États présents |
Between ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’: French Studies and the Postcolonial Turn
University of Liverpool
In Les Carnets de Shérazade, Leïla Sebbar describes the journeys of her eponymous protagonist, a modern-day Sherherezade, as she hitches a lift through various regions of France.1 Using travel and the impressions it triggers as a means of superimposing traces of the historical Arab and Turkish presence in the Hexagon over the contemporary realities of migration, the text suggests that solid national boundaries have become decidedly permeable. The more general implications, both for the French studies field and for its object of study, of this increasingly commonplace observation are clear: the subjects known as Modern Languages were built around the modern European nation state; a growing awareness of the globalized or transnational formations by which this unit is challenged are triggering what may be seen as these subjects' definitive crisis.
The study of what some would call ‘travel literature’, of what others (in more neutral, ahistorical terms) dub the ‘literature of mobility’ — categories to which Sebbar's text arguably belongs — allows an opening up of cultures predominantly viewed hitherto as discrete. These generic labels refer to a glory hole of diverse material, both fictional and documentary (and often a hybrid of the two), focused on journeys within and between cultures, that permits exploration of the inter-related identities and histories on which those cultures depend.2 The recent growth of interest in travel literature in French, while linked to a wider recognition of the genre as one of the most representative forms of (according to the interpreter in question) post/colonial or intercultural discourse, bears witness to a questioning of the self-sufficiency of French studies' traditional object of enquiry.3 Study of this (predominantly metropolitan) form merely hints, however, at a wider questioning brought about by the necessary accommodation — as opposed to integration or assimilation — of a growing body of material, in relation to which much French travel literature exists contrapuntally, produced in a wider French-speaking space.
In his study of the growth of a recognizably modern British tradition of French studies, Christophe Campos describes the cracking of its coherence around 1960.4 It is debatable whether such coherence ever existed in a field as fundamentally plural or metamorphic, in other words, an interdiscipline. Campos claims elsewhere, however, that at the heart of these questions of identity is the ‘unusual, but not quite unique’ designation of a subject area ‘by an adjective instead of a noun’, or, perhaps more accurately, by an adjective used as a denotative noun; that is, a part of speech whose field of reference is notoriously arbitrary or unpredictable.5 Battles over ideas are often crystallized in battles over words, and what may to outsiders appear to be a tedious squabble over semantics clearly has implications for the definition of a subject area and for debates over what some saw — and still see — as its fragmentation and disarray, others as its much-needed diversification. Witness the divergent reactions to the recent proliferation, in the French studies field, of associations and journals all purporting to lay claim to a particular understanding of that denotative ‘French’: are these a sign of self-destructive fragmentation or enriching diversity, congenital weakness or inherent strength? Such taxonomic issues disguise a more deep-seated disciplinary anxiety inherent in debates about what a globalized French studies might call itself. Adopting an all-encompassing, etymologically accurate use of ‘Francophone’ may imply either a ‘provincialization’ of France, or an obfuscation of the epithet's political overtones; continued use of ‘French’ may suggest business as usual; and the compromise label of ‘French and Francophone’ may risk a compartmentalization of (or even bifurcation between) the two elements, with the potential for dialogue (or for a perhaps more constructively synergist approach) thwarted at the same time as it is suggested. The third solution is close to the French national one, with postcolonial literatures traditionally studied outside ‘lettres modernes’ in departments of ‘littérature comparée’.6 The dilemma is presented succinctly by Margaret Majumdar in the preface to her Francophone Studies, a glossary of key terms in the field that itself understands ‘Francophone’ as extra-Hexagonal: on the one hand, the binary opposition creates an ‘illusory homogeneity in camps on either sides of the divide’; on the other, the forging of a connection through the institutional frame of la francophonie implies a different sort of homogeneity that obscures very real linguistic and cultural diversity.7
What remains clear is that Campos's ‘cracking of coherence’ should be associated with the growing academic awareness of an alternative curriculum, of a set of texts written by women, of items belonging to other media, of works of popular culture — but also of a body of post/colonial material in French that was not ‘franco-français’. In the 1970s, a number of scholars scattered in Africa, Europe and North America became ‘fledgling Francophone specialist(s) in a field that did not as yet exist’.8 Progressively, however, a series of books, special issues of journals and conferences has contributed to the mapping and widening of the Francophone field, to the creation of links between postcolonial debates and an explicitly Francophone perspective.9 Recent special issues of French Forum, Modern Language Notes, Paragraph and Yale French Studies, Thomas Spear's La Culture française vue d'ici et d'ailleurs, as well as the three opening issues of the new journal Francophone Postcolonial Studies, have all illustrated, through a number of divergent individual interventions, that what may be dubbed the ‘postcolonial turn’ is undoubtedly the most significant shift in French studies since the theoretical and feminist revolutions of the post-1968 period.10 Such self-critical reflection complements the activity of field-construction witnessed in a series of recent publications;11 but at the same time, it represents a conscious embedding of this field — not a self-congratulatory nombrilisme, but more a necessarily cautious self-questioning and a complex self-positioning; not the prescription of parameters, more the sketching of a frame within which might operate the diverse set of inter-related, historically nuanced theories and strategies appropriate for studying the intersections of French studies and the ‘postcolonial’.
