Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas by F. Bart Miller (review)

of fifteen years by an already mature writer—both through the historical periods in which the action takes place, and chronologically in terms of publication date, allowing for a more nuanced, if often paradoxical portrait of the doctor, from his meteoric rise to his ultimate reclusiveness. Part one opens with a panoramic view of Bianchon’s trajectory from his first appearance in Père Goriot (1834)—the action of which takes place in 1819—to his last in L’envers de l’histoire contemporaine (1848). Part two details the doctor’s new-found ambition and adaptability in his successful negotiation of Restauration Paris, while the third identifies Bianchon as a “libéral désabusé” in both politics and medicine during actions spanning the July Monarchy (164). Part four interrogates Bianchon’s later appearances in plots taking place between 1833 and 1836—during which time Balzac began situating his stories closer to the present of his readership. Finally, part five purports to tease out thematic lessons by shifting focus from the “pseudo biographie” of a fictional character to a synchronic analysis of his evolution in terms of publication date, thereby avoiding some of the pitfalls of the biographical approach while opening up space to draw parallels between the doctor and his creator, who share the initials“H.B.”(285). Throughout, Mikhalevitch probes the stakes of Bianchon’s evolving role, playfully fleshing out the contours and contradictions of a character whom Balzac seemed unwilling to fully develop. Overall, Balzac & Bianchon delivers on its promise at the outset to investigate the paradox of Bianchon’s active role in plot making, despite his apparent absence of romantic attachments . More than the “prêtre laïque” seen by certain readers, Mikhalevitch gestures toward Bianchon as the author’s double or“sur-moi,” achieving the early success that Balzac lusted after while side-stepping much of his romantic turmoil (162). His close readings offer new insights and historical contextualization of Bianchon’s medical and scientific practice, even if the Francocentric bibliography overlooks recent work on the intersections between nineteenth-century realism and medicine by literary critics and historians such as Lawrence Rothfield and Mary Donaldson-Evans. The greatest strength of Mikhalevitch’s study resides in his kaleidoscopic analysis of Bianchon’s development, considered against the backdrop of Balzac’s biography, Parisian medical debates, and a French political climate in constant flux. San Francisco State University Anne E. Linton Miller, F. Bart. Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. ISBN 978-90-420-3826-4. Pp. 262. $77. This original monograph should be commended for shedding new light on Damas’s role within the Négritude movement. In his lengthy introduction, Miller distinguishes Damas’s unique approach to Négritude from that of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. In four chapters of approximately equal length, he proposes “to theorise Damas’s literary expression and ideology of Négritude by showing that they developed 228 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 Reviews 229 and changed over time in relation to each other” (9). He justifies why he chose not to integrate the poetry collections Poèmes nègres sur des airs africains (1948), Graffiti (1952), and Névralgies (1966): it was “not possible to analyze these in terms of a relationship between anti-colonial resistance ideology and generic experimentation” (53). He explains how his argument is at the same time related to and different from the one Jonas Rano proposed in his Créolité: Léon Gontran Damas et la quête d’une identité primordiale (EUE, 2011) which envisages “Damasian Négritude as essentially transcending‘la situation noire’”(15).The first chapter,“Awakening to an Anti-colonial Poetics: The Case of Pigments,” accounts for Damas’s intense anger toward metropolitan assimilation through his anti-colonial poetics (this poetry collection dates from 1937). The second chapter analyzes and interprets Retour de Guyane (commissioned by the Musée du Trocadéro and published in 1938) as an anti-colonial essay. In the third chapter Miller investigates how Damas, through the use of the folk tale in Veillées noires (1943), subtly critiques French colonialism in Guyane.As its title suggests “Drinking to Remember...