turns of phrase and manners of speaking unique to francophone Quebec. The author develops his own unique understanding of this term throughout this book. [Translator’s note] 3. Part 3 of this book outlines the current state of hexagonal thought in relation to the resistance to “postcolonial studies” in France. 4. I speak of France, since Mudimbé and Glissant teach or taught in some of the most prestigious universities, and the reflections of Fanon are central for Homi Bhabha, one of the stars of “postcolonial studies” today. Since the writing of this book, the situation of postcolonial studies in French academia has changed significantly. Interestingly, literary scholars are still lagging behind. 5. See, for example, Daniel Lefeuvre, Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale (Paris: Flammarion, 2006). 6. Many others have engaged in this effort, which in fact remains to be named; I would cite here, as a gesture of friendship, only the syncretism of Susan Buck-Morss (see Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009], 151) and Anthony Mangeon’s integrative (or integrated) history (La pensée noire et l’Occident: De la bibliothèque coloniale à Barack Obama [Cabris: Sulliver, 2010]). 7. I privilege this term at the core of the book for its historical, descriptive value. I am not unaware of its racial connotations, or of the negative meaning it sometimes carries. Yet I hope to indicate with this term the possibility of using words to surpass words. I will return to this problem at the end of chapter 4. 8. The French expression prendre la parole, which in everyday language means simply “to speak” or “to have the floor,” forms a central element of Dubreuil’s thesis about possession, dispossession, and language. It has been translated here most often as “to speak up,” which gives the sense of speech as an event that breaks with both silence and prescribed language; this translation lacks the full resonance found in the French. In other cases, I have given an overly literal translation (e.g., “to take the word”) in order to maintain the movement of a specific argument or point. [Translator’s note] 9. I worked on the first version of this book from 2004 to 2008, the date of the original publication in French by Hermann. For the English translation, I revised and expanded the French text in March, April, and July 2011. 203

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Introduction to Part I

1. This phrase, a commonplace expression in French textbooks, has become emblematic of the way that French education has both constructed the object of history and interpellated the schoolchildren charged with memorizing it. [Translator’s note] 1. (Post)colonial Possessions

1. Most of this passage is translated and quoted in David Hacket Fischer, Champlain’s Dream: The European Founding of North America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 370–71, from which the current translation has borrowed, with slight modifications. All other translations of quoted material are mine, unless otherwise indicated. [Translator’s note] 2. It was even originally called L’Ile de la Prise de Possession (Island of the Taking of Possession), a name conferred in 1772 by Marion-Dufresne. 3. Léry finds in Aygnan the equivalent of the devil. André Thevet, a contemporary and personal enemy of Léry, gives a nearly identical description in Les singularitez de la France arctique (1558; Paris: Maisonneuve, 1878), chap. 25. 4. For a broad overview of the language of possession in the Spanish-speaking context, see Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). For another overview of the connections between witchcraft, possession, or demons and colonial expansion, in the context of the first French colonial empire, see Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), chap. 3. Anthony Mangeon developed my hypothesis one step further, while incorporating it into his own scholarly perspective in La pensée noire et l’Occident: De la bibliothèque coloniale à Barack Obama (Cabris: Sulliver, 2010); see chap. 2 in particular. 5. There are many recent republications of the Code noir. One can consult the version in Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code noir, ou le Calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002). The text can also be found online. 6. While revising this work for the English translation, I found a structurally congruous motif in a sardonic libelle from 1790, addressed to Condorcet by the colonists who were hostile to the abolition of slavery. The authors describe freed blacks with these words: “They will always be in ecstasy, disengaged from matter, they will always be in their seventh heaven” (Adresse de la jeuneses du Cap-François, Isle SaintDomingue à Monsieur le Marquis de Condorcet, surnommé le Grand-Prêtre JEAN, Apôtre, depute de l’Abyssinie [Cap Français, 1790], 6). Emancipation is presented derisively here as a second legal ecstasy that would cancel out the body for the benefit of pure spirit. Let us also note that at the Assembly in 1794 during a debate on the abolition of slavery, the deputy Pierre-Joseph Cambon asked that the following anecdote be written in the trial register: “A citizen of color, who regularly attended the meetings of the convention, and who shared in all the Revolutionary movements, has just experienced such an intense joy, seeing liberty granted to all her brethren by us, that she lost consciousness altogether” (meeting of 16 Pluviôse, Year II [4 February 1794]; available on gallica.bnf.fr; my emphasis). 7. Less than a century later, the black Dutch preacher Jacob Capitein will “justify” the enslavement of the body so long as it is accompanied by a spiritual liberation

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of black people through the Christian faith. At the level of “spiritual principle,” he writes, one can “be submissive to the empire of the Devil” (Dissertation politicotheologica de servitute, libertati Christianae non contraria [Leiden, 1742], III, 1). 8. In particular, see Viktor Schoelcher, De l’esclavage des Noirs et de la législation coloniale (Paris: Paulin, 1833), chap. 6, p. 41; id., Abolition de l’esclavage: Examen critique du préjugé contre la couleur des Africains et des sangs-mêlés (Paris: Paguerre, 1839), 23; and id., Des colonies françaises: Abolition immédiate des Noirs de la législation coloniale (Paris: Paguerre, 1842), chap. 5, p. 67. 9. See in particular the introduction and the conclusion in Frantz Fanon, Peau noire masque blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 28, 202. 10. On the connection between the Hegelian dialectic and the example of the slave revolt, see Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 11. “Z’hovas” is a version of “Hovas,” which refers to the class within the Malagasy Merina tribe of Madagascar against which the French fought during the Franco-Hova war of 1883–96. 12. In particular, listen to Chansons coloniales et exotiques (Paris: EPM, 1995), 2 CDs, “Arrouah Sidi!”, “La fille du bédouin” (1927), “Nuits d’Outre-mer” (1932), “Viens dans ma casbah” (1935). Also see “Vive l’Algérie” in Alain Ruscio, ed., Que la France était belle au temps des colonies: Anthologie des chansons coloniales et exotiques françaises (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001). 13. Tartarin is thus “taken with a singesse,” (singe [monkey] + princesse; there is also a possible connection to the word sauvagesse, mainly used to refer to a female savage). Daudet, Oeuvres 927. 14. From Casablanca et sa région, quoted in the republication by Abdelmajid Arrid from the 1951 study by Jean Mathieu and P. H. Maury, Bousbir: La prostitution dans le Maroc colonial: Ethnographie d’un quartier réservé (Paris: Paris-Méditerranée, 2003), 11. 15. It is difficult to establish a genealogy of the expression “safety valve.” The oldest occurrence I have found (although there may be older ones) dates from 1839: the economist Constantin Pecqueur speaks of the necessity, for Europeans, of a “valve by which the effervescence might escape.” See Pecqueur, Economie sociale: Des intérêts du commerce, de l’industrie, de l’agriculture, et de la civilization en générale (Paris: Desessart, 1839), 2: 392. “Safety valve” is also found in the article “Colonie” that Joseph Chailley-Bert contributed to the Nouveau dictionnaire d’économie politique (vol. 1, 439a), which he codirects with Léon Say. Carl Siger (pseudonym of Charles Régismanset), among others, reprises the argument in 1907 in his Essai sur la colonisation (Paris: Mercure de France, 1907), 173. In English, the image of the colony as safety valve seems to be even more common, and, in 1824, an author could already describe it as a “metaphor so commonly employed” (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 15 [1824]: 435). 16. See Laurent Dubreuil, De l’attrait à la possession: Maupassant, Artaud, Blanchot (Paris: Hermann, 2003). 17. Page numbers refer to the standard English translation: Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), which has been used in this translation, in slightly modified form, to accommodate Dubreuil’s own translations from the German. [Translator’s note]