As was argued above, ‘taxonomic uneasiness’ often accompanies debates about the realignment of disciplinary boundaries — an uneasiness apparent in debates about the adoption of the term ‘post(/)(-)colonial’ itself.12 This is certainly the case with any notion of Francophone postcolonial studies, whose strategic provisionality must be stressed. I share the reservations of a number of contributors to the survey volumes I have mentioned: the fear of prescription, or in Celia Britton's terms, ‘the danger that postcolonial theory might in turn prove to be too restrictive a framework to encompass and illuminate all the Francophone texts we wish to study’;13 the risk, that Chris Bongie articulates most clearly, that a Francophone project with a postcolonial emphasis might be seen — as has too often been the perception of research in Modern Languages — as a belated gesture, the ‘liaison of two "more and more empty" signifiers that have lost a great deal of their former mastery (and institutional marketability)’.14 Despite the intention to ‘de-colonize’ the epithet ‘Francophone’ and to redeploy it inclusively, the implications of la Francophonie as a political project persist. Despite the aim of opening up the field of ‘postcolonial’ enquiry to new material and approaches, the semantic baggage of the term remains, as do the risks of an exclusive Anglophone–Francophone dialogue at a point when new intercultural or transnational dynamics — between French-speaking areas, or between the Francophone and the Hispanophone or Lusophone — are increasingly in evidence. I suggest, however, that terms such as ‘Francophone Studies’ or ‘Francophone Postcolonial Studies’ refer to what I have called elsewhere ‘a constructively critical strategy emerging from dissatisfaction with both the monolingual emphases of postcolonial criticism [...] and the monocultural, essentially metropolitan biases of French Studies’.15 Mireille Rosello underlines this implied provisionality by classing ‘Francophone Studies’ as a ‘performative statement that may or may not be useful ten years from now’.16 The ‘postcolonial turn’ involves a series of wider issues, therefore, attempts at whose resolution may be seen to have invigorated French studies for several decades, by obliging the subject area to renegotiate, widen, globalize its object and field of study.
Those approaching French-language material from a postcolonial perspective operate in the interstices of two areas of enquiry — French studies and postcolonial studies — and, dialogically, have a potentially significant contribution to make to the future direction of each of these; although it is convenient to present a Francophone postcolonialism as a sub-specialization slowly developing as a field in its own right, I tend to reject this atomization, belied as it is by intellectual practice, and concentrate on the interdependency of such cognate fields. Francophone postcolonial studies is certainly part of the response to those who claim that postcolonial criticism is a monolingual practice with ‘ears only for English’, who suggest that it reached a dead end and that it is now time, in Epifanio San Juan's terms, to move ‘beyond’;17 instead, a Francophone postcolonial studies permits a fuller articulation of the postcolonial project, further defining and specifying its goals, its limits and its objects of study, avoiding the pitfalls of any monolingual emphasis or of any reduction of ‘the West’ to a homogeneous entity. Indeed, some of the most interesting postcolonial interventions in recent years have been made by scholars of Francophone material, whose work precisely reveals the redundancy of any separatism implicit in dividing postcolonialisms along language-specific lines.18
Perhaps more importantly, the very necessary postcolonial detour to which French studies has been subject leads back to questions about the relationship between France and French, French and Francophone. For the prising open of an understanding of French-speaking cultures in order to move beyond the national restrictions of the Hexagon has been more than a thematic matter of curriculum change, of tacking on supplementary material; it has had structural implications, involving the necessary reappraisal of the French studies area as a whole — a reappraisal that has both consolidated the field, whilst at the same time questioning its sustainability. The traditional division of the French studies field into chronological or generic fields has been challenged by a new historico-spatial model, and the uneasy co-existence of these often divergent understandings poses a major challenge at a time of increased uncertainty generated by perceived crises in undergraduate recruitment. What has been the impact of the increasingly popular study of postcolonial literatures and cultures in French on traditional notions of French studies? The answers one might propose are diverse: a loss of coherence tending towards fragmentation and dispersal; an assimilationist and centripetal approach whereby the non-metropolitan is progressively normalized; the perpetuation of a centre–periphery binary whereby the non-metropolitan is marginalized, or objectified and transformed into what Graham Huggan, triggering very necessary alarm bells, has perceptively dubbed the ‘postcolonial exotic’;19 or, finally (and perhaps most constructively), a more fundamental response, epitomized by Lawrence D. Kriztman's contribution to Yale French Studies, that involves a more general restructuring and an integrative understanding of the interaction between ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’ dependent on ‘hermeneutic strategies that are both comparative and dialogic in nature’.20 In short, the development of a Francophone postcolonial studies may permit the elaboration of a genuinely postcolonial French studies.
