Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (review)

Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects. By Emily Apter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xv + 285 pp. $49.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

Emily Apter's Continental Drift contributes to the ongoing conversation about the future of French studies,¹ whose center she shifts from the metropolis to the colonies. Against Derrida's semiautobiographical remembrance of the sanctity of French in colonies thus made monolingual, she places what Sartre and Malraux, writing of Fanon and Picasso, named thénonité and yadtou, respectively.² The first term refers to the colonial echo of the West's ethnocentric prostration before the Parthenon as pure origin (Parthenon--thénonité); the second, to the reverberating sound of the universalist primitivist refrain indicating that "Negro art" represents everyone's past: il y a de tout thus becomes yadtou.

Both terms reveal accented speech. Derrida writes of his own shameful struggle to "purify" his French of, or perhaps to "white out" from it, the trace of a colonial accent, which confirms the power of Parisian academic French. Apter refers to this struggle for linguistic purity as a colonial affect that is the "psychic preservation of foreignness" (16). In contrast, the cosmopolitan Sartre and Malraux valorize differences of accent. But they do so at the expense of understanding the conflicted relationship to language that constitutes the colonial psyche. Apter's use of thénonité and yadtou is not aimed (as Sartre's, and to some extent Malraux's, writings were) at introducing a colonial or postcolonial people to complacent Western readers, although she does find it necessary to summarize texts for her French studies audience, which may not have happened upon the material. Taking the psychological consequences of colonialism very seriously, Apter implores us to read the affect in the colonial echo. It is, she suggests, a way of accessing content and character of implied subject positions and thus of destabilizing an otherwise narcissistic metropolitan. Apter thereby brings questions of history and content to deconstruction, and the outmoded (and, she argues, highly gendered) concept of character to psychoanalytic theories of the subject and the ego.

Apter's wager of a continental drift between Europe and its colonies implies another drift, between the institutional and disciplinary continents of high theory (particularly the deconstruction and psychoanalysis so prevalent in French departments) and the continent of cultural studies (which for Apter includes feminism and postcolonial criticism). She suggests that the former needs colonial modifiers and the latter, theoretical inflection. Perhaps she overstates the divide. Postcolonial studies and feminism have always drifted among various camps in literature departments. At a moment when there appears to be a schism between canonicity and noncanonicity, and between aesthetics and cultural studies, postcolonial critics have insisted that the terms of opposition are themselves unequal to the task of studying colonialism and its consequences. That is, thénonité and yadtou already necessitate the disciplinary shift, for neither content nor theory adequately explains the complexity of colonial people's literary productions and the affect of the shadow of colonialism over everyone.

Apter ranges over many texts, including those of Maurice Barrès, Albert Camus, Frédéric Paulhan, Octave Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, Isabelle Eberhardt, Elissa Rhaïs, Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Samuel Delany and over many subjects, including psychoanalysis, Afro-cyberpunk, nomadism, and interpretations of Joan of Arc. Given the ambitiousness of her project, it is hardly surprising that the chapters (or case studies?) neither consistently exemplify the theoretical arguments with which she begins nor, indeed, respond to the specific questions she raises. But to provide an agenda for future studies, it makes sense to end chapters with questions. It would be useful, Apter suggests, for French departments to break free of the national model and undertake a broader cultural analysis of metropolis and colony.

To this end, the book's sections ("National Characters," "Metropolitan Masquerades," and "Virtual Colonies") follow something of...