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18. I am playing on the meaning of “natural peoples” (Naturvölker) to designate savages (cf. Freud, Totem and Taboo 5 and passim). 19. For a more substantial critical assessment that is sympathetic to psychoanalysis, see Ranjana Khanna, Dark Contintents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 20. The interplay of “other” and “ours” is even more complex in the original French, where “une autre” (another) contains the phoneme “notre” (ours), while “un être” (a being) echoes it. [Translator’s note] 21. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 143; id., L’An V de la révolution algérienne (Paris: Maspero, 1959), 133–34. 22. The English rendering of the phrase fails to capture the metaphor embedded in the original French, “la défectivité ne sera pas recouverte,” in which “défectivité” evokes French grammatical defectives, i.e., words that lack all the forms found for other similar terms. The metaphor suggests that, likewise, “pure reason” lacks the “grammatical” resources to account for certain thoughts, experiences, subjects, or speakers. [Translator’s note] 23. The critique of “universalism” is still ongoing. Is this the most urgent task? Perhaps. The surreptitious “universalization” of this critique is, in any case, not a very intellectually attractive solution, and I will return to this point in my analysis of métissage in chapter 3. The ideal would be to maintain the promise of the universal, without universalism. 24. The expression comes from the sixth stanza of Baudelaire’s “L’Héautontimoroumenos” (“The Self-Tormentor”) from Les fleurs du mal: “Je suis la plaie et le couteau! / Je suis le soufflet et la joue! / Je suis les membres et la roue, / Et la victime et le bourreau!” [Translator’s note] 2. Haunting and Imperial Doctrine

1. I have been developing the notion of singularity since the late 1990s. The term “singularity” is in no way my own, and it has become so widespread in so short a time that I sometimes doubt its effectiveness. To my mind, singularity is not preindividual (as in Deleuze and Guattari); neither is it a transcendental unity, radical oneness, quiddity, or the kernel of the subject. There is “singularity” when despite all the fragmentations, dissolutions, and openings, something obstinately persists, in diverse instances, designating a resistance as much to unification—in principle, synthetically, or a priori—as to complete dispersion. This process, to play with the words involved, is thus always bound to remain bizarre, strange, singular; it is ultimately eminently fragile. If works of art create singularities, including “us,” they are of course not the only sites for such events. An affable relationship, a statement, the experience of a rapture might prove comparably fortuitous. It is in this sense that I use the word “singularity” in this work. Two notable voices use a similar vocabulary within the articulation of francophone and postcolonial studies; I am thinking of Peter Hallward (Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001]) and Nick Nesbitt (Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008]). However many points of convergence exist between these authors and my version, it should be obvious that what I call singularity has nothing to do

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with the “singular individual” acting like a transcendental “creator-God” (Hallward 1), nor with a given historical process of “singularization” (cf. Nesbitt 20). All this shows, if it is necessary to do so, that similarity of vocabulary is only meaningful under certain conditions, which are always to be constructed (by the exhaustion of a phrase, for example; the possible work toward such a task I leave to others). 2. “La plus grande France” is an expression that first emerged in the 1880s in the context of the European “scramble for Africa” and French parliamentary debates on the necessity and the meaning of French overseas expansion. See Roger Little’s brief but insightful “Comment” on the term in French Studies Bulletin 26.95 (Summer 2005): 19–20. [Translator’s note] 3. The full title of the Crémieux Decree: Décret qui déclare citoyens français les israélites indigènes de l’Algérie, 24 octobre–7 novembre 1870. 4. Sénatus-consulte du 14 juillet 1865 sur l’état des personnes et la naturalisation en Algérie, arts. 1 and 2. 5. The leading ideologist of anti-Semitism in France, Drumont was an ardent anti-Dreyfusard who, as the deputé from Algiers, tried unsuccessfully to repeal the Crémieux Decree. [Translator’s note] 6. See “Ce que l’homme noir apporte” (What the Black Man Brings) in Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté (Paris: Seuil, 1964), vol. 1. 7. Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934) was a general, a colonial governor, and a member of the Académie Française whose views tended to favor autonomy over assimilation. Louis Léon César Faidherbe (1818–89), French general, colonial administrator, philologist, and archaeologist, is perhaps best known for creating the Senegalese Tirailleurs. [Translator’s note] 8. See part 1, note 1 in this book. 9. “La décadence des races” is the fourth chapter of Le Bon’s Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peoples (Paris: Alcan, 1894). 10. The series Bibliothèque de philosophie scientifique, in which Jules Harmand published Domination et colonisation (Paris: Flammarion, 1910), was directed by Le Bon. 11. In this same order of ideas, one thinks of the figure of the born criminal, of the survival of ancestors in him, in Gabriel Tarde’s La criminalité comparée and of Emile Zola’s La bête humaine. 12. It is worth noting here that although Mitterand held different positions regarding France’s various colonial possessions, during this period he was a staunch opponent of decolonization, stating famously that “Algeria is France.” He would later serve as the French president in 1981–95. [Translator’s note] 13. See James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000). 14. See Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Les sélections sociales (Paris: Fontemoing, 1896), chap. 15, on Native Americans. Also see Lapouge, L’Aryen, son rôle social (Paris: Fontemoing, 1896), 470: “It will be enough for the Jews to reserve the offices of justice and high military positions for themselves in order to maintain the submission of their subjects, as the French do in Indochina and the English in India.” 15. On the history of the concept of diarchy, see chapter 2 of Ramona Srinivasan, The Concept of Diarchy in Special References to Its Working in the Bombay Presidency (1921–1937) (New Delhi: NIB, 1992). For the transcription of his speech:

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http://projectsouthasia.sdstate.edu/Docs/history/primarydocs/Political_History/ ABKeithDoc046.htm). 16. In 1909, when Gandhi is still in South Africa, Lord Morley rejects the “extremist” ideas of “self-government” (see http://projectsouthasia.sdstate.edu/Docs/ history/primarydocs/Political_History/ABKeithDoc035.htm). 17. http://projectsouthasia.sdstate.edu/Docs/history/primarydocs/Political_ History/ABKeithDoc025.htm. 18. This is one of the arguments of my book De l’attrait à la possession [From Attraction to Possession] (Paris: Hermann, 2003), which responds, through the question of haunting, to Maupassant’s critics’ obsession with the double. 3. The Revenant Phrase

1. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945). 2. The author uses the term “alter-mondialistes,” which is usually translated as “partisans of antiglobalization.” The French term, however, with its implication that an other world is possible, more closely echoes the affirmation of “Third-Worldist” (or “tiers-mondiste”) than the negative position of “anti-globalization.” [Translator’s note] 3. This and the quotes that follow in this paragraph come from the television show A vous de juger (You Be the Judge), broadcast on France 2, 8 February 2007. 4. This lexicon can be found at http://www.hci.gouv.fr/-Mots-de-l-integration-.html or in André-Clément Decouflé, “Mots de l’immigration et de l’intégration: Eléments de vocabulaire,” Notes et documents 42 (1998). 5. See Sylvie Tissot and Pierre Tévanian, Dictionnaire de la lepénisation des esprits (Paris: L’Esprit frappeur, 2002). 6. See, for example, Roger Toumson, Mythologie du métissage (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); and Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). 7. Quotations from the first volume of Gobineau’s Essai are from Adrian Collins’s 1915 English translation, which was reissued in 1967 by Howard Fertig. Quotations from the second volume, which to my knowledge has not been translated, are my own translation. [Translator’s note] 8. The “Nuit Blanche” is an all-night arts and music festival. “Sous le signe du métissage” was the official slogan of the 2006 event. [Translator’s note] 9. This word appears in English in the original text. [Translator’s note] 10. See the documents reproduced on pp. 112–13 of Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, Relation Authentique du Voyage du Capitaine de Gonneville ès Nouvelles Terres des Indes (Paris: Chalamel, 1869). Paulmier de Gonneville had returned from America in 1505 with a young indigenous man (“because it is the custom of those who reach the new lands of India to bring certain Indians to Christianity” [101]), who then married his daughter. 11. Code noir, art. 13. I am referring here to the legal decision more than to its application. 12. See Erick Noël, Etre noir en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Tallandier, 2006), 134–38.

