Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies (review)

I was meant to complete this review by October 2005. I am glad now that it is late, for a number of key events took place in 2005 in relation to the francophone world: Assia Djebar's election to the Académie Française; the dreadful treatment of France's minister without portfolio Azouz Begag at the United States border in Florida; Nicolas Sarkozy's abandoned visit to Martinique following popular anger there at the proposed teaching of French colonialism in French schools; and then the 'soixante-huit des banlieues' in November 2005, then, is a year that demonstrates the 'fracture coloniale' throughout the francophone world, and hence the importance of this volume of chapters, which brings together an awareness of the diversity if not fragmentation at the centre of French Studies. Thus a set of paradoxes dominates this wide-ranging and in-depth study of small terrains within what is known as 'Francophone Studies'. In their introduction the editors cover the emergence, trajectory and state of 'Francophone Studies', locating its origins in Fanon's work and in Edward W. Said's approach since; naturally, the term is then neatly deconstructed, dissected and finally decimated by Michel Laronde, and by Jacques Coursil and Delphine Perret. By way of recompense, the great and the good of French and francophone studies in the United States appear in this volume. Ronnie Scharfman writes lucidly on Derrida's and Cixous's twin and contradictory experiences of being Jewish and Algerian in Vichy times, Winifred Woodhull on the link between melodrama and popular culture in Pabst's film Drame de Shanghaï (1938), Alec Hargreaves on Barthes's Mythologies as a precursor to postcolonial studies, and Élisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi on Toussaint Louverture's heroic image. E. Anthony Hurley takes a sideways swipe at much of postcolonial theory's uses of Fanon, and film specialist Kenneth Harrow deconstructs Benguigui's well-known film of 1997, Mémoires d'immigrés. Francophone Quebec is represented too, with Eloise Brière's account of the linguistic and cultural paradoxes of Quebec's relationship to France and with Renée Larrier's sharp discussion of Haitian literary identity in its North American diasporic state; as is Maghrebian literature in John Erickson's careful overview of the theme of nomadism. Anjali Prabhu and Ato Quayson set out Édouard Glissant's importance for transcultural studies, and Dominic Thomas very convincingly the curricular implications of a fragmented and decentred form of French studies in anglophone university departments. In this way, what seems to be a rather eclectic and over-ambitious attempt at 'coverage' in this volume, is in fact a commendable effort to find some kind of synthesis. Just because French studies has lost its canonical, hexagon-centred unity does not have to lead us to the conclusion that meaningful parallel analyses cannot be made through discussion of a variety of materials from a variety of cultural contexts. Indeed, the volume is well balanced between meta-discussions on what francophone actually means (apparently it is pleonastic to say 'Francophone Postcolonial', as the former already designates the postcolonial) and in-depth studies of literature, film and cultural theory. Moreover, Françoise Lionnet's concluding remarks use a very 'French' film — Coline Serreau's 2001 film Chaos — to make some lucid comments about feminism's oiling of postcolonialism's critical machine. Thus, as well as being synthetic in its aims and outcomes, the volume's approach is rigorously twenty-first century in its refusal to ghettoize (or privilege tokenistically) the non-hexagonal francophone world: francophone postcolonial studies is as much part of France as it is of non-European French-speaking regions. In this respect, the aim at synthesis is that much more significant. If anything, it is francophone Africa that is somewhat overlooked, especially as the 'Black Atlantic' section of the book tends towards its western fringes. This is not to detract though from what is sure to be an important marker in the field...