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  • Postcolonial Fictions in the 'Roman de Perceforest': Cultural Identities and Hybridities
  • Helen J. Swift
Postcolonial Fictions in the 'Roman de Perceforest': Cultural Identities and Hybridities. By Sylvia Huot. Woodbridge, D. S. Brewer, 2007. vii + 234 pp. Hb £50.00; $85.00.

Postcolonial Fictions, the first monograph-length work on this anonymous vast prose composition, is an important contribution not only to medieval French studies, but also to scholarship on pre-modern romances and historiography, and to methodological reflection on the application of postcolonial theories to such texts. Perceforest, a not [End Page 329] yet fully edited romance from about 1340, chronicles a pre-Arthurian narrative of the Greek kingdom of Great Britain, an imaginary era governed by a dynasty descended from Alexander the Great, beginning with the coronation, by Alexander, of Perceforest and Gadifer as kings of England and Scotland. Central to Huot's study is 'the careful management of difference' (p. 207) involved in constructions of cultural identity traced across the rise, decline and regeneration of Britain mapped by Perceforest. Through the lens of postcolonial theory, she analyses the diverse 'management' strategies applied in the narrative to varieties of ethnic, genealogical, generational, political and sexual difference, such as hybridization, assimilation, fusion, separation, isolation and purification. Her examination of the complex interplay between these impulses in different circumstances enables a sophisticated interrogation of medieval ideas of culture, nature, sexuality and history. Through comparative study of the 'civilizing missions' of Gadifer and Perceforest, Part I examines the rewriting of British identity resulting from intricate negotiations between culture and nature, colonial imposition and indigenous resistance, which highlight the contingency and instability of 'nature' and 'culture' as structuring concepts. Part II focuses on the regulation of love, gender and sexuality, and their disruption by the spectres of incest, miscegenation and homoeroticism. Through Perceforest's management of sexuality, 'the intimate relationship between the military or imperial and the sexual as forms of conquest and conjoining' (p. 215) operates crucially to preserve Greco-British hegemony. Part III traces how interweaving, competing categories of blood and ethnicity —Trojan and Greek, complicated by the indigenous lignaige Darnant —contribute to Perceforest's construction of history 'as a matrix for both individual and cultural identity' (p. 22). Its vision of British history through 'cycles of suppression, cooption, and, reassertion' (p. 175) reveals 'the artifices and ruses by which the narrative of history, and the cultures it describes and upholds, are produced' (p. 182). Huot's intellectually rich study is lucidly expressed and plentifully illustrated (with the benefit of English translations), initiating the unfamiliar reader into the fascinating world of Perceforest and the often brilliant analyses of this world in Postcolonial Fictions. Frequent contextualizations of particular motifs, such as animal metamorphosis or male companionship, in relation to more well-known literary texts (Marie de France, Chré tien de Troyes) and historical sources (Geoffrey of Monmouth) embed this single-work monograph in a broader domain of critical debate, whilst also demonstrating the specific contribution of Perceforest to ongoing discussions of, for example, myths of nature or the dangers of heterosexual love in chivalric society. A useful glossary of proper names is supplied; even more helpful would be a genealogy of characters, though this was perhaps judged too unwieldy to present clearly. Huot's excellent study merits a broad readership in both medieval and early modern studies of cultural difference, conquest and empire, and in wider reflection on the history of identity politics.

Helen J. Swift
St Hilda's College, Oxford
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