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5 The Expulsion from the Public Sphere The Novels of Marie Chauvet During the modern colonial period, writers like José Martí and Claude McKay, as well as journal editors like Frank Collymore, Aimé Césaire, and Suzanne Césaire, made the case for the literary as a crucial quality in governing the nation. But the successes and failures of the region’s anticolonial struggles left nationalist intellectuals in a difficult new position during the decolonizing years as they could no longer unify their aspirations to speak for both a public and a counterpublic. This chapter begins the second half of Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, which examines the effects that the crisis of anticolonialism had on the region’s literature. Writers who had conceived of their intellectual labor as oppositional now found themselves at odds with the nationalist movements that became the postcolonial state. While participants in the anticolonial struggle faced persecution from colonial Britain, France, and the United States, as postcoloniality became the region’s dominant framework intellectuals faced a variety of pressures from the local governments they had helped bring to power. Postcolonial or postmodernist critics, influenced by suspicion of nationalism as an exclusionary ideology, have often seen the tragedy of the contemporary Caribbean as the coming to power of the anticolonial intellectuals of the modern colonial period. In The Other America , Michael Dash makes this case. According to Dash, Caribbean modernism —defined as “negritude, indigenism, and even Marxism” (Other America 62)—harbors in its poetics a desire to close down difference through enforcing an imagined lost purity. Modernism thus becomes a term used to periodize—he looks especially at Aimé Césaire and Jacques Roumain as major practitioners of this kind of poetics—but also to describe an ongoing trend within Caribbean writing, since Dash includes more recent writers like Frantz Fanon, Kamau Brathwaite, and Roberto 126 Postcoloniality and the Crisis of the Literary Fernández Retamar as adherents to what he characterizes as a dangerous mode of thought. Postmodernism, represented for Dash in deconstructive play and the carnivalesque (79), refuses to align itself with any master narrative or ideological position and thus avoids what he calls in his section on Roumain “The Totalitarian Temptation.” Dash acknowledges that in its origins, “modernity was an emancipatory discourse” (61), but reads Césaire, Brathwaite, and Roumain to argue that their anticolonialism “reinforced the idea of the author as the fountainhead of truth, of an authoritative self presiding over a totalizing vision and the lure of a nativist politics” (73). Césaire’s and subsequently Fanon’s desire for a violent revolutionary break from the past paradoxically lends itself to “nostalgia for a prelapsarian, mythic past” (70); Brathwaite’s “History of the Voice” turns into a search for “the foundational rhythmic utterance” that “is not an inclusive chorus” (72). The problem, for Dash, is how “Fascist politics are a hidden dimension to indigenist poetics” (75), and so Roumain becomes the ideological precursor for Duvalier’s dictatorship with Gouverneurs de la rosée “a Caribbean version of the ‘dictator’ novel” (78).1 In making this case, Dash must argue that writers critical of or even persecuted by these authoritarian regimes actually share a common totalitarian logic. Thus, in discussing Roumain, he suggests that “even those ideologically opposed to Brouard’s fascism were seduced by the retrieval of a terrestrial order, by the restoration of a luminous center from which would emanate sacred diction, a prelinguistic rhythm, a primal harmony. . . . Roumain’s Masters of the Dew, while normally seen as progressive and quite distinct from the ideology of [Duvalier’s] griot movement, paradoxically reveals an anxiety for establishing a truth beyond words” (76). Dash ultimately makes the case that celebrations of the folk are fascist (75) and that “what starts off as a dream of liberation from an oppressive Western system of knowledge ends up also asserting a new, closed, hegemonic system of values . . . the seductive reality of authoritarian poetics is not far behind these originary fictions” (80). In identifying negritude, indigenism, and Marxism as precursors to totalitarianism, Dash argues that literary and political projects based on racial, national, or class consciousness lead to exclusionary practices based on distinguishing us from them. While totalitarians like Duvalier may have claimed intellectual grounding for their regimes in discourses like noirisme, I would argue against ahistorically collapsing all nationalist ideologies or revolutionary movements into the category of fascism. My discussion of Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire from chapter 4, for [18.119...

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