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13. Regarding this intensification of policing, see Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 14. Pecqueur was also one of the first defenders of the doctrine of European “association.” He was close to the utopianist circles (Fourierism, Saint-Simonism) that conducted a number of social experiments in Algeria. Prosper Enfantin, the “father” of Saint-Simonism, while praising the reciprocal influence of the East and the West, did not go as far as Pecqueur and instead recommended the spatial separation of different ethnic groups in Algeria (see Prosper Enfantin, Colonisation de l’Algérie [Paris: Bertrand, 1843], 482–83). 15. In particular, see chapter 2 of José Vasconcelos’s La raza cosmica: Misión de la raza iberoamericana, Argentina y Brasil (México: Espasa-Calpe Mexicana, 1948). 16. See chapter 14 of Vasconcelos’s “De Robinson a Odiseo,” also in La raza cósmica. 17. See all of chapter 6 of Gilberto Freyre, New World in the Tropics: The Culture of Modern Brazil (New York: Knopf, 1959); see in particular pp. 149 and 192. 18. I allude here to the final pages of Gruzinski’s La pensée métisse. 19. Caroline Ferraris-Besso, personal communication. 20. “Relation planétaire” (planetary relation) is a reference to the thought of Edouard Glissant, who sees in the Antillean colonial experience the realization of the concept of relation. Philosophically, Glissant’s theory is a pairing of the conceptual incarnation of Hegel and Deleuzian rhizomatics. The question of métissage is secondary here to the structure of relation. 21. See Catherine Bouthors-Paillart, Duras la métisse: Métissage fantasmatique et linguistique dans l’oeuvre de Marguerite Duras (Geneva: Droz, 2002). 22. See Bouthors-Paillart, Duras la métisse, 189–213, for an examination of Duras’s syntax. 23. During the Renaissance, the humanist Juan Latino, who taught at the University of Grenada, may well have been the first black slave to have composed using an “Ethiopian” poetic “I,” during a period in which Latin was the chief written language, in his poem Austrias (1573); see the extract cited in V. B. Spratlin, Juan Latino: Slave and Humanist (New York: Spinner, 1938), 40. 24. Williams’s text in Latin with a French translation can be found in Abbé Henri Grégoire’s book De la littérature des nègres [On Negro Literature] (Paris: Maradan, 1808). The sardonic commentary on the black muse is described on p. 239. Invocations of the autochthony of the new muses created by colonial expansion is even older than this example. In like fashion, Marc Lescarbot, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, titled a collection of poetry that he wrote while in North America Les muses de la Nouvelle-France (The Muses of New France) [Williams’s original Latin poem appears with an English translation in Vincent Carretta, “Who Was Francis Williams?” Early American Literature 38.2 (2003): 213–37—Trans.].Chapter 3 4. The Languages of Empire

1. See Spinoza, Tractatus, chap. 17, p. 191. 2. It is not irrelevant, but neither am I making a historical type of argument here. One must distinguish between my reclamation of the theologico-political and

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a design that would inscribe what follows into the posterity of the radical Enlightenment, to cite the celebrated work of Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). In chapter 5 of Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Israel points out in passing that enlightened “radicalism” is not always anticolonial. 3. The text of the law is available online at http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/ histoire/villers-cotterets.asp. 4. See Shenwen Li, Stratégies missionaires des jésuites français en Nouvelle-France et en Chine au XVIIe siècle [Missionary Strategies of the French Jesuits in New France and China during the Seventeenth Century] (Saint-Nicholas/Paris: Presses de l’Université Laval/L’Harmattan, 2001). 5. On the uncertainty concerning the relationship between nation and language, see Daniel Nordman’s Frontières de France: De l’espace au territoire XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), sec. 5. 6. What about women of color, the noires? The movement does not seem comparable and still falls short of feminist revolutionary expression in the metropole. 7. The Cahiers de Doléances (Records of Grievances) were a list of specific complaints drawn up by each of the Three Estates and presented at the meeting of the Estates-General on 5 May 1789. [Translator’s note] 8. The same rhetoric appears in Grégoire one year earlier: “They are our children. Your children, and the paternal heart, repulse them” (Lettre aux Philanthropes 17). 9. Another commentary on this letter can be found beginning on p. 86 in Laurent Dubois’s excellent book A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 10. Ever since the Revolution it has often been said that Toussaint is not the real author of the texts ascribed to him. Certainly, they were proofread, perhaps ameliorated in a few places. But to claim that Toussaint was incapable of speaking and dictating is a surprising continuation of the phrase of colonial possession, in this case, turning the great general into a marionette. 11. On the historiographical quarrel surrounding the Bois-Caïman ceremony, see David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), esp. 89–92. Also see the commentary by Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), beginning on p. 139. 12. One need only point to the very small proportion of recent studies on Haitian literature from the nineteenth century. However, see Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), and also the work of Michael Reyes, who is currently working under my supervision on this neglected textual corpus. 13. Le Bon could be adapting the following atrocious reflection from the philosopher Hume: “In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.” David Hume, “On National Characters,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 213.

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14. Sophie des Déserts, “L’homme du CRAN,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 December 2005. Of course, the French expression fils prodige is a play on words indicating “child prodigy” as well as recalling the evangelical context of the parable of the prodigal son. 15. Introduction to Rue d’Ulm, ed. Alain Peyrefitte (Paris: Flammarion, 1963), 14 [a normalien is a student at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure—Trans.]. 16. An official memo from 1901 about teaching in Madagascar defines “reduced French” as “only including words and their usages in the language of everyday life, almost entirely corresponding to material things, qualities, and actions.” L’enseignement aux indigènes [Teaching Indigenes] (Brussels: Institut Colonial Intérnational, 1919), 2: 69. 17. See Louis-Jean Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme: Petit traité de glottophagie (Paris: Payot, 1974). 18. The Appel des indigènes de la république (Appeal of the Indigenes of the Republic) dates from 2005; it allowed for a movement and then a party (Indigenous People of the Republic) whose “primary objective” would be a “convergence” within a single antiracist and anticolonial dynamic (http://www.indigenes-republique.fr). I will have much to say about Bouchareb’s film and about the Indigenous People party. 19. Indigenism is sometimes accompanied by a catch-all mystique of Indian identity, authorizing a form of authoritarian and national social economy, from the Ecuadorian Victor Gabriel Garcés (see his Indigenismo [Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1957]), to the Bolivian Evo Morales and the Venezuelan Hugo Chavez. For a more positive view of the phenonmenon, see Courtney Jung, The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 20. For an introduction to Latin America, see René Prieto, “The Literature of Indigenismo,” in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, ed. Roberto Gonzaléz Echevarria and Enrique Pupo-Walker, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the first Haitian indigenism movement, see La revue indigène, 1927–1928 [periodical] (repr., Nendeln: Kraus, 1971). 5. Interdiction within Diction

1. Compare with the emphatic pronunciation of “Allah Akbar” and colonial songs such as “Arrouah Sidi!” (1914) and “Allah Oulla” (1931), in the CD anthology Chansons coloniales et exotiques (Paris: EPM, 1995). 2. This is also a way of remotivating and specifying the common identification between dogs and adversaries. This derision is ancestral. In the colonial context, it is equally ancient, and in the Spanish Golden Age, the protagonist of the Comedia famosa de Juan Latino (a black scholar) is constantly assailed by this insult. See Diego Ximénez de Encisco, El encubierto y Juan Latino (Madrid: Aldus, 1951), 182, 183, 188, 262, and 268. 3. See Guido Cifoletti, La lingua franca barbaresca (Rome: Il Calamo, 2004). 4. See Henri Estienne, Deux Dialogues du nouveau langage françois italianizé et autrement desguizé, principalement par les courtisans de ce temps, 2 vols. (1578; Paris: Lemerre, 1885). These examples are given, respectively, on pp. 83, 96, 101, and 281 of vol. 1. 5. Gleaned from listening to songs from 1910, 1931, 1934, and 1942 (respectively) from Ruscio’s anthology Chansons coloniales.

