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  • Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature
  • Esther Peeren
Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. By Chris Bongie. (Postcolonialism across the Disciplines, 3). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. xv + 412 pp. Hb £65.00. Pb £25.00.

As the neat symmetry of the titles indicates, Friends and Enemies constitutes 'a sequel of sorts' (p. xi) to Bongie's 1998 Islands and Exiles, supplementing the latter's culturalist 'creole continuum' (extending from nativist identities to hybridization) with a more political 'universal continuum' that ranges from humanism to radical difference (p. 58). Underlying this move is the vital question no-one working in postcolonial literary studies can escape: 'exactly what is my relation, if any, to postcolonialism as a political project, rather than as a mere exercise in literary/cultural criticism?' (p. 102). Bongie's answer takes the form of a series of captivating close readings of mainly francophone texts, clustered to address the notion of humanity, the duty to remember and the politics of postcolonial literary studies. First, Bongie exposes humanity as a concept that, though aspiring to the universal, always involves taking sides with some (friends) against others (enemies). Careful consideration of Régis Debray's shift from situated commitment to humanism, the violence-effacing mémoire brouillée of Jean-Baptiste Piquenard, and the racial politics of Hugo's Bug-Jargal and its abolitionist English translation, lead him to the perhaps anti-climactic but persuasive position that a median should be found between sublimating the unsavoury aspects of the Enlightenment project and a Žižekian radical politics. Bongie's predilection for the neither-nor need not be seen as a cop-out; rather, it accords with his insertion of a deconstructive slash in the post/colonial, which indicates not a separation but an inevitable entanglement that pre-empts facile distinctions or 'pure' positions – hence his timely warning that the francophone, instead of positioning itself as minoritarian in relation to anglophone postcolonialism, should acknowledge its (neo)colonial tendencies and avoid becoming a 'fetish-concept' (p. 159). In the second part, commemorations of Haitian independence and the abolition of slavery in Martinique, and Walcott's Haitian Trilogy are invoked to show how 'good' memory and 'bad' nostalgia have become hopelessly entwined, with a 'duplicitous consciousness' (p. 187) or 'commemorative invention' (p. 277) the only recourse against neutralizing, state-sanctioned remembering. The final, most polemical section identifies a foundational bias in postcolonial literary studies' focus on a coterie of 'great' writers to the exclusion of popular fiction. In stirring cultural studies-inspired readings of Maryse Condé and Édouard Glissant, Bongie critiques such elitism without jettisoning the notion of literary value. This further reflection of his middle-ground approach is related to the 'scribal politics' of the book's subtitle. Pairing Schoelcher and Bissette, Walcott and Baron de Vastey, and Glissant the author and Glissant the policy advisor, Bongie destabilizes the author/scribe distinction to reveal them as doubles. While this would presumably open the way for literature and literary [End Page 122] criticism, considered as scribal rituals, to enter politics, Bongie again refrains from an unequivocal conclusion, preferring to remain 'of two minds' (p. 365). In the end, despite its rather frustrating reluctance to acknowledge that occupying middle ground is also to take a position, its laborious style and somewhat excessive length, Friends and Enemies is well worth diving into for shrewd readings of a splendidly varied corpus and an insightful, comprehensive elucidation of contemporary postcolonial perspectives.

Esther Peeren
University of Amsterdam
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