Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic by Justin Izzo (review)

Justin Izzo’s book Experiments with Empire considers how writers on both sides of the color line adapted anthropological tools—mainly ethnography—in order to document social life in the 20th-century Francosphere and create new spaces for creative intervention. Heeding the particular history of French anthropology and its role in sustaining the at-times contradictory ambitions of the French colonial empire, this book’s impressive project is to propose what Izzo calls “a third interlocutory mode” that mobilizes anthropological forms to envision alternative modes of postcolonial critique (7). The French and Francophone writers he discusses write themselves into a broader system of knowledge-making and worldbuilding while also gesturing toward the particular problems that come with writing from within the ruins of empire.

The book’s chapters examine novels, nonfiction, and film from the French Atlantic world that incorporate ethnographic methods into the production of art. Chapter 1 considers the ethnographic writings of Michel Leiris and Amadou Hampâté Bâ during their time as colonial administrators during the Second World War. Izzo attends to the ways that both Leiris and Bâ navigated and articulated their subject positions with French Africa. He avoids prescriptive dichotomies that might otherwise position someone like Leiris—who decried the impact of racism in greater France—as an irredeemable colonizer and someone like Bâ as a misguided collaborant. In chapter 2, Izzo continues this process of positional disentanglement through a study of Jean Rouch’s ethnofictional filmography. Focusing on a triptych of films in Rouch’s lengthy career, this chapter considers how Rouch’s African actors produce a kind of self-knowledge that is inevitably shuttled along by the anthropological gaze of the camera. The result is a kind of fictive détournement wherein the director bends documentary into fiction and storytelling into ethnography.

Chapter 3 marks a turn toward the Caribbean, stopping first in Haiti to discuss the legacy of Jean Price-Mars’s Ainsi parla l’Oncle on what Izzo calls Haitian “ethnographic nation building.” Attention is paid here to the relationship between the changing tides of folk culture and the backdrop of the American occupation and the Duvalier regimes in Haitian fiction. Chapter 4 takes us to Martinique, where Izzo examines the trio of Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. It is in this chapter that one clearly sees the relationship between literature and the human sciences as more of a dialogue than a process of appropriation. All three of these novelists use what Izzo names “an ethnology of Relation” to illuminate the social problems produced by the afterlives of colonialism and slavery in the French Caribbean. The book then comes to a close in France, where Izzo considers the crime novels of Jean-Claude Izzo and their counter-cartographies of postcolonial Marseille.

Experiments with Empire is well worth considering if you are looking for a way to think about empire and its aftermath without falling into an often dead-ended and retrenched mode of negative political critique. The work straddles a line between a metacommentary on the field of anthropology and the more traditional tool of close reading. Izzo does not agonize over the obvious colonial roots of the modern discipline of anthropology nor does he explore the ethical problems attached to ethnography as a tool of knowledge production. While some readers may find this to be a theoretical shortcoming, it demonstrates that Izzo’s project is more invested in the uses of anthropology to influence both literary and social forms. Experiments with Empire ultimately provides a roadmap in French studies for interdisciplinary scholarship that theorizes alternative possibilities for the study of postcolonial life.