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6. “Les Zouzous,” in the version by Léon Lehuraux, Supplément 1, in L’Afrique française, January 1932, 15. “Coquine,” an adjective expressing an inherent quality, also shares a phonetic similarity with “cocu” (cuckold, cuckolded). [The still-contemporary racist slur for a North African Arab in French, “bicot,” is a truncated form of “Arbicot” or “Arbico,” which are diminutive forms of “Arbi,” roughly equivalent to the English “Araby,” both of which are closer to the Arabic word for “Arab” (‘arabı-) than are the contemporary French (arabe) or English (Arab). The pun in question works only with this older form in French, where “Arbico–cu” condenses “Arbico” and “cocu”—Trans.] 7. Compare this with the Algerian nationalist group L’Etoile Nord Africaine, which is described as having just “thieved its juridical existence in a razzia” (L’Afrique française, 1935, 489). 8. A “chacal” is a soldier in the colonial army. 9. The phrase appears throughout Bhabha’s book, most prominently in chapter 4. 10. Claude Favre, seigneur de Vaugelas (1585–1650), was a grammarian and original member of the Académie Française. His name has become synonymous with elegant and correct French usage. [Translator’s note] 11. The Littré’s second definition of the term indigène (“That which has always been established in a country, speaking of nations”) gives the following example from Voltaire’s “Essay on General History and on the Customs and the Character of Nations”: “It is the peoples of Araby properly said, who were truly indigenes, that is, those who from time immemorial had inhabited this fine country without mixing with any other nation, without having ever been the conquered or the conquerors” (Ce sont les peuples de l’Arabie proprement dite, qui étaient véritablement indigènes, c’est-à-dire qui, de temps immémorial, habitaient ce beau pays sans mélange d’aucune autre nation, sans avoir été jamais ni conquis, ni conquérants). [From an online version of the Littré, available at http://littre.reverso.net/dictionnaire-francais/ definition/indig%C3%A8ne.—Trans.] 12. I have received multiple confirmations of the appeal to petit-nègre as a pedagogical spur for schoolchildren up through the 1990s. 13. See Louis A. L. A. Lahontan, Nouveaux Voyages, 1703, vol. 1: “There are no figures in all of our Rhetoric more lively, nor more energetic, especially regarding matters hyperbolic, than there are in the Harangues and Songs of these poor people, who only express themselves with transports”; also “Metaphorical Harangue [made by an Onondanga leader, called in French Grangula, or Bigmouth] that was so stuff ’d with Fictions and Savage Hyperboles,” in Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan, English preface to the New Voyages to North America (London: Bonwicke, 1703), A4. 14. This work, in its postwar version, is discussed in chapter 3 of Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs. 15. For this other take on Diallo, as well as a review of the majority reading of his work, see Janos Riesz, “The Tirailleur Senegalais Who Did Not Want to Be a ‘Grand Enfant’: Bakary Diallo’s Force-Bonté (1926) Reconsidered,” Research in African Literatures 27.4 (1996): 157–79. 16. Perhaps one should recall here the title of a book published in 1910 by Charles Mangin that played a decisive role in the strategic conception of a massive influx of African soldiers during World War I: La force noire (Paris: Hachette, 1910).

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17. Which has nothing to do with “black writers” or “African writers.” One can be black and African and not seek to initiate one’s language in such a way. 6. Today: Stigmata and Veils

1. See the report issued by the General Director of Academic Education, Ministry of National Education: Français: Classes de Seconde et Première, Futuroscope ([Poitiers]: Centre national de la documentation pédagogique, 2007). 2. Yves Bordenave and Mustapha Kessous, “Une nuit avec des ‘émeutiers’ qui ont ‘la rage’” [A Night with the ‘Rage-Filled’ Rioters], Le Monde, 8 November 2005. 3. See, for example, Pascal Ceaux and Marie Huret, “The Law of Silence,” L’Express, 27 February 2007. 4. See Guyotat’s Littérature interdite (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). One may also consult a 2010 interview with Guyotat in which he discusses his book Arrière-fond: http:// www.dailymotion.com/video/xcs5ki_pierre-guyotat-1–5-ecriture-biograp_news. 5. Crouille is a racist pejorative used to indicate someone of Arab appearance. [Translator’s note] 6. See Alain Ruscio, ed., Que la France était belle au temps des colonies: Anthologie des chansons coloniales et exotiques françaises [sound recording] (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001). 7. The clip is accessible online at YouTube. The most contemptible kind of colonial racism permeates this tele-trash, which aims to domesticate the masses: from the grimaces of the fatma to the visual identification between the Arab and the trash can. [The song also hit #1 on the French pop charts.—Trans.] 8. It is known that this euphemistic expression in particular designated the actions of the French state during the Algerian War. 9. Chichmah (“shishma” in standard English transliteration) means “toilet” or “cloakroom” in Algerian dialectical Arabic. [Translator’s note] 10. These courses have been transcribed in issues of La revue littéraire, published by Editions Léo Scheer. A video of Guyotat’s first lecture is available online at http:// www.leoscheer.com/spip.php?article693. 11. Double page numbers refer first to the French original, and then to the English translation. Single citations refer to the French. [Translator’s note] 12. The interplay between the hidden and the secret is constant. One recent example would be the title of Régis Debray’s book, Ce que nous voile le voile: La République et le sacré [What the Veil Veils: The Republic and the Sacred] (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). 7. Reinventing Francophonie

1. The translation is my own, although I have referred to the English translation by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. Page numbers cited refer to the French edition. [Translator’s note] 2. Sonacotra (now called Adoma) was a state-run organization founded in 1956 that built and administered housing for migrant workers in France. [Translator’s note] 3. For example, see Theresa Parry, ed., The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

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4. See Marcyliena Morgan, Language, Discourse, and Power in African-American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 5. The translation of M. A. Screech has been modified slightly in places. All quotations come from chapter 56 of Le quart livre (The Fourth Book). 6. Graffiti from the ends of the platforms at the Gare de Lyon (Paris) and the Gare de Nîmes, observed in 2007. Of course, the graphic quality of these severed words is greatly diminished as presented here: many of these words are written in capital letters on the walls. 7. Claims of this sort were made by Jamel at the Zenith in 2005. 8. The original French text gives the URL for this website of this group (http:// www.labanlieuesexprime.org), which has since been shut down under shrouded circumstances, likely having to do with content understood as being anti-Zionist, antiSemitic, or both. [Translator’s note] 9. See Onésime Reclus, France, Algérie et colonies (Paris: Hachette, 1886), 422, where “francophone” and “francophonie” are used in quotation marks, indicating that for Reclus these words have yet to be normalized and widespread (whether they are personal neologisms or recently formed words). 10. I refer to the preface of Gilbert Gratiant’s Une fille majeure: Credo des sangmêlé, ou Je veux chanter la France, poème; Martinique à vol d’abeille (Paris: L. Soulanges, 1961). In the body of the text, Credo refers to this work by Gratiant; “Credo” refers to the lines of this poem. 11. Gratiant was also a member of the French Communist Party (PCF). 12. This is a thesis running throughout Jean-François Lyotard’s book Economie libidinale (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1974). 13. http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poem Id=1552. I also refer readers to the work of Meta DuEwa Jones, including both her book, The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), and her article, “Listening to What the Ear Demands: Langston Hughes and His Critics,” Callaloo 25.4 (2002): 1145–75. Introduction to Part III

1. The distinction between anthropology and ethnology is the result of this same history; I will return shortly to the specific gaps in these parasynonyms. 8. Formations and Reformations of Anthropology

1. Regarding this child, who in 1800 emerged from a life lived in isolation in the woods in the South of France, there are articles by Philippe Pinel and Joseph-Marie de Gérando in Aux origines de l’anthropologie française: Les mémoires de la Société des observateurs de l’homme en l’an VIII, ed. Jean Copans and Jean Jamin (Paris: Place, 1994). 2. For example, see Clémence Royer, “Mémoire sur l’origine des Aryas et leur migrations,” in Congrès International des Sciences Anthropologiques Tenu à Paris du 16 au 21 août (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1880), 304–33. 3. The “dwarf ” in question was the property of Stanisław Leszczyn´ski (1677– 1766), king of Poland and Duke of Lorraine and Barrois. Bébé, whose real name was Nicolas Ferry, was famous for his maliciousness and intellectual limitations.

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4. Mauss wrote this in 1914. See certain denunciations of colonial racketeering as a form of capitalism also included in Marcel Mauss, Ecrits politiques (Paris: Fayard, 1997) 190, 206. 5. See, for example, Out of Our Minds, Johannes Fabian’s book, cited in the part 1; also Vincent Debaene, L’adieu au voyage: L’ethnologie française entre science et littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). 6. In the early 1970s, the groundbreaking volume edited by Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973), was already taking stock of this crisis, in the context of English-language anthropology. 7. I am echoing here the expression that serves as the title of Marcel Detienne’s book, Comparer l’incomparable (Paris: Seuil, 2000). 8. See Laurent Ferri, ed., Ils racontent la mondialisation: De Sénèque à Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Saint-Simon, 2005). 9. These essays are contained in Jean-François Duvalier, Oeuvres essentielles, vol. 1, Eléments d’une doctrine (Port-au-Prince: Presses nationales d’Haïti, 1968). 10. In a more comprehensive way, and mining similar theoretical territory, the recent and remarkable work of Anthony Mangeon, La pensée noire et l’Occident: De la bibliothèque coloniale à Barack Obama (Cabris: Sulliver, 2010), offers a more precise reading of the description I have just given. 9. The Impossible Colonial Science

1. Perhaps something should be said here about francophone literary studies in hexagonal France. Generally dispensable in the grand scheme of the education of students, francophone literary studies exist in a particularly erratic way. Certain archipelagoes should be signaled, on more than one occasion, in relation to the colonial past of a city: the University Bordeaux-III, for instance, a city with a long involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. 2. ACHAC, or Association Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine (Association for the Study of the History of Contemporary Africa), is a collective of researchers formed in 1989. [Translator’s note] 3. “Denial” is the master trope of the preface to La fracture coloniale, ed. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandire Lemaire (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), to which each also contributes several essays, including the preface. “Archetypes” and “collective unconscious” appear on p. 71 of the collective work Zoos Humains, by Pascal Blanchard et al. (translated as Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008]). 4. This well-known multivolume collection by Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), has been translated as Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). The page numbers from the English translation are given first, followed by those from the French original. The translation here is my own, however. [Translator’s note] 5. Perry Anderson, with Pierre Nora and William Olivier, eds., La pensée tiède: Un regard critique sur la culture française [Tepid Thought: A Critical Look at French Culture] (Paris: Seuil, 2005), followed by La pensée rechaufée [Thought Warmed Over] (Paris: Seuil, 2005).

