Race, Colonialism, and Social Transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean

10. Creole Counterdiscourses and French Departmental Hegemony: Reclaiming “Here” from “There”

10 Creole Counterdiscourses and French Departmental Hegemony Reclaiming“Here”from“There” H. Adlai Murdoch In a classic event that underscores the paradoxes of doubleness and ambiguity that continue to define the terrain of the departmental relationship, the fiftieth anniversary of the departmentalization law of 1946 that continues to bind Guadeloupe and Martinique to mainland France, across the reaches of history, culture, and the Atlantic Ocean, was feted twice, in both department and metropole. It was feted first in Paris through an exposition at the Palais de Chaillot from November 16 through December 15, 1996, under the title Les départements d’outremer: Quatre siècles d’histoire commune. The paradoxes, contradictions, and erasures implicit in the title of this event were made clear when it was then restaged in the Antilles in an installation in the Salle Osenat in Schoelcher, Martinique on April 9–26, 1997. This example of the double vision that plagues the départements d’outremer (DOMs), rendering them essentially and simultaneously both French and West Indian, sums up quite effectively the ironies, hierarchies, and inconsistencies of the now sixty-year-long overseas departmental relationship. Further, the key question of the doubleness of the DOMs—the divergences and differences arising from their complex ethnic, cultural, and historic intersections with France—sets the terms of their specific articulation of French Caribbeanness and points inalterably to central patterns of domination and exclusion, center and periphery that continue to shape this French Caribbean postcolonialism-that-is-not-postcolonialism and its corollaries of intellectual and cultural production. The geopolitical status of the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique symbolizes the ambiguities of political development for the French Caribbean region, for if the departmentalization law theoretically bestowed the same rights and privileges on Martinicans and Guadeloupeans as on 258 / H. Adlai Murdoch French citizens from any other region—as those of the Bouches-du-Rhône, for example—then this relationship implied, in effect, ignoring or effacing continuing colonial dichotomies of race, history, and geography. Over time, then, the populace of the French Caribbean became the inheritors of a double perspective, marking a transatlantic duality of location that increasingly separated them both from their politically independent Anglophone Caribbean counterparts and from the social and cultural materialities of the metropole, to whom they remain inexplicably linked in a complex symbiosis of contentious subordination. Such a perspective is reflective of a critical perspective articulated by Stuart Hall, who, as Mimi Sheller points out, “explains Caribbean identity in terms of a positioning which is not only dialogic, but also conflictual” (2001, 9). Indeed, this critical combination of geographical distance, economic domination, ethnic and cultural difference, and colonial history join with the political paradoxes of assimilation to render these territories more colonies of France rather than the equivalent political entities they theoretically are. Beverley Ormerod makes this point well: “The French Caribbean islands . . . are still owned and ruled by France. Their official status as Departments of France has not greatly altered the realities of political and cultural colonialism” (1985, 3). At the same time, ongoing patterns of capital repatriation, increasing unemployment, conspicuous consumption, and decreasing indigenous business ownership have tended to reinforce impressions of an across-the-board subservience to the metropole that appears to accompany French overseas departmentalization in the Caribbean. Meanwhile , metropolitan gestures toward a granting of increased autonomy are not always taken advantage of with the approbation or alacrity that might be imagined. For example, a recent double referendum, organized in the islands on December 7, 2003, asking the populace to decide on a proposed transformation of their two régions monodépartementales into a “new autonomous region” was roundly and soundly defeated, because (so the story goes) the residents feared that this nudge toward self-government would be but the first nail in a French-imposed coffin of enforced independence (with the concomitant loss of privileges and benefits). In other words, this episode provides a striking example of the pervasive paradoxes that have long plagued both axes of France’s overseas departmental dyad, a Caribbean population divided from and dependent on its metropolitan center but unwilling, or unable, to assume the full mantle of its Caribbean identity in the political sphere. Alongside such ongoing paradoxes, however, and while bearing in mind the visibility gained by such self-affirming cultural Creole Counterdiscourses and French Departmental Hegemony / 259 phenomena as zouk and the Creole language in which it is sung, the material principles...