International Francophone Studies: Post/Colonial Francophone Studies

Session Coordinator: Keith Alan Sprouse

Department of Modern Languages

Hampden-Sydney College

Hampden-Sydney, Virginia 23943

ksprouse@hsc.edu

“Postcolonial Studies Meet Visual Rhetoric: The Case of Description de L’ Egypte”

Bringing together lenses from postcolonial theory and visual rhetoric, this paper explores the ideologies at work in the illustrated, multi-volume work, Description de L’Egypte, produced by the French during their occupation of Egypt (1798-1801). The Description is a clear example of France’s ideologies as a colonial power and as a nation that had only recently overthrown its monarchy and adopted a republican, secular government system. This paper uses the work of postcolonial critics such as Said and Bhabha, as well as the work of Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Jack Solomon, I.A. Richards, and Lakoff to bring together the fields of postcolonial studies and rhetoric in order to uncover the ideologies at work in the Description.

The paper explores how the illustrations reflect the representational apparatus at work in the French-Egyptian encounter where representing the Egyptians as inferior was a method employed to assert the French’s superiority. Another aspect of the ideological framework of 19^th century France, namely the republican values and rising imperialism, lead to a sense of affinity and identification with the Roman Empire. In the illustrations the French metaphorically represent themselves as Roman figures while they represent conquered Egypt as either a source of material goods or a domesticated deity/royal figure.

In addition to the illustrations that have been consciously produced to reflect France’s ideals as a republic and a colonial power, there is a host of illustrations that reflect a subconscious fascination (that accompanies the conscious disdain) with the royal expressing an ambivalent force at work that is competing with the newly acquired ideals.

Maha Baddar

University of Arizona

mbaddar@arizona.edu

“Camus’s Algeriance: Rethinking Colonial Identity and Discourse”

Albert Camus’s place in the literary canon seems fairly secure; however, he has come under attack by postcolonial critics since Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, for being reactionary and anti-Arab in supporting the French imperial cause in Algeria. However, I contend that Said models Camus as a French imperialist writer unjustly, discounting the writer’s cultural heritage as a destitute pied-noir youth lost between distant French and displaced Arab cultures. Growing up poor (though privileged in comparison to the Arabs), French and Algerian left Camus with a lack of shared history and a cultural immediacy that greatly affected his philosophy, his work and his eventual political neutrality. His choice between Arab independence and French imperialism in Algeria was meaningless; choosing either would destroy the transient culture of his youth and the ephemeral home of his childhood and his mother.

In lieu of Said’s interpretation, I propose that Camus lived a double-consciousness, simultaneously French, Algerian, and French-Algerian and that the demands of this consciousness shaped his work, thought and political life. The unfinished auto-biographical novel Le Premier Homme and the short story “L’Hote” evince the author’s complex loyalties and the ramifications of coming of age among an “orphaned people.” Interpreting Camus (not to mention the many other 20^th century French-Algerians including Derrida, Cixous, Kristeva and Althusser) as a French colonialist rather than as an Algerian over-simplifies the colonial situation and leads to severe misrepresentation of the fecundity of thought it produced.

Phil Bridges

Missouri State University

Bridges731@MissouriState.edu

“The [M]Other Tongue in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chemin d’ecole: Performative Linguistic Spaces in a French Creole Childhood”

Chamoiseau’s novel, published in 1994, recounts the author’s apprenticeship in the French language at school in the late 1950s in Martinique. Chamoiseau presents his post-colonial initiation into imperial language first and foremost in terms of the body. His trajectory describes the rupture with and violation of his mother tongue, Antillean Creole, and his subsequent induction into the realm of “le Savoir universel” encoded by French. Within the text, we find a rich array of metaphors for the transformative power of language, where the words one speaks can allow one to exchange --or be forced to give up--one world for another. This process is presented first in relation to his own body, then in relation to the bodies of the two polar opposites in the novel: Gros Lombric, a resilient child from the backwoods who doesn’t understand a word of French the first day of school, and “le Maitre”, a black Creole who models impeccable French for his young charges, oblivious to the ironies of his favoring the light-skinned among them, urging them ceaselessly to “speak white.” Chamoiseau’s novel causes us to reflect on language itself as a kind of second, metaphorical body, marked by race, class, and gender: the dominant language is a way of imposing a certain type of cultural validity where both religious practices (abstinence, stigmata, punishment, salvation) are at work as well as health practices (French as a powerful prophylaxis against the murky dangers of barbarism). Included in my analysis are ideas by thinkers Jacques Derrida (himself a post-colonial speaker of French), Michel Foucault (state control of the body), and Judith Butler (the body as a primary vehicle of self expression).

Ultimately, Chamoiseau learns an effective way to resist by appropriating/reconfiguring this “other” tongue so that it serves to validate Creole history, experience, and sense of self.

Janice Morgan

Murray State University

Janice.morgan@murraystate.edu

“Violence in postcolonial Caribbean literature”

In the panel on Post/colonial Francophone Studies, this presentation intends to examine the significance of a few violent scenes found in Texaco (1992) by Patrick Chamoiseau and in La grande drive des esprits (1993) by Gisèle Pineau, in order to situate these scenes, their implications and fallouts, in the postcolonial context.

Just a couple of years before these novels were published, Edouard Glissant wrote in his Poétique de la Relation that: “contemporary violence is the response that societies oppose to the immediacy of contacts, an immediacy exacerbated by the brutality of the agents of Communication” (155)¹. We would like to discuss the validity of this statement through a reading of the violence found in the caribbean novels mentioned. In both novels, the violence is turned against a representative of the government clearly considered as an outsider and a potential danger. From important punctual, and analytical questions such as: What kind of communication if any occurred before the act of violence, and even more importantly, what communication if any resulted from it? What danger was averted or created through the use of violence? Are the writers proposing the model of David defeating Goliath as a response to or a symptom of societal problems such as poverty, racism, disenfranchisement, etc.?, our discussion will turn to broader, and more theoretical issues such as: Are postcolonial governments and their representatives perceived today as remnants of colonial times? How relevant is the concept of postcolonialism for the population at large?

At a time when demonstrations too often turn into riots, when children can turn into soldiers, when intifadas become a way of life, violence and its manifestations -be they literary- need to receive our full attention.

Notes

1. Our translation. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.

Véronique Maisier

Southern Illinois University

vmaisier@siu.edu