The Poetics of Ethnography in Martinican Narratives: Exploring the Self and the Environment

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. “Marquer” means to write in Creole. Chamoiseau uses this description to cast himself in the role of the writer within his novels. See Chapters 2 and 3. 2. In Colonial Encounters, Peter Hulme defines colonial discourse as “an ensemble of linguistically based practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial relationships, an ensemble that could combine the most formulaic and bureaucratic of official documents . . . with the most non-functional and unprepossessing of romantic novels” (2). 3. The concept of epistemic violence comes from Foucault, but Spivak includes it in a postcolonial context in her famous article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and defines it as the “remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other” (280). See also Said’s Orientalism , “The Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West” (21). 4. Chamoiseau’s skepticism toward ethnography appears among others in a discourse from March 28th 2008: “Mondialisation. Mondialité. Pierre-monde.” 5. Claude Lévi-Strauss confirms this connection in Tristes Tropiques in stating that the accounts of travelers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the origins of modern ethnography (358). 6. The relationship between colonialism and ethnography has been discussed thoroughly within the discipline since the 1970s when Talal Asad published the anthology Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. This problematic dimension of ethnography can today be said to constitute a proper research field within cultural anthropology, as in George Stocking’s Observers Observed and Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other. 7. See Antoine, “Caribbean in French Metropolitan Writing” 349; Corzani, La Littérature des Antilles-Guyane françaises 90–92, 150. In Caribbean Literature and the Environment DeLoughrey et al., give an excellent account of the myth of origins that has been projected onto the Caribbean since Columbus (10–15). 190 Notes to Introduction 8. On the constitution of ethnography and the ethnographic object, see Fabian’s Time and the Other. The best-known example of this discourse is, of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. Rousseau first states that he will erase all the facts in order to create a fiction of natural man. However, he then cannot refrain from referring to travel accounts from and descriptions of the Caribbean to underline his arguments and give authority to his fiction. 9. Concerning the image of Haiti during the American occupation, which was contemporary with the establishment of ethnography as an academic discipline, see Dash’s book Haiti and the United States. Let us rapidly mention the scientifically dubious study The Magic Island by William Seabrook, which projects an exoticized vision of Haitian society in general and voudou in particular. This book was to nourish the marvelous imagination of many surrealists. 10. Naipaul writes, ”Martinique is France. Arriving from Trinidad, you feel you have crossed not the Caribbean but the English Channel . . . . Unlike the other islands, which have one main town to which everything gravitates, Martinique is full of little French villages, each with its church, mairie and war memorial (Aux Enfants de—Morts pour la France) . . . . That Martinique is France, and more than in appearance, that France has here succeeded, as she has perhaps nowhere else, in her ‘mission civilisatrice’, there can be no doubt” (Middle Passage 199–203). 11. Chris Bongie’s definition of exoticism is relevant here: “a discursive practice intent on recovering ‘elsewhere’ values ‘lost’ with the modernization of European society” (Exotic Memories 5). 12. Fleischmann confirms that this happened in Haiti through the work of the indigenous movement, which was to lead to the opening of Le Bureau d’ethnologie in 1941 (“Formation and Evolution of a Literary Discourse,” 322). See also Leiris, who in Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe , affirms that Aimé Césaire, along with the Haitian author Jacques Roumain , followed the same path as Dr. Price Mars and used ethnography to grasp national consciousness and give value to national culture, which the local elite regarded as barbaric and primitive (111). Kate Ramsey discusses this at length in the fourth chapter of The Spirits and the Law. 13. See the introduction to Christopher L. Miller’s Theories of Africans (1–30) and Eleni Coundouriotis’s work Claiming History. Benoît de L’Estoile also discusses this problem in his article “Au nom des ‘vrais Africains.’” 14. Régis Antoine, for instance, confirms...