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

Franoise Vergès concludes her Monsters and Revolutionaries by referring to her object of study, the French Overseas Department of Réunion, as "a small island." This is an ironic conclusion to an innovative work that places Réunion squarely on the map and its author clearly among the ranks of leading scholars of postcolonial studies. Blurring genres of history, criticism, ethnography, and autobiography, this study tacks back and forth between the Indian Ocean, metropolitan France, and Indochina. Vergès unravels more than a century of Creole emancipatory politics, from the abolitionist movement of the mid-nineteenth century, to the call for assimilation and equality of a century later, to the Cold War confrontations of the 1960s. In analyzing this "micropolitical" history through the language of psychoanalysis and feminist theory, Vergès demonstrates how studies of colonizer-colonized relations must take into account a third category: the métis or mixed-race subjects who make up the majority of Réunion's population and serve as anathema to colonial discourses of racial purity and degeneration.

A political scientist by training, Vergès has followed Lynn Hunt and Michael Rogin in incorporating a psychoanalytic framework into discussions of state power and political movements. In particular, she translates Freud's formulation of a "family romance" into an analytic of the "colonial family romance." In the former, as is well known, a child "imagines a new set of parents, who are replaced in his [sic] imagination by persons of better birth" (p. 4). In the latter, according to Vergès' translation, the colonizers invent a single parent, the French state or La Mère-Patrie (that is, the mother-fatherland), to re place the colonial subject's actual mother and father (pp. 4-5). Vergès traces how such a myth, with its implications of unpayable debt and dependence, was perpetuated through the medium of revolutionary ideologies of fraternité (brotherhood) and how it was adopted into the various emancipatory discourses of Réunion's Creole abolitionists and assimilationists. As an effect of this paternalist myth, Vergès argues, Réunion's mothers and sisters have been the silenced and erased from political discourse. Conversely, the interrelated facts of métissage and France's history of slavery have been disavowed.

One must question the applicability of such a set of psychoanalytic theoretical apparati based on an individual ego's development to larger collectivities, beyond its use as allegory or through some mediating theory of a collective unconscious. Neither of these is Vergès' approach. Instead she slides between agentive individuals and abstract totalities attributing to the latter concrete hopes, fears, and anxieties:

The narrative of the métis as monster and revolutionary was about the fear of the French father dreading, as in a nightmare, the return of an avenging son whom the father might not even recognize at the moment of being struck. . . . The state would act as disciplining father: sons would be tamed into good soldiers of the colonial army under the authority of white officers, their fathers

(p. 103).

Such a conflation of unlike categories unfortunately tends to rob Réunion's cultural politics of the historical particularity Vergès is so careful to detail. Perhaps for this reason, Vergès' analysis is strongest when she applies the paradigm of the colonial family romance to concrete textual representations (novels, political speeches, anti-communist propaganda posters), or to a single family—namely, her own.

For, above all, Monsters and Revolutionaries is a sustained effort to recover the efforts of parents and grandparents in the formulation of a postcolonial political project. Vergès rejects the Antillean critic Raphäel Confiant's disavowal of the 1946 generation of Aimé Césaire for having "betrayed" the anti-colonial aspirations of the "Old Colonies" in its demands for political integration (pp. 74-76). Instead, she seeks to understand how versions of this "narrative of betrayal" have been repeatedly used by forces of colonialism to silence not only the past but also...