Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Culture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire by Jane Hiddleston (review)

This book begins with a central paradox: the emergence, in France’s colonies, of a French-language intellectual tradition and literary corpus the principal aim of which was to put an end to the very mission civilisatricewhich had produced them. As Jane Hiddleston notes in her Introduction, Gary Wilder’s antithetical formulation ‘colonial humanism’ (in The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005)) succinctly captures the founding contradiction of French colonial discourse, which was based on the supposed universality of French values and, simultaneously, on the production, cultivation, management, and suppression of difference and particularity. Hiddleston tracks the elaboration of what we might call ‘anticolonial humanism’ in her six extensive case studies, which persuasively show that, in very different ways, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Jean Amrouche, Mouloud Feraoun, and Kateb Yacine sought to redefine humanism in a truly catholic rather than restrictive, Eurocentric, and imperial sense. Hiddleston’s starting point — the internal contradictions or structural aporieof colonial humanism — provides in this reader’s opinion a more powerful and convincing framework than the titular (and Francocentric) notion of the intellectual, especially since the anticolonial theorist Fanon as well as the dissident writer Kateb, two of her central examples, adopt radically anti-elitist stances in their work, refusing to speak for the political subjects to whom they give voice. Kateb presents Hiddleston with another problem in that, unlike the other writers she analyses, he abandoned the French language in favour of Algerian Arabic and Berber, and Italianate theatre in favour of popular Algerian performance genres, putting Francocentric notions of universality into crisis on a very concrete level. Kateb’s turn away from his colonial heritage might in fact have provided even more nuance to Hiddleston’s argument, enabling a full-fledged critique of universalism as a doctrine that is necessarily exclusive. Nevertheless, the comparative approach she adopts in this ambitious survey of anticolonial humanism provides a welcome departure from studies confined by area (Caribbean, West Africa, Maghreb), putting into fruitful dialogue the founding fathers of Negritude with the Maghrebi canon via Fanon, who literally and temporally travelled between these two centres of francophone decolonial thought and practice. (It would have been fitting to include a more explicit discussion of Fanon’s transcolonial position, both historically and theoretically; indeed Hiddleston’s Fanon chapter literally bridges her Negritude and Maghrebi chapters, and thus plays a pivotal role in her book.) Equally important are Hiddleston’s sustained and nuanced readings of the theoretical and literary writings of these prolific and complex writers. Each chapter is based on extensive close readings, paying particular attention to generic differences and shifting political positions within the work. Her comparative reading of Feraoun’s war journal and novels, for example, persuasively undercuts ‘ethnographic’ readings of his work through attention to irony and shifts in narrative voice. Each of her six chapters makes incisive contributions to the subfields of Negritude and Maghrebi studies, and would thus serve well in specialized graduate seminars. Taught as a book, it is suitable for both graduate courses on postcolonial theory and undergraduate francophone literature classes.