Joseph Zobel: Négritude and the Novel by Louise Hardwick (review)

This is the first extensively researched study of Zobel's life and works, including all his novels, from Diab'-là (1945) to Quand la neige aura fondu (1979), as well as his short stories. Hardwick's richly informative biographical introduction considers previously unexamined or only recently available interviews, correspondence, and journal entries. She comprehensively reviews scholarship on Zobel and Négritude and finds in Zobel themes central to areas within post-colonial studies such as ecocriticism. Hardwick argues that the social realism of Zobel's early novels expanded the frame-work and audience of Négritude by focusing on rural Martinique and making the ideas of the Parisian movement accessible to a local Martinican public. She maintains Diab'-là was radical in defending rural Martinicans and innovative in dissociating the land from the residual trauma of slavery. For Hardwick, the themes, structure, and internal dialogue of Diab'-là—a "new founding narrative for black lives" (69)—reflect the inspiration of Haitian Indigénisme, Césairian Négritude, and the Harlem Renaissance. She offers a comparative study of Les jours immobiles (1946) and its rewritten version Les mains pleines d'oiseaux (1978). In both, locally-directed efforts—absent outside interference—overcome economic hardships. In Mains, Zobel valorizes cultural manifestations of African and Amerindian heritage in Martinican Creole (4). Hardwick reads La rue Cases-Nègres (1950) as an immigrant novel of "rupture and dislocation" (151), targeting "discriminatory social structures" within the ethno-class hierarchy of "black Martinican society" (145). She also notes Zobel's ambivalence towards his French middle-class existence as he recalls his impoverished youth in colonized Martinique. She contends Zobel's "Janus-like" social critique is best understood through Kristen Ross's theory of French post-war realism (147). Such "double-visioned" social realism serves as a corrective to the era's narratives of progress and prosperity by exposing marginalized "parallel life trajectories" of suffering and poverty (148). Hardwick studies La fête à Paris (1953, substantially rewritten as Quand la neige aura fondu), through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's three stages of cultural capital (embodied, objectified, and institutionalized), to which she adds race as a complicating factor (214). Hardwick analyzes the protagonist's encounters with racism, his successful navigation of Parisian society through his knowledge and manipulation of French cultural practices and expectations, and his lucid commentary on colonial institutions and their role in the construction and dissemination of the image of colonial subjects. She notes Quand la neige omits the strident criticism of La fête and takes an internationalist perspective on human suffering and working-class exploitation. Hardwick's cogently written study benefits from extensive archival research in the United States, France, and Martinique, where she gained access to previously unavailable or unexplored documents. For example, in Martinique she consulted both the Archives départementales Schœlcher and the Fonds Zobel (his personal papers, first available 2015). Particularly noteworthy are two original manuscripts in the Fonds Zobel (Cocotte ou les jours immobiles and an unpublished anthology, Chants de la Négritude: 14 poètes, 20 poèmes de la Négritude), and an unknown short story from Le Sportif.