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6. One might add here that the conventional reading of Said as a postcolonial critic whose primary concern is with the “other” and the production of stereotypes of otherness has been strongly challenged in recent scholarly work, particularly that done by those associated with the boundary 2 collective. Aamir Mufti, especially, has done much to shift the understanding of Said from a leading figure of postcolonial criticism to someone more concerned with “secular criticism,” in the singular sense of these terms Said himself developed throughout his work, referring to a sustained engagement with the structuring and restructuring of knowledge and language practices on a planetary scale. See Mufti’s “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Paul A. Bové (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 229–56; and the 2004 special issue of boundary 2, dedicated to the notion of what Mufti calls “critical secularism,” boundary 2 31.2 (2004). [Translator’s note] 7. The first and last sections of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), thus borrow, in disciplinary terms, from literary criticism and cultural studies. 8. I comment on “Le Cygne” at length in Laurent Dubreuil, L’état critique de la littérature (Paris: Hermann, 2009), chap. 4. 9. This bilingual edition (Albert Rivaud, Plato, Oeuvres completes, vol. 10 [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1925]) was used by Jacques Derrida, who, more generally, recalls a portion of this semantic field in Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 17. 10. Who Will Become a Theoretician?

1. All the same, the proximity to Bakhtin’s dialogical hybrid undoes the causal principle of this adherence. 2. Labyrinthe 17 (2004) and 14 (2003), respectively (http://labyrinthe.revues.org/ index.html). I develop this line of thought in various venues, including “If Interdisciplinarity Means,” sans papier (http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/french_studies/publications/index.asp?pubid=3886); “What Is Literature’s Now?” New Literary History 38.1 (Winter 2007): 43–70; and “A Viral Lexicon for Future Crises,” Qui parle? 20.1 (2011): 169–78. A few occurrences of indiscipline appeared before 2003 in the work of the following and other scholars: Roberto Esposito, Categorie dell’impolitico (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), vii; Laurent Loty, “Sens de la discipline … et de l’indiscipline,” Pour l’histoire des sciences de l’homme 20 (Fall 2000): 3–16. 3. Regarding indiscipline and the postcolonial, see the part 3 of Anthony Mangeon, La pensée noire et l’Occident. 4. The work of Dipesh Chakrabarty could be the missing piece in the work of his friend Homi Bhabha, but does the historian move beyond his discipline? I would be hesitant to certify this. 5. See my “What Is Literature’s Now?” New Literary History 38.1 (2007): 43–70, as well as my essay L’état critique de la littérature (Paris: Hermann, 2009). 6. Nick Nesbitt would perhaps say so; see his Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).

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7. Matthew Ward’s translation of The Stranger has been used here, and in some cases, slightly modified. Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). See also Albert Camus, Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 1162–68. [Translator’s note] After the Afterward

1. Those who choose not to use the parentheses, which I justified at the beginning of this book, cannot seriously hope that the artifice of writing in itself will project them into a future.

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Index

abolitionism. See slavery, abolitionism, and emancipation abrutissement, 19 academic languages and disciplines, 11, 14, 145 – 46. See also anthropology/ ethnology; colonial science; postcolonial studies African Americans, 42, 60–61, 134, 135, 151 L’Afrique française (journal), 107 – 8, 111 Agamben, Giorgio, 168 Algeria Arabization in, 142 assimilation and counterassimilation, 38, 39 – 40 colonial science in, 160 L’Etoile Nord-Africaine, 107, 212n7 French conquest of, 70 Guyotat and Cixous, writing of, 123 – 28 immigration from, 63 pataouète, 114 property systems in, 21 – 22 war of independence in, 1 – 2, 203n1 alienation and disalienation, 19 – 20 Allen, Danielle, 193 – 94 alterity or otherness in postcolonial studies, 169 – 76 Amyot, Jacques, 178 Anderson, Benedict, 6 Anderson, Perry, 167 anthropology/ethnology, 146, 147 – 58 colonial science and, 159 – 60 contemporary state of, 152 – 54 distinguishing, 146, 148, 214n1 exploration and colonization, relationship to, 148 – 54 history and development of discipline, 147 – 51 “primitive mentality,” concept of, 27 – 34 reformation of, 154 – 58 Antilles imperial doctrines and, 46

indigenous speech and, 88, 98, 99, 101 interdiction and, 113, 121 phrase of possession and, 20, 62, 63, 79, 209n20 apartheid/segregation, 53 – 54 Aragon, Louis, 140 – 41 Aristotle and Aristotelian logic, 29, 49, 83 – 84, 109, 147, 177, 193 Artaud, Antonin, 27 assimilation, 37 – 42, 48, 62, 64 association and autonomy, 38, 42 – 48, 55 Association Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine (ACHAC), 166, 215n2 attentisme, 38, 48 – 50 Augé, Marc, 153, 156 Augustine of Hippo, 148 autonomy and association, 38, 42 – 48, 55 Aymonier, Etienne, 98 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 216n1 bamboula, 103 Bancel, Nicolas, 166, 167, 215n3 La Banlieue S’exprime, 137, 214n8 banlieues, 4, 10, 63, 108 – 9, 121 – 23, 133 – 35 baragouin, 103 Barbary and barbarisme, 111 Barère, Bertrand, 88 – 89 Barthes, Roland, 179 Batouala (Maran, 1921), 112 – 14, 121 Baudelaire, Charles, 170, 171, 172, 206n24 Bébé (Nicolas Ferry), 150, 214n3 Begag, Azouz, 120 Belgium, 161, 163, 165 Belhaj Kacem., Mehdi, 143 Benedict, Ruth, 155 Betts, Raymond, 43 Bhabha, Homi Chakrabarty and, 216n4 Fanon and, 203n4

231

232

INDEX

Bhabha, Homi (continued) French translations of, 5 Gruzinski on, 167 on interdiction, 109 – 10, 212n9 métissage and, 72 – 73 possession and psychoanalysis, 24 postcolonial studies and, 6, 170, 174 – 84, 188 Biard, Pierre, 86 The Black Jacobins ( James, 1938), 92 Blanchard, Pascal, 166, 167, 215n3 Blanchot, Maurice, 27, 93 Boas, Franz, 146, 150 – 51, 155 Bois-Caïman ceremony, 94 Bouchareb, Rachid, 101 Boukman, Dutty, 94 Bourdieu, Pierre, 131 – 32 Bourguiba, Habib, 138 Bouthors-Paillart, Catherine, 74 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 60 Brazil, 1, 17, 70 British East India Company, 55 Brittany, Bretons, and Breton language, 40, 99, 100, 103 Broca, Paul, 148 – 50 Bruant, Aristide, 24 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 149 Cahiers de Doléances, 89, 210n7 Calame, Claude, 153 Calvet, Louis-Jean, 100 Cambon, Pierre-Joseph, 204n6 Camus, Albert, 194 Cantos (Pound), 73 Capitein, Jacob, 204 – 5n7 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 163 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 103 – 4, 106, 108, 123 censuring language. See interdiction Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique, 120 Césaire, Aimé, 5, 51 – 52, 62, 93, 168 Chailley-Bert, Joseph, 205n15 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 169, 187, 216n4 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 74, 112 Champlain, Samuel, 15 – 17, 20, 58, 69, 86 Chanlatte, Juste, 60 Chaumette, Anaxagoras, 92 Chavez, Hugo, 211n19 Chevalier, Maurice, 106 “child prodigy” ( fils prodige), 98, 211n14 Christian missions in New World, polyglot format of, 85 – 88

