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· xi ·· INTRODUCTION · Joseph Bédier and the Imperial Nation “C’est comme si j’arrivais du Moyen Age et c’est pareil pour tous les autres Réunionnais, on est sauvages, on ne sait pas vivre.” [It’s like I came from the Middle Ages, and it’s the same for all the other Réunionnais, we are savages, we don’t know how to live.] This statement describes the experience of a young migrant factory worker, arriving in France in the mid-1960s from the Indian Ocean island of Réunion. Instinctively , he likens his sense of cultural alienation to temporal distance—“it’s like I came from the Middle Ages.”1 Judging himself and his compatriots as uncivilized “savages” who do not know how to live, he identifies the difference between France and its island as one of both time and space. His comment reveals the great distances that Réunionnais travel to reach “France”—only to find themselves as far as ever from their fellow citizens. In literal terms, their differences can include geography, climate, language, culture, religion, and race. By aligning these differences with France’s own origins in the Middle Ages, this particular young man articulates the colonial paradox by which migrants identify simultaneously with colonizing and colonized perspectives: only as a “metropolitan” can he judge himself a “savage”; only as a “modern” can he see himself as “medieval.” By identifying the medieval with the absence of civilization, this Réunionnais migrant echoes succinctly the denials of history that so often characterize colonialist discourse.2 This “negative” version of what I will call “creole medievalism” finds its “positive” counterpart in the judgment of another Réunionnais migrant who turned to the Middle Ages as he grappled with the shocks of cultural difference—Joseph Bédier (1864– 1938), the most influential scholar of medieval French literature of his era. In the 1920s, almost fifty years after arriving in Paris, Bédier uncannily presaged , and inverted, the judgment of his compatriot: “I am not a man of the present, but of the Middle Ages; I’m at least six centuries behind. I come to you from a faraway France, that of St. Louis.”3 For Bédier, “coming from the Middle Ages” is a badge of honor, not disgrace; his expression xii INTRODUCTION “faraway France” associates colonial territory with the prestige of a medieval crusader (Louis IX, 1214–70). For Bédier, distant times and distant places converge into a deeply secure sense of national belonging. Indeed, Bédier first encountered the Middle Ages growing up on Réunion, where at age fourteen he read the epic La Chanson de Roland under the mango tree of his family home in the capital Saint-Denis. Bédier and his fellow migrant both conjoin the Middle Ages to their Réunionnais identity—the one to assert prestige, the other to characterize estrangement. Both live in a time lag. They articulate two ends of the spectrum of “creole medievalism” developed in this book. Throughout France’s Third Republic (1871–1940) and into the present, both the medieval and the colonial attract idealizations (like Bédier’s) and denigrations (like the factory worker’s). If the Middle Ages can reference either glory or barbarism, colonialism can imply “promised land” or “hell on earth.” As medieval studies and the empire both expanded after 1870, idealizations supported potent forms of national belonging for Bédier, for his elite Réunionnais contemporaries, and for the nation as a whole. Meanwhile, denigrations supported efforts to subjugate rural and overseas populations and to exclude them from national citizenship. Alongthespectrumbetweenthesediametricallyopposedvaluations,creole medievalism challenges the traditional binarisms of imperial discourse. On contemporary Réunion especially, creole medievalism joins a myriad of other strategies for representing postcolonial society. While medievalism can never veer too far from the imperial conditions that brought memories of distant times to Réunion, creative claims on the Middle Ages hold out the possibility of moving beyond colonial dualities (civilization/savagery, inclusion/exclusion, etc.). The productive powers of hybridity, syncretism, and métissage extend to the Middle Ages themselves, prompting further critique of their ideological alignment with simplified “positives” and “negatives .”Altogether,then,“creolemedievalism”designatesaproliferatingsetof contradictory claims born of numerous dislocations between Réunion and France, and between past and present. Creole medievalism ultimately functions in at least three clearly identifiable ways: in support of homogeneous national history, in opposition to that history, and in mixed formations that defy singular conclusions. In the course of...

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