Francophone postcoloniality has had an obvious impact on a traditional, Hexagonal object of study, an impact all the more pressing as French institutions often ignore the implications of French's status as a variegated world language (as opposed to a regional one). Some scholars, such as Sandy Petrey, firmly defend a Hexagonal focus against what some may see as potentially ‘Francophobic inquiry’; others, such as Mireille Rosello, perform a provocative reversal, suggesting that ‘Hexagonal literature is a branch of Francophone Studies’.21 What is perhaps a more pragmatic starting point, responding to Kritzman's call for comparatism and dialogism, is the recognition of a non-hierarchical interdependency that remains difficult to unravel, of a complex French-speaking space whose geography has moved beyond that of centres and peripheries. This progressive imbrication of what are known as the ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’ has led to their alliance in what Peter France, in his New Oxford Companion of 1995, dubbed ‘literature in French’, and in what Roger Little describes as the ‘Francographic’ — both of which terms underline the need to avoid exoticization or marginalization, to acknowledge the radically disruptive force of the opening up of the ‘French’ field that they imply, and to recognize the emergence of a globalized, transnational object of inquiry.22 Canon enlargement triggers a thorough transformation of the ways one reads: a newly emergent yet increasingly coherent field of study — addressing the interlocking regions, countries and communities in which French is actually or historically a primary means of communication — requires a new framework and rationale. One solution is perhaps to be found in Edward W. Said's model of contrapuntal reading, an ongoing attempt (that remains largely undeveloped, both by Said and his interpreters) to present comparatism with an unrestricted field of enquiry and without any implicit hierarchies. Central to it is the desire to elaborate a critical practice that is ‘neither completely at one with the new [...] nor fully disencumbered of the old’.23 In exploring the ‘interval between what we mean by "France" and what we mean by "French"’ — an interval central to understandings of the relationship between the French and Francophone — such a nuanced approach would seem invaluable.24 From a polarized, imbalanced, even falsely dichotomized view of the relationship between France and its former colonies or current dependencies, we move to a more flexible approach to intersections and interdependencies. Such a sense of connectedness has already emerged from recent work on the Francophone Caribbean: Jean Jonassaint has explained the ways in which ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’ in a Caribbean context are ‘to a certain extent, part of one another’; Michael Dash explores the subtle intersections of Caribbean and metropolitan travel writing around the Second World War; and as Haiti ‘celebrates’ the bi-centenary of independence, the role of the island in the formation of French republican identity — already mapped out by historians such as Laurent Dubois in his concept of ‘La République métisée’ — has become increasingly apparent.25
Counterpoint may be seen, however, to imply a certain harmony, denied not least by Said's own uncompromising explorations towards the end of his life of the discordances of ‘late style’.26 Such discordances are incorporated into a model of ‘Relation’, reflecting the varied associations — historical and actual — that link the different spaces that constitute the wider Francophone world (without, of course, restricting it to these connections). I borrow Glissant's term as it reflects the unevenness of these connections to which I have alluded, belying the official and homogenizing rhetoric of any political understanding of la Francophonie and ranging from the neocolonial to more complex processes of transculturation whereby the metropolitan, in a disruption of the entropic logic of globalization, is itself altered, denatured, and sent back in often unrecognizable forms. I am not suggesting that all those in French studies must adopt this approach, or sustain this type of research: in terms of individual specialisms, metropolitan and non-metropolitan focus will often be maintained, although projects will increasingly and inevitably bridge the gap between them, suggesting that these categories are no longer, and perhaps never were, watertight. However, what is required is an awareness of a wider field of operations: issues dubbed ‘intercultural’ are not only to be addressed by modernists; the objects of ‘postcolonial’ investigation are not bound by geography or chronology, and must not be defined by a residual colonial exoticism that denies France's own postcolonial status.27
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Footnotes |
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1 Les Carnets de Shérazade (Paris, Stock, 1985), pp. 264–65. For a discussion of this aspect of the text, see Anne Donadey, Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 2001), p. 123.