Cicero, 74 Cixous, Hélène, 123, 126 – 28, 200 Code noir, 9 – 10, 18, 22, 38, 69, 84, 88 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 18, 20, 69 Coligny, Gaspard II de, 69 colonial phrase of possession. See phrase of possession colonial science, 145 – 46, 159 – 68 anthropology/ethnology and, 159 – 60 defined and described, 160 – 65 history as, 165 – 68 postcolonial studies and, 169, 171 colonialism and language, 1 – 11, 197 – 201 academic languages and disciplines, 11, 14, 145 – 46. See also anthropology/ ethnology; colonial science; postcolonial studies articulation of discourses of colonization, 9 – 10, 13 – 14. See also doctrines, imperial; phrase of possession; possession importance of examining, 1 – 3, 197 – 201 indigenous speech, 10 – 11, 81 – 82, 83 – 101. See also francophonie; indigenous speech; interdiction long historical view of, 8 – 9 postcolonial and (post)colonial, 4 – 9, 197 – 201. See also postcolonial and (post)colonial relationship between, 3 – 4, 7 – 9 silence regarding, 1 – 2, 197 Columbus, Christopher, 60 comparative literature, 171 Condé, Maryse, 79 – 80 Congrès Colonial (1889), 38, 43, 49, 96, 98 contrition, moral issues requiring, 6 – 7 counterassimilation, 41 – 42 “Credo des sang-mêlé” (“Half-Blood Creed;” Gratiant, 1961), 140 – 41, 144 Crémieux Decree (1870), 39, 40, 50, 207n3, 207n5 Creole, 9, 20, 74, 85, 94, 104, 143 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 85 Daudet, Alphonse, 23 de Gaulle, Charles, 138 Death on the Installment Plan (Mort à crédit; Céline, 1966), 103 – 4 Debbouze, Jamel, 134 – 36, 142 Debray, Régis, 213n12 Decouflé, André-Clément, 64 Deleuze, Gilles, 206n1, 209n20 Delorme, Demesvar, 5, 185 – 89 demonic or spiritual possession and exorcism, 17 – 20, 27, 33, 55, 64

INDEX Depestre, René, 10, 62, 79 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 169, 170, 178, 180, 216n9 Descartes, René, and Cartesianism, 37 – 38, 85, 97 Deschamps, Hubert Jules, 37 Diallo, Bakary, 115 – 18, 121, 133, 134 La Diane française (Aragon, 1846), 140 – 41 diarchy, 55 – 56 Diderot, Denis, 85 discourse. See colonialism and language doctrines, imperial, 36 – 56 assimilation, 37 – 42, 48, 62, 64 association and autonomy, 38, 42 – 48, 55 attentisme, 38, 48 – 50 concept of, 51 counterassimilation, 41 – 42 diarchy, 55 – 56 extermination, 51 – 53 of multiple languages and countries, 54 – 56 phrase of possession and, 36 – 39, 42, 47, 50, 52 – 55 segregation/apartheid, 53 – 54 of Union Française, 49 – 51 dog, adversary as, 107, 211n2 Dranem, 106 Drumont, Edouard, 39, 207n5 du Bellay, Joachim, 85 Du Bois, W. E. B., 60 – 61 Dubas, Maris, 106 Dubois, Laurent, 88 Dubreuil, Eugène, 106 Duerr, Hans Peter, 29 Dupont, Florence, 153 Duras, Marguerite, 74 Duval, Jeanne, 172 Duvalier, Jean-François, 157 Duvalier regime in Haiti, 89 Ebonics, 135 Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), 163 education in French, 96 – 100 interdiction and, 119 – 22 Elias, Norbert, 28 – 30 Ellison, Ralph, 190 – 95, 200 emancipation. See slavery, abolitionism, and emancipation enchantment. See haunting, enchantment, and the supernatural Enfantin, Pierre, 209n14

233

Enlightenment, 9, 27, 55, 69, 96, 186, 187, 189, 210n2 Erasmus, Desiderius, 186 Estienne, Henri, 96, 105 “ethnic cleansing,” 53 ethnology. See anthropology/ethnology European Union, 50 Evian Accords (1962), 1 exoticism, 22, 104 extermination, 51 – 53 Fabian, Johannes, 33 – 34 Faidherbe, Louis Léon César, 41, 99, 207n7 Fanon, Frantz articulation of discourses of colonization and, 10 Bhabha and, 174, 175, 188, 203n4 (post)colonial continuation of colonial diction, 59 as (post)colonial writer, 5 history as colonial science and, 168 on indigenous speech, 93, 100, 129 on possession, 19 – 20, 24, 33 postcolonial studies and, 174, 175, 180 subjugation, logic of, 36 fatma, 103 – 4, 106, 213n7 feminism and women, 210n6 Feraoun, Mouloud, 115, 133 Ferri, Laurent, 153 Ferro, Marc, 160 Ferry, Jules, 160 Ferry, Nicolas (Bébé), 150, 214n3 Ficin, Marsile, 179 Le fils du pauvre (The Poor Man’s Son; Feraoun, 1954), 115 Firmin, Anténor, 5, 149, 189 Flaubert, Gustave, 104 Force-Bonté (Diallo, 1926), 115 – 18, 134 Foucault, Michel, 151, 168, 180 Fourierism, 209n14 France ( post)colonial discourse in, 4 – 5 Constitution of 1946, 49 – 50 exceptionalism in, 96 Far Right/Front National, 63 – 64, 108, 136 – 37 focus on, 1, 6 Franco-Prussian War of 1870, 137 – 38 “Greater France” (la plus grande France), 37, 58, 72, 207n2 Haiti, after loss of, 55 laïcité law, 128 “Nuit Blanche,” Paris (2006), 68, 208n8

234

INDEX

France (continued) Revolution of 1789, 7, 10, 59, 69, 88 – 96, 121, 186 – 89 second colonial empire, 7, 10, 22, 55, 70, 84, 95, 109, 130, 137 Third Republic, 10, 24, 37, 39, 41, 51, 95, 98, 100 Union Française, 49 – 51 “veil,” use of, 127 – 28 La France coloniale (1886), 39 – 40 francisation, 21, 40, 49, 51, 109 francophonie, 2, 82, 129 – 44 in aftermath of French Revolution, 94 – 95 anthropology/ethnology as pre-text for, 157 decolonization and, 4 defined, 10, 94, 137, 140 emancipation from itself, 130 – 37 history of, 121, 137 – 44 interdiction of, 111, 114, 120 – 21. See also interdiction literary study of, 215n1 in ordinary speech, 131 – 33 phrase of possession and, 59 Frankétienne, 120, 143 Frankfurt School, 182 French East India Company, 64 Freud, Sigmund, and Freudianism, 19, 24 – 26, 27 – 28, 30, 166 Freyre, Gilberto, 70, 72 Frobenius, Leo, 155 Froidevaux, Henri, 162, 164, 165 Gandhi, Mahatma, 56, 208n16 Garcés, Victor Gabriel, 211n19 Garvey, Marcus, 61 Gauls/Gallic ancestry, 14, 40, 41, 43, 97, 185 Gérando, Joseph-Marie, 148, 150, 155 Germany, 137 – 38, 152. See also Nazism Glissant, Edouard, 5, 74, 93, 169, 203n4, 209n20 Gobineau, Arthur de, 45, 65 – 66, 69 Golkonda, 63 – 64 Gonneville, Binot Paulmier de, 208n10 graffiti, 135 – 36, 214n6 Grant, Ulysses S., 186 Gratiant, Gilbert, 62, 140 – 41, 144, 186, 200 Great Britain, 55 – 56, 146, 150, 169 Grégoire, Abbé, 89, 90, 210n8 Grubb, W., 30 Gruzinski, Serge, 65, 68, 71, 167 Guattari, Félix, 206n1 Guyotat, Pierre, 123 – 26, 128, 200

