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Conclusion One is deprived of community when one lives in a world that is wholly given, apparently wholly objective. —Wilson Harris The Guyanese writer Wilson Harris observes in “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination” that the relationship between self and the surrounding world can be localized in the blind spots of perception when reality does not appear to us as transparent (Explorations 58). Eclipsed perspectives allow us to connect with others because when we cannot grasp the whole, we turn to other people’s perspectives in order to seize the bigger picture and, ultimately perhaps, form collectivity. Heterogeneity is here a postulate for creating a common ground, allowing continuous processes of subjectivation to occur in relation to others. According to Harris, the very difference between the self and its environment allows for building and connecting to a community. In many of the texts analyzed in this book, the ethnographic poetics operates as a mediator: it helps find this eclipsed perspective of the self that constantly questions its relationship to the world. These narratives coming from Martinique appear in different ways as responses to changes in Martinican society. Tropiques, for example, was published in a time of war. Ironically, the war years, during which the creativity of Tropiques was at its peak, are the idealized scene of Chamoiseau’s novels on Fort-de-France a half century later. Here, the difficult years under Admiral Robert are considered to have fertilized Creole strategies of survival, trickery, and other cultural practices that were soon to vanish as Martinique became a French overseas department. The Ripening is a memoir of the elections of 1946, written when France launched its modernization program for Martinique. Ina Césaire’s Zonzon Tête Carrée is set in an era prior to the construction of roads. Strobel underscores the urgency of studying the rapidly diminishing society of gold miners. The Convict and the Colonel contains more than just the story of the historical figure Médard; it is also an account of how a traditional society of fishermen has modernized. 182 Conclusion Although these books were written during and/or deal with different transitional times in Creole society, they do not always embrace the heterogeneity and diverse relationships to the surrounding world that Harris holds as fundamental. On the contrary, my study shows that ethnographic poetics is sometimes used to single out a cultural whole, safeguard it, and thereby counterbalance the feeling of alienation that often occurs in times of transition . The subject, often incarnated as a writer or intellectual, then emerges as a hero, saving vanishing cultural practices (even before they have completely disappeared) in the texts in order to fight the eclipse that Harris considers necessary for establishing a common ground. Whatever we might think of this kind of projection of a heroic subject saving culture, it does bring up questions concerning the difficulty of investigating the self from that eclipsed perspective when assimilation, modernization , and/or economic globalization seem to be threatening. In The Convict and the Colonel Price warns against reacting conservatively to this kind of dilemma, a warning that is repeated by Nick Nesbitt in Voicing Memory (6) and Chris Bongie in Friends and Enemies (187–92). Price, Bongie, and Nesbitt all argue from their respective perspectives that strategies for safeguarding culture against the pressures of modernity often incline toward a monumentalizing of the past, which is, in itself, a part of the rapid modernization of Martinican society: the more Frenchified the Martinicans become, the more their cultural practices (making charcoal or visiting a sorcerer, for instance) are localized in the past. This is no doubt true; the introduction notes that since the 1980s, an increasing number of festivals have been arranged, museums opened, and texts written to commemorate the specificity of Creole culture , all of them orchestrated by a discourse of identity proclaiming that society should not forget its origins. Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent explores this process, where the only character that dies, besides Solibo, is Congo, an old black man who makes manioc rasps. His practice is outdated; he is mocked by the locals and is photographed by tourists. The “imperative to remember,” Price claims, tends to fail to recognize the ways in which the past and tradition live on in everyday life without being commemorated by official discourses. Price demonstrates the absurdity of the historicist politics that have dominated Martinique since the 1980s. He describes officials visiting Petite-Anse who speak of old-fashioned practices of fishing with an...

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