2 For two recent studies that illustrate these points, namely that France itself has been shaped by global processes of creolization and was, during the three centuries leading to the Revolution, always already multicultural and multiethnic in the private sphere, see French Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. by Tyler Stovall and Georges van den Abbeele (Lanham, Lexington Books, 2003), and Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Régime and After (Ithaca — London, Cornell University Press, 2004).
3 For some of the most recent criticism of travel literature in French, see Michael Cronin, Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation (Cork University Press, 2000); Kimberley Healey, The Modernist Traveler: French Detours, 1900–1930 (Lincoln, NB — London, University of Nebraska Press, 2003); and David Scott, Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard (Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also a number of related studies of ‘exotic’ or ‘colonial’ literature, for instance, Roger Célestin, From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits of Exoticism (Minneapolis — London, University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998); Edward J. Hughes, Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet (Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Jennifer Yee, Clichés de la femme exotique (Paris, L'Harmattan, 2000).
4 ‘Le Français dans les universités britanniques’, Franco-British Studies, 8 (1989), 69–108.
5 ‘The Scope and Methodology of French’, in French in the 90s: A Transbinary Conference July 1991, ed. by Jennifer Birkett and Michael Kelly (Birmingham Modern Languages Publications, 1992), pp. 33–38 (pp. 33–34).
6 This is not to deny, however, a growing French engagement with postcolonial questions in works such as Jacqueline Bardolph, Études postcoloniales et littérature (Paris, Champion 2001), and Jean-Marc Moura, Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Paris, PUF, 1999).
7 Francophone Studies: The Essential Glossary, ed. by Margaret Majumdar (London, Arnold, 2002), p. vii.
8 Ronnie Scharfman, ‘Before the Postcolonial’, Yale French Studies, 103 (2003), 9–16 (p. 9).
9 See, for example, Emily Apter, Continental Drift: from National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago — London, University of Chicago Press, 1999); Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford University Press, 1991) and Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford University Press, 1998); Celia Britton, Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1999); Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago — London, University of Chicago Press, 1990) and Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago — London, University of Chicago Press, 1998); Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995); Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature (Durham, NC — London, Duke University Press, 1996); Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds, ed. by Dina Sherzer (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1996); Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Durham, NC — London, Duke University Press, 1999); and Jane Bradley Winston, Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France (New York–Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001).
10 See Le Monde francophone, French Forum, 77.6 (2004); Francophone Texts and Postcolonial Theory, ed. by Celia Britton and Michael Syrotinski, Paragraph, 24.3 (2001); Francophone Studies: New Landscapes, ed. by Françoise Lionnet and Dominic Thomas, Modern Language Notes, 118.4 (2003); French and Francophone: The Challenge of Expanding Horizons, ed. by Farid Laroussi and Christopher L. Miller, Yale French Studies, 103 (2003); and La Culture française vue d'ici et d'ailleurs, ed. by Thomas Spear (Paris, Karthala, 2002). Also of genuine interest are two earlier issues of Yale French Studies: Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations and Nomadisms, ed. by Françoise Lionnet and Ronnie Scharfman, 82 and 83 (1993). As Naomi Schor makes clear, the ‘postcolonial turn’ in French studies is itself part of an ongoing process of transformation, epistemological and otherwise, continuing and further developing in many ways the impact of feminism in the 1970s, in ‘Feminism and Francophone Literature: From One Revolution to Another’, Yale French Studies, 103 (2003), 163–65 (pp. 164–65).
