Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage (review)

Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage. By Françoise Vergès (Durham, Duke University Press, 1999) 395 pp. $64.95 cloth $21.95 paper

The power of "discourses" to shape reality is a recurrent theme in modern postcolonial studies. In this work, Vergès seeks to reconstruct the political history of Réunion, a French colony in the southwestern Indian Ocean that became an overseas département of France in 1946, by analyzing the emancipatory discourses that have developed on the island and link its colonial past with its postcolonial present. To this end, she relies upon two notions to guide her deconstruction of various literary, legal, medical, and other texts in order to reveal the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized on Réunion since the early nineteenth century. The first such concept, "colonial family romance," is derived from Sigmund Freud's ideas about the fictions (or "family romances") that children develop about imagined parents. The second concept in question is that of métissage, or racial mixing, which Vergès regards as a distinctly colonial response to European racism and mono-ethnicism. The textual analyses based upon these concepts provide for the construction of what, following others, she characterizes as a "nonquantitative serial history."

Political histories of France's overseas départements are a scarce commodity, and Vergès' interest in the nature and dynamics of the political struggles between the island's Creole inhabitants and metropolitan France over a period of more than 150 years suggests that an important contribution to Réunion's history may be in the offing. Her willingness to draw upon the possible insights offered by psychiatry and modern literary theory likewise seems to hold out the promise of intriguing new insights into hitherto ignored aspects of the complex relationship between colonies and their metropoles, including how colonial mentalités changed over time.

Any such expectations are, alas, sadly misplaced. Vergès touches on several important questions about how the colonial past can influence the postcolonial present, but her approach and argument do little to dispel the skepticism that many historians have about the value of psychiatry or psychohistory, much less literary theory, as possible tools to help understand the past. Vergès' claims to be writing a political history, but she fails to abide by a fundamental rule of historical research and writing--to muster convincing archival or other documentary evidence to support her psychological speculations and deconstructionist ruminations. Her notes suggest, for example, that her explorations in the archival record were, at best, highly circumscribed.

Another source of concern is Vergès' apparent ignorance of important relevant scholarship about slave and sugar plantation colonies in general and the Mascarenes in particular, and her attendant inability to demonstrate a solid understanding of Réunion's social, economic, and political history as she argues her case. Other problems include a propensity to summarize (and often quote) the work of others at length, a practice that, when coupled with a surfeit of opaque jargon, makes for an ocean of tiresome and often confusing prose.

Last, but far from least, Vergès is unable to keep her own deep involvement with those seeking to end Réunion's dependence on France from transforming this book into the kind of accusatory tract that, in her preface, she readily admits that it might be. As this volume unfortunately demonstrates only too clearly, to indulge one's passions--theoretical and otherwise--is one thing; to do good history is something else.

Richard B. Allen
Worcester, Massachusetts

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