Haiti anthropology/ethnology in, 154 (post)colonial political theoreticians, 5 (post)colonial presentation of history, 59 – 60 colonial science, history as, 168 Delorme’s Les théoriciens au pouvoir (1870), 185 – 89 Duvalier regime in, 89 France after loss of, 55 francophonie in, 121 indigenous speech in, 10, 89 – 95, 92 journalism and, 120 in long historical view, 8 Hammon, Jupiter, 77 Happy Together (film), 71 Hardt, Michael, 62 Harmand, Jules, 43 – 47 haunting, enchantment, and the supernatural in anthropology/ethnology, 151, 156 (post)colonial phrase of possession and, 57, 58, 59, 63 in Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), 190, 191 francophonie and, 123, 124, 143 imperial doctrines and, 36, 41, 42, 47, 48, 53 – 56 indigenous speech and, 81, 87, 96 – 99, 97 interdiction and, 109, 110, 117 métissage and, 63, 65, 67, 68, 72 phrase of haunting, 47, 56, 65, 76 phrase of possession, 57, 63, 76, 78, 79 possession and, 18, 19, 21, 25 – 27, 29, 32, 33, 35 postcolonial studies and, 193 relationship between colonialism and language and, 9, 10, 199 spiritual or demonic possession and exorcism, 17 – 20, 27, 33, 55, 64 Havard, Gilles, 69 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and Hegelianism, 19, 171, 173, 178, 209n20 Henri III (king of France), 105 Henri IV (king of France), 69 Herodotus, 147 hip-hop and rap, 134 – 35 history as colonial science, 165 – 68 Haiti, (post)colonial presentation of history of, 59 – 60 long historical view of colonialism and language, 8 – 9 Hitler, Adolf, 52, 66, 69, 73, 130

INDEX Horkheimer, Max, 182 Hughes, Langston, 144 Hume, David, 210n13 hybridity. See métissage hypercorrectness, 110 – 14 ideology, 14 immigration, 62 – 64 imperialism. See colonialism and language India, 30, 55 – 56, 64 Indigènes (film), 101 Indigènes de la République, 101, 211n18 indigenism, 101, 211n19 indigenous/indigène, as terms, 111, 203n7, 212n11 indigenous speech, 10 – 11, 81 – 82, 83 – 101. See also francophonie; interdiction in aftermath of French Revolution, 88 – 95 ancien régime, multilingualism under, 84 – 88 education in French, 96 – 100 in second colonial empire, 95 – 101 in theologico-political domain, 83 – 86, 89, 93, 95 – 96, 209 – 10n2 indiscipline, 181 – 84, 185, 216n2 Indochina, 24, 38, 40, 50, 56, 63, 74, 98, 99, 100, 163, 207n14 integration, 64 interdiction, 5, 81 – 82, 102 – 28 breaking free of, 122 – 28 continued existence of, 119 Diallo’s Force-Bonté and, 115 – 18 in education, 119 – 22 of francophonie, 120 loan words in French, pejorative values of, 103 – 10 possession and, 32, 46 by press, 107 – 8, 111, 119 – 22, 128 publication issues, 114 – 15 usage strictures and hypercorrectness, 110 – 14 interdisciplinarity, 158, 171, 175 – 77, 180, 181 Invisible Man (Ellison, 1952), 190 – 95 Isaac, Alexander, 38 Italian loan words, 105 Jacky, 106 Jamaica, 10, 78, 210n13 James, C. L. R., 92 Janvier, Louis Joseph, 189 Jauffret, Léon-François, 147 – 48 Jesuits, 10, 53, 69, 86 – 87, 200

235

Jews and Judaism, 39, 53, 54, 62, 114, 122, 127, 207n14 Le joli mai (film), 1 – 2, 203n1 Journal sans date (Maran, 1927), 113 journalism, interdiction by, 107 – 8, 111, 119 – 22, 128 Jung, Carl, 166 Kant, Immanuel, and Kantianism, 40, 147, 171, 173 Kesteloot, Lilyan, 116 Kipling, Rudyard, 171 – 72 Klemperer, Victor, 130 Kourouma, Ahmadou, 120 Kristeva, Julia, 178 La misère du monde (The Weight of the World; Bourdieu and Accardo, 1993), 131 – 32 Labat, Jean-Baptiste, 78 Labyrinthe (review), 182 Lacan, Jacques Emile, 166, 170, 175, 176 Lagaf ’, Vincent, 124 Lahontan, Louis A. L. A., 17, 112, 212n13 Lalonde, Michèle, 139 – 40 Lamartine,Alphonse de, 93, 97 – 98, 188 Lanessan, Jean-Louis de, 24 – 25 language. See colonialism and language lanvers, 108 – 9 Lapouge, Georges Vacher de, 53 Latin America, 101, 211n19 Latino, Juan, 209n23, 211n2 Le Bon, Gustave, 43 – 45, 47, 96 – 97, 99, 210n13 Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier, 168 Le Jeune, Paul, 86 – 87 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 63 – 64, 137 Lebel, Roland, 164 Leiris, Michel, 154 Lemaire, Sandrine, 166, 167, 215n3 Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, 160 Léry, Jean de, 8, 17, 147, 204n3 Lescarbot, Marc, 40 – 41, 209n24 l’Estoile, Benoît de, 152 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 154, 155, 175 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 29 – 32, 153 “linguistic turn,” 2 – 3 Lionnet, Françoise, 72, 74 loan words in French, pejorative values of, 103 – 10 Loti, Pierre, 23 Louis XIII (king of France), 18 Louis XIV (king of France), 18, 36, 69 Lyautey, Hubert, 41, 47, 53, 54, 207n7 Lyotard, Jean-François, 142, 179

236

INDEX

Madagascar, 22 – 23, 38, 80, 86, 205n11, 211n16 Maghreb, 22, 23, 79, 100, 104, 106 – 7, 111, 123 – 24, 133 Malebranche, Nicolas, 97, 98 Manceron, Gilles, 168 Mangin, Charles, 212n16 Mannoni, Octave, 24 – 25, 46 Maran, René, 112 – 14 Marker, Chris, 1 marronnage, 19, 199 Martinique, 88, 91, 93, 98, 140 Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 14, 19, 21, 33, 61 – 62, 157, 163, 171, 174, 187, 191 Maupassant, Guy de, 27, 123, 208n18 Mauss, Marcel, 146, 150, 152, 154, 155, 159, 160, 215n4 M’bala M’bala, Dieudonné, 136, 142 Mbembe, Achille, 169 Meddeb, Abdelwahab, 79, 120 – 21 media, interdiction by, 107 – 8, 111, 119 – 22, 128 Memmi, Albert, 5, 25, 93, 142, 168 Mentor, Etienne Victor, 91 metaphysics, 83 – 84 métissage (hybridity), 65 – 75, 199 in anthropology/ethnology, 155 contemporary promotion of, 68 – 75 erotic connotations of, 22, 69 francophonie, development of, 138 historical development of concept of, 65 – 68 imperial doctrines and, 51 indigenous speech and, 89, 90 meaning of, 65 postcolonial studies and, 177 – 82, 184 procolonial, 69 – 71 relationship between colonialism and language, 4, 10 thought, hybridizing, 122 Métraux, Alfred, 154 Michelangelo, 186 Michelet, Jules, 69 – 70 Mills, Jean-Baptiste, 91 Mirages de Paris (Socé, 1937), 66 – 68, 71 missions in New World, polyglot format of, 85 – 88 Mitterand, François, 50 – 51, 64, 207n12 Montagné, Léon (Aïcha), 124 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de, 179 Morales, Evo, 211n19 Morley, Lord, 208n16

Morocco, 23, 47 – 48, 53, 107, 142 Morrison, Toni, 79 moukère, 103 – 7 Mudimbé, Valentin-Yves, 5, 157 – 58, 169, 203n4 mulattoes, 59, 62, 89 – 91, 94, 121, 172, 183 Mus, Paul, 50 Naipaul, V. S., 180 “Names” (Walcott), 72 – 73 Napoleon I Bonaparte (emperor of France), 60, 150, 201 Napoleon III (emperor of France), 39 Native Americans, 17 – 18, 41, 52 – 53, 59 – 60, 65, 69, 80, 91, 101, 151, 186 – 87, 211n19 Nau, Emile, 60 Nazism, 52, 66, 69, 72, 73, 122, 130 Negri, Antonio, 62 Neoplatonism, 179, 181 New France, 15 – 17, 69, 112 Nora, Pierre, 166 – 67 Optic White/Optic Black, 192 Organization of the Secret Army (OAS), 115 “Oriental style,” 111 – 14 Orientalism, 163 otherness or alterity in postcolonial studies, 169 – 76 Ousmane, Sembene, 130 – 31 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd viscount, 56 Pan-Africanism, 60 – 61 Les parapluies de Cherbourg (film), 203n1 Paris Exposition of 1931, 152 parlance defined, 203n2 imperial doctrines and, 48 indigenous speech and, 103, 105, 109, 113, 114, 118, 123, 124, 128, 131, 133, 134, 139, 143 phrase of possession and, 65 possession and, 26 relationship between colonialism and language, 4, 10, 197, 199, 201 pataouète, 113 Paz, Octavio, 175 Pecqueur, Constantin, 70, 205n15, 209n14 Pericles, 185, 186 petit-nègre, 111 – 14 phrase of haunting, 47, 56, 65, 76

