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Book Reviews but colored also by studies of nineteenth-century realism that have been provoked by Barthes's ubiquitous effet de réel, Janell Watson combines a fine eye for the detail of the realist text with a broad historical perspective on cultural production. This double take produces a memorable book that is indispensable for readers interested in the study of consumer culture and in the connection between realism and cultural production in the nineteenth century. David F. Bell Duke University H. Adlai Murdoch. Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2001.Pp. xi+ 290. $55. H. Adlai Murdoch's principal claim in Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel is that créolité is marked by all those characteristics customarily associated with postmodern ambiguity. The key terms that recur over and over in his study are "doubling," "complexity," "ambivalence," "differential," "plurality," "disjunction," and "difference," along with "hybridity" and "métissage ." Although the claim in favor of this conception of contemporary Caribbean thought and expression is thoroughly established in each instance, this vision overwhelms the differences between Caribbean texts and authors, submerging any of their other qualities. The focus of this study is on the period after 1946 when Guadeloupe and Martinique became French départements. Rather than resolving the split between colonizer and colonized, Murdoch claims that with departmentalization that split remains embedded in the mixed form of identity that marks a people who are neither "Third World" nor "First World." To capture the expression of the creolized identity, Murdoch explores fictional works of Glissant, Condé, Maximin, Dracius, and Chamoiseau. His theoretical apparatus relies upon Glissant's Caribbean Discourse as a fundamental text of anti-foundationalism, and brilliantly incorporates a vast array of thinkers whose studies focus on the Caribbean as the privileged site of ambivalences and cultural cross-currents. What emerges is a new canonicity that dances uneasily around the issue of identity without ever successfully negotiating its ultimate challenge, that of its constructed, non-originary nature. Or rather, it is its non-originary cross-cultural ambivalence that takes on the quality of a fixed entity, an anti-anti-essentialism that has become increasingly indistinguishable from essentialism. This is because the question of identity is never fully investigated, but rather shifted onto the plane of "identitarian" claims. The key to Murdoch's approach might be seen in his treatment of the colonial discourse as a split position. Although he does make reference to colonial univocalily, in contrast to créolité, more typically he accepts the notion of the split position of enunciation inherent in the colonial discourse, citing Benita Parry who states, "The civil discourse of a culturally cohesive community is mutated into the text of a civilizing mission" with the result that "its eminciatory assumptions are revealed to be in conflict with its means of social control" (24). This passage so closely resembles Bhabha's position in The Location of Culture that one can only wonder at the absence of references to Bhabha in its elaboration. Eventually Bhabha appears in Murdoch's study, but surprisingly late and infrequently for an argument built increasingly on notions of hybridity. Murdoch performs close textual analyses so as to establish the split, divided nature of identity claims for créolité. Thus, in describing Maximin's L'Isolé Soleil, he concludes, "The novel . .. produc[es] meaning through complex processes of reading and writing, engendering an identity for Marie-Gabriel and, by extension, for the creóle culture she signifies, out of the turbulence of textual praxis" (107). The indefmiteness of this claim is never resolved, and, by extension, the failure to address what Lacan would call the misrecognition involved in identitarian claims. Despite the insistence upon the ambivalent nature of créolité, certain undivided qualities would seem to remain. For instance, the conteur and the maroon are defined as essentially subversive , notwithstanding Condé's more critical portrayal of the latter in /, Tituba, substantiated by the historical claims made by Richard Burton in his Afro-Creole. Murdoch sees resistance as an Vol. XLII, No. 1 141 L'Esprit Créateur automatic feature of Caribbean identity; Naipaul, no less doubled in his narrative voice and discourse , would seem to contradict...

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