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Introduction The Myth of the Vulnerable Body We are all the direct descendants of Christopher Columbus; our gene­ alogy begins with him. —Tzvetan Todorov, La conquête de l’Amérique: La question de l’Autre In his portrait of a black man returning to the Caribbean from exile in France, Frantz Fanon describes the psychological transfor­ mation of the now Europeanized Antillean man as a physical change: “The black man who has lived in France for a length of time returns radi­ cally changed. To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype undergoes a definitive, an absolute mutation. Even before he had gone away, one could tell from the almost aerial manner of his carriage that new forces had been set in motion. When he met a friend or an acquaintance, his greeting was no longer the wide sweep of the arm: With great reserve our ‘new man’ bowed slightly” (Fanon 1995, 15). For Fanon, the experience of exile produces a psychological as well as a physical transformation. The body of the “new man” has adopted a gestural repertoire that seems to express a different phenotype. The enthusiastic ritual of greeting a friend has been replaced by another, more “controlled” gesture: the sweep of the arm—“le large geste huméral” in the French original—has now been replaced by the more civilized subtlety of a bow. By figuring this trans­ formation in “genetic terms,” Fanon reproduces what Mary Louise Pratt has called a “bodyscape,” that is, the “portrait of manners and customs” according to which early travelers and ethnographers have traditionally described the natives (1985, 139). In this sense, Fanon’s “bodyscape” can be said to “cite” ethnographic texts insofar as his observations focus on ritualistic behavior and bodily performance. With the phrase “our ‘new man’” [“notre ‘futur’”], Fanon seems to be making an ironic observation about the bleak prospects of assimilation (“notre ‘future’ s’incline”) and, by implication, an allusion to a type of social Darwinism in which the black Antillean man progressively undergoes a process of “whitening”  Introduction by assuming “white” manners and demeanor. Fanon’s observations in the passage just quoted would seem to suggest that the racial inferiority complex he has diagnosed is somehow related to the body as a biological entity, even as he is intent on accounting for this complex as the result of a historical conditioning of attitude and behavior. Admittedly, it seems odd that Fanon would pay lip service to the natural sciences, a discourse that has helped create the categories under which the natives of the Carib­ bean and the offspring of African slaves have been subsumed as little more than primitive bodies in need of spiritual and political guidance. Yet Fanon’s use of the scientific instruments of colonialism in his efforts to decolonize the black man can be explained strategically as “writing against” the very discourse that fixed social and cultural meaning on bodies that lacked the means to “write for” themselves. In a manner that is both descriptive and critical, Fanon’s gesture is illustrative of a larger trend that has become increasingly more pervasive in contemporary lit­ erature in the Caribbean. As this book contends, recent texts from across the Caribbean archi­ pelago show two interrelated tendencies: a preoccupation with the local cultural and political circumstances that have resulted from coloniza­ tion, and an exhibitionist attitude toward the body in its most vulnerable states. I propose that these two tendencies strategically respond to the same foundational gesture of deriving legitimacy for the colonial enter­ prise from the body of the colonized. In fact, as the chronicles of the “discovery” and the proslavery literature show, the colonial situation was “objectively” justified according to reasons pertaining to the body’s capacity to produce social meaning, which, understood as intrinsic and natural, would be ciphered in a scientific metaphor of inferiority. This in­ feriority was grounded in the physical traits of the natives and the slaves so that the body itself was made to yield the symbolic reasons for the subject’s own political and social domination. That colonial agents felt compelled to find in the physical body a justification for their political position reveals that colonial domination was effectively based on the vulnerability of the material body to the forces of symbolic power. A comparative study of the role played by the vulnerable body in works by Jamaica Kincaid, Severo Sarduy, Patrick Chamoiseau, Magali García Ramis, Michelle Cliff, and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, this book seeks...

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