INDEX phrase of possession, 7, 57 – 80 (post)colonial, 58 – 64 concept of, 7, 9 – 10, 13 – 15, 32 – 35, 37, 57 – 58 continuity of, 197, 199 in Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), 190 imperial doctrines and, 36 – 39, 42, 47, 50, 52 – 55 indigenous speech and, 96, 99, 210n10 interdiction and, 105 in literature, 75 – 80 meanings of possession and, 25 métissage, 65 – 75 phraseology, 7, 14, 130, 134 pieds noirs, 114 Plato and Platonic thought, 178 – 80, 191 Plotinus, 179 Plutarch, 178 Pocahontas, 69 Poe, Edgar Allan, 190 political correctness, 2 Pompidou, Georges, 99 popular song, 22 – 23, 105 – 7, 124, 213n7 possession, 9 – 10, 15 – 35. See also phrase of possession in different languages, 54 – 55 dispossession and, 20 – 22 erotic connotations of, 22 – 24 Harmand on association and, 45 – 46 of indigenes, 17 – 22 as performative act of appropriation, 15 – 17 place name, “Possession” as, 16 – 17 “primitive mentality,” concept of, 27 – 34 psychological theory and, 25 – 26 segregation/apartheid and, 53 – 54 spiritual or demonic possession and exorcism, 17 – 20, 27, 33, 55, 64 postcolonial and (post)colonial anthropology/ethnology and, 152 – 58 concepts of, 4 – 9, 197 – 201 phrase of possession and, 58 – 64 segregation/apartheid, 54 postcolonial studies, 146, 168 – 95 Bhabha and, 6, 170, 174 – 84, 188 colonial science and, 169, 171 defined and described, 169 – 70 Delorme’s Les théoriciens au pouvoir (1870), 185 – 89 Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), 190 – 95 indiscipline, 181 – 84, 185, 216n2 interdisciplinarity and, 171, 175 – 77, 180, 181

237

métissage (hybridity) and, 177 – 82, 184 otherness or alterity in, 169 – 76 Spivak on, 170 – 74, 181 – 83 postmodernism, 183 Pound, Ezra, 73, 74 prendre la parole (speaking up), 3, 10, 20, 35, 76, 90, 118, 131 – 35, 139, 143, 145, 203n8 press, interdiction by, 107 – 8, 111, 119 – 22, 128 Progénitures (Guyotat, 2000), 123 – 26 psychological theory and possession, 25 – 26 Quebecois activists, 139 Rabelais, François, 136, 186 race and racism, 43 – 45, 60 – 61, 65 – 66, 149 – 50 Rachid O., 23 Raharimanana, 80 Rambaud, Alfred, 160 Rancière, Jacques, 134, 182 Rank, Otto, 56 rap and hip-hop, 134 – 35 razzia, 107 Reclus, Onésime, 137 – 38, 214n9 “reduced French,” 99, 110, 121, 211n16 relation, 74 religious missions in New World, polyglot format of, 85 – 88 reparations, 34 – 35 Réunion, 16, 38 Les rêveries de la femme sauvage (Reveries of the Wild Woman; Cixous, 2000), 126 – 28 Revue d’anthropologie, 149 Rivarol, Antoine de, 96 Roblès, Emmanuel, 115 Rolfe, John, 69 Royer, Clémence, 148 – 49 “safety valve,” colonies as, 23, 205n15 Said, Edward, 6, 56, 170, 216n6 Saint-Domingue. See Haiti Saint-Simonism, 209n14 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 70 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 128 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 41 – 42, 77, 190 Saussure, Léopold de, 25, 99 Say, Léon, 205n15 Schoelcher, Victor, 10, 19, 20, 36 scholarship. See academic languages and disciplines segregation/apartheid, 53 – 54

238

INDEX

Senegal, 66 – 67, 116, 138, 207n7 Senghor, Léopold Sédar on assimilation, 41 – 42 ( post)colonial use of colonial diction, 59 as ( post)colonial writer, 5 francophonie and, 138, 139 interdiction and, 118, 121 métissage and, 66 – 68, 70, 72 Wheatley compared, 77 sexuality and colonialism, 22 – 24, 47 – 48, 69, 106 Siegel, James, 152 Siger, Carl, 33, 205n15 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 80 singularities colonization, 7 – 8, 198, 200 concept of, 206 – 7n1 francophonie and, 124, 128, 140 imperial doctrines and, 37 possession and phrase of possession, 14, 57, 79, 80 postcolonial studies and, 183, 189, 195 slander, in Code noir, 84 slavery, abolitionism, and emancipation Delorme’s Les théoriciens au pouvoir (1870), 186, 187 francophonie and, 135, 140 imperial doctrines and, 52 indigenous speech and, 84, 85, 91 phrase of possession and, 61, 69, 77 – 79 possession and, 36, 38, 46, 204 – 5n6 – 7 relationship between colonialism and language, 10 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 157 Socé, Ousmane, 66 – 68, 71, 72 Société Belge d’Études Coloniales, 161, 163, 165 Société des Amis des Noirs, 90 La Société des Observateurs de l’Homme, 147, 152 Sonthonax, Léger-Félicité, 92 – 93 South Africa, 53, 54, 161, 208n16 speaking up (prendre la parole), 3, 10, 20, 35, 76, 90, 118, 131 – 35, 139, 143, 145, 203n8 Spinoza, Baruch, 83 – 84, 95 spiritual or demonic possession and exorcism, 17 – 20, 27, 33, 55, 64 Spivak, Gayatri, 5, 170 – 74, 181 – 83, 216n7 Starr, Joey, 135 Strachey, John, 45 the supernatural. See haunting, enchantment, and the supernatural Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 40

tags, 135 – 36, 214n6 Taguieff, Pierre-André, 108 Tarde, Gabriel, 207n11 Tardieu, André, 47 Thao, Tran Duc, 20 – 21 Themistocles, 178 theologico-political domain francophonie and, 130, 139, 145, 209 – 10n2 indigenous speech and, 83 – 86, 89, 93, 95 – 96, 209 – 10n2 interdiction and, 109, 110, 122, 126 Les théoriciens au pouvoir (Delorme, 1870), 185 – 89 Third Reich, 52, 54, 72, 130 Third-Worldism, 62, 136, 208n2 Thompson, Ashley, 152 Timaeus (Plato), 178 Timbuktu/Tombouctou, 103 Tin, Louis-Georges, 98 Tintin, 114 Toussaint Louverture, 60, 92 – 94, 97 – 98, 131, 133, 168, 201, 210n10 Tractatus theologico-politicus (Spinoza, 1670), 83 Tunisia, 38, 50 – 51, 111, 138, 142 Une politique de la langue (Certeau, Julia, and Revel, 1975), 88, 89 Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), 128 United Kingdom, 55 – 56, 146, 150, 169 United States anthropology/ethnology in, 150 – 51 Delorme’s Les théoriciens au pouvoir (1870), 185, 186 Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), 190 – 95 in focus of text, 6 francophonie and, 134 – 35, 144 history as colonial science and, 167 – 68 imperial doctrines and, 52, 53, 55 phrase of possession and, 59 – 61, 63 – 64, 68, 72 postcolonial studies in, 146, 169, 173, 177, 180 resistance to repudiation of colonialism in, 1 universalism in anthropology/ethnology, 155 in colonial science, 162 francophonie and, 133, 138 imperial doctrines and, 37 indigenous speech and, 85 interdiction and, 110

INDEX possession and phrase of possession, 29, 70, 72, 206n23 in postcolonial studies, 169, 174, 189 relationship between colonialism and language, 9 Vasconcelos, José, 70 Vaublanc, Viénot, 93 Vaugelas, Claude Favre de, 110, 111, 130, 212n10 “veil,” French use of, 127 – 28 verlan, 108 – 9 Victor of Aveyron, 148, 214n1 Vietnam, 74 Vignon, Louis, 24, 160 Villers-Cotterêts ordinance (1539), 84

239

Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior, vicomte de, 44 Voltaire, 111, 212n11 von Ranke, Leopold, 187 von Stegl, Karl, 161 voodoo, 67, 79, 94, 98 Walcott, Derek, 72 – 73, 175, 183 – 84 Wheatley, Phyllis, 77 – 79 Williams, Francis, 78, 209n24 Wolf, F. A., 161 – 62 women and feminism, 210n6 Wong Kar-Wai, 71 Yacine, Kateb, 120 Zola, Emile, 207n11