11 See Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (London, Arnold, 2003); Francophone Postcolonial Cultures: Critical Essays, ed. by Kamal Salhi (Lanham, Lexington Books, 2003); and Postcolonial Theory and Literature in a Francophone Frame, ed. by Anne Donadey and H. Adlai Murdoch (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2004).
12 The term ‘taxonomic uneasiness’ is used by Irène Assiba d'Almeida, in ‘A Necessary Uneasiness’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1.1 (2003), 25–28 (p. 26).
13 ‘New Approaches to Francophone Literature’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1.1 (2003), 29–32 (p. 32).
14 ‘Belated Liaisons: Writing Between the Margins of Literary and Cultural Studies’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1.2 (2003), 11–24 (p. 22).
15 ‘Challenging the Monolingual, Subverting the Monocultural: The Strategic Purposes of Francophone Postcolonial Studies’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1.1 (2003), 33–41 (p. 36).
16 ‘Unhoming Francophone Studies: A House in the Middle of the Current’, Yale French Studies, 103 (2003), 123–32 (p. 124).
17 See Harish Trivedi, ‘The Postcolonial or the Transcolonial? Location and Language’, Interventions, 1.2 (1999), 269–72 (p. 272), and E. San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998).
18 See, for example, Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester University Press, 2002), and Nicholas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory and the Work of Fiction (Oxford, Polity Press, 2003).
19 On the ‘postcolonial exotic’, see Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London, Routledge, 2001). This risk is accentuated by what Karen Gould has identified as the problems of the obligatory departmental ‘Francophone hire’; in other words, the expectation that a new colleague will ‘"cover" the entire French-speaking world outside France’ so that those already in post can continue with business as usual; see ‘Nationalism, Feminism, Cultural Pluralism: American Interest in Quebec Literature and Culture’, Yale French Studies, 103 (2003), 24–32 (p. 26).
20 ‘A Certain Idea of French: Cultural Studies, Literature and Theory’, Yale French Studies, 103 (2003), 146–60 (p. 154).
21 See Sandy Petrey, ‘Language Charged with Meaning’, Yale French Studies, 103 (2003), 133–45 (p. 135), and Mireille Rosello, ‘Unhoming Francophone Studies: A House in the Middle of the Current’, p. 131.
22 See The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, ed. by Peter France (Oxford University Press, 1995), and Roger Little, ‘World Literature in French; or Is Francophonie Frankly Phoney?’, European Review, 9 (2001), 421–36.
23 Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London, Vintage, 1994), p. 36.
24 See Mary Gallagher, ‘Revisiting the "Others' Others", or the Bankruptcy of Otherness as a Value in Literature in French’, Women's Studies Review, 6 (1999), 51–59 (p. 51), cited by Roger Little, ‘World Literature in French; or Is Francophonie Frankly Phoney?’, p. 425.
25 See Jean Jonassaint, ‘Literatures in the Francophone Caribbean’, Yale French Studies, 103 (2003), 55–63 (p. 58); Michael Dash, ‘Caraïbe Fantôme: The Play of Difference in the Francophone Caribbean’, Yale French Studies, 103 (2003), 93–105; and Laurent Dubois, ‘La République métisée: Citizenship, Colonialism, and the Borders of French History’, Cultural Studies, 14.1 (2000), 15–34. On re-exploring the France–Haiti axis, see also French Historical Studies, 23.2 (2000), in particular, Alice L. Conklin, ‘Boundaries Unbound: Teaching French History as Colonial History and Colonial History as French History’, pp. 215–38, and John D. Garrigus, ‘White Jacobins/Black Jacobins: Bringing the Haitian and French Revolutions Together in the Classroom’, pp. 259–75.
26 See Edward Said, ‘Thoughts on Late Style’, London Review of Books, 26.15 (2004), 3–7.
27 On postcolonial France, see Post-colonial Cultures in France, ed. by Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (London and New York, Routledge, 1997). For a model of the widening of the postcolonial field, see, for example, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, The Postcolonial Middle Ages (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), and Ananya Kabir and Deanne Williams, Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 2005). A number of the ideas explored in the study of this ‘État présent’ were initially presented in the Dorothy Blair Memorial Lecture (Institut Français du Royaume-Uni, November 2003), and the inaugural lecture of the Centre for French and Francophone Cultural Studies (University of Leeds, February 2004). I am grateful to the organizers of both of these events for providing me with the invitation to debate these issues.
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