Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World (review)

This year on the 14^th of July France celebrated the birth of the Republic together with fourteen other countries from Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa. Despite president Sarkozy's affirmation that the impressive multinational parade was not another nostalgic revival of France's colonial glory, such a display of military power brought attention to the intricate ways in which the former Empire still overshadows various practices of commemoration and institutionalized identity narratives of the present-day Republic.

The spontaneous revolts of the young descendants of immigrant workers of Northern African and Sub-Saharan African origin in the French banlieue in November 2005, as well as the recent debate on national identity initiated in November 2009 by Eric Besson, minister of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development, equally demonstrated that the malaise of contemporary French society is deeply rooted in its colonial history and that the end of colonization is far from being a precise punctual event from the past. Along these lines, in their introduction to Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World, the editors Charles Forsdick and David Murphy rebuke the generalized belatedness and reticence among the majority of French politicians and intelligentsia in equating egalitarian Republican values with the violent colonial enterprise. As the twenty-five authors who have contributed essays to this volume argue, present-day France has a lot to gain from examining its current identity crisis as a problematic interaction between its multiethnic nature and its restrictive ideal of universalism. With this in mind, they propose postcolonial theory as a valuable tool in bringing to the forefront discursive strategies structured around notions of gender, race, religion, specific periods of time and locations, and other forms of social and political behavior informed by the tormented Messianic career of France outside and inside its European borders.

Although there have been attempts among French academics and intellectuals to rethink the impact of colonial history on current collective dilemmas starting with the late 1990s and culminating with the pivotal study edited by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, La fracture postcoloniale: La société française au prisme de l'héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), it is rather difficult to assert the existence of a fully fledged postcolonial Francophone discipline in France. In comparison with the long-established tradition of postcolonial studies in the Anglo-American world, French scholarship on the legacy of colonization has been generally confined to historical rather than epistemological approaches. Nevertheless, instead of focusing on well-known advances made mainly by Anglo-American academics, the authors of the present volume highlight the understudied French-language origins of postcolonial theory. Anti-colonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Edouard Glissant, together with post-structuralists in the vein of Jacques Derrida and philosophers of "alterity" like Jean Paul-Sartre, have indeed influenced "canonical" postcolonial critics starting with Edward Saïd up to Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Robert Young and many others. Considering that both postcolonial and Francophone studies have reached a critical crossroads within current debates on the emergence of global and transnational modes of citizenry, this anthology convincingly conjoins the two fields and reinforces their theoretical importance. In so doing, its aim is to consolidate a new discipline that would not only respond to the heuristic insufficiency fostered by conflicting colonial memories, but would additionally offer a multi-disciplinary approach to post-national diasporic identities.

Following the same direction initiated in their first anthology of critical texts, Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (London: Arnold, 2003), the editors seek to redefine fluctuating mappings of the contemporary French-speaking global community. Cast in the pedagogical mode and drawing on a diverse range of cultural, social and political practices, such as literary and theoretical productions, film, print media, exhibits, commemorative laws and monuments, the current volume is mainly addressed to Anglo-American readers who wish to familiarize themselves with the most salient aspects of the field. Despite the editors' avowed effort to extend their area of...