Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (review)

For some time, it has been a common practice of postcolonial studies to read the texts of the formerly colonized through the lens of European high theory. Rare is the article or book in this field that does not deploy some aspect of Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus (1987) to bolster its argument. Less common have been attempts to read the literatures of the colonial and postcolonial world in dialogue with European theory and philosophy. This is the gap that Nick Nesbitt fills with Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature, the most scrupulously researched and intelligent study to date on the connection between history, cultural memory, and literature in the francophone Caribbean. More remarkable is the fact that he does so while inscribing the Caribbean literary texts at the heart of Voicing Memory in a wider web of signification. The dialogue between literature and philosophy is clearly Nesbitt's central concern, but he also makes compelling and plausible connections between these cultural fields and, for instance, avant-garde musical composition and state iconography in Eastern Europe, and jazz and folk art in the circumatlantic world.

The most engaging parts of Nesbitt's study are those that tackle the "canonical" authors of francophone Caribbean literature (Aimé Césaire, Daniel Maximin, Edouard Glissant, and Maryse Condé) and subject their works to the double readings that are the hallmark of this book. The three chapters on Césaire do this most successfully, in that they manage to nuance our understanding both of Césaire's work and of his place in the unfolding of a black Atlantic modernity. Chapter 2, "Antinomies of Double Consciousness in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal," is exemplary in this regard. It reads Césaire against the typical grain of interpretation, citing a "specter" of negativity in the poem that other critics have overlooked. For Nesbitt, Césaire's poem is a "most-imposing working-through of the traumas of slavery and racism in Francophone culture . . . that steadfastly refuses to represent existence as the mere teleological unfolding of subjective wish fulfillment" (78). In resisting the unproblematically heroic interpretations of Césaire's Cahier that so many others have proposed, Nesbitt goes so far as to suggest that the Cahier flirts with the rhetoric—though not the aims—of 1930s European fascism in its references to the common blood and spirit of the African diaspora (a tendency in early-twentieth-century Caribbean literature previously pointed out by Michael Dash in The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context, though not specifically in relation to Césaire). Where Césaire's poem departs from the fascist imaginary is in its positing of a black double consciousness, revealed most strikingly in the poem's last lines that for Nesbitt show how the freedom of blacks contains the seeds of their repetition of the errors of fascism, which he calls the "antinomical status of freedom itself" (87). Anticipating the obvious hue and cry that such an interpretation will provoke among promoters of the unambiguous liberatory potential of Césaire's poem, Nesbitt responds in advance, and with conviction, by describing the relationship that criticism must maintain with utopian projects: "To underscore this doubled, ambiguous nature of the literature of decolonization via critique is not to be unfaithful to its invocation of a liberated subject but rather to pursue the only means available to recall its dream of the transformed society that history goes on betraying, endlessly" (92).

The ambivalence at the heart of Césaire's poetic project is precisely that which makes it a singularly rich document of its time and place, and Nesbitt conveys that ambivalence without flinching.

Nesbitt follows Césaire's literary production and political investments over time in the two subsequent chapters. Chapter 4, "Cannibalizing Hegel: Decolonization and European Theory in La tragédie du roi Christophe," reads Césaire's play not through the lens of Hegel...