Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces: Colonial Borders in French and Francophone Literature and Film by Mohit Chandna (review)

Mohit Chandna's stimulating book examines the consequences of spatial production under European colonialism, and how spaces of colonialism have produced colonial and postcolonial subjectivities. The spatial legacies of colonization play themselves out to this day, whether as forms of postcolonial nationalism, or in the colonially inflected socio-spatial divisions of metropolitan France. The book's strengths lie in its concerted effort to read the impact of colonialism in spatial terms, and its exploration of how the subjectivities produced by colonialism are located within and respond to specific spatial configurations. Chandna's account begins with Jules Verne's Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, a text written at the height of Europe's colonial expansion by an author who, Chandna observes, equated colonialism with civilizational progress. Phileas Fogg's journey reveals the spatial forms taken by colonial capitalism, the spatial homogenization it demands, and the stakes for the people lying in its path. Chandna shows how the colonial opium economy is woven like a thread through Verne's text, connecting Hong Kong with India and underlining the importance of the opium trade in fuelling the British Empire. While the text itself seems reluctant to establish a link between opium and imperialism, Chandna draws out the drug's subterranean circulation within it, showing how Britain's exploitation of the opium trade is bound up with the racial hierarchies imposed and instrumentalized by the colonial project. Echoing the world tour explored in the first chapter, the rest of the book takes us on its own global investigation of postcolonial spaces and subjectivities, examining how the consequences of spatial production under colonialism continue to ripple across contemporary French and Francophone culture. Moving between Mauritius and India, Ananda Devi's writing explores postcolonial nationalism and how postcolonial subjects at once turn to and must navigate the assertion of identities defined in national terms. Patrick Chamoiseau's novel Texaco stages the postcolonial relationship between French and Creole through its portrayal of a Martinican community's struggle to defend its informal settlement. The battle fought by the central protagonist, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, makes clear not just that struggles over space are struggles over language and identity, but also that the colonized female body is one of their critical sites. The final chapter returns us metropolitan France with an engaging reading of Caché, Michael Haneke's forensic portrayal of the historical and psychical consequences of French colonial violence and its obfuscation. Notwithstanding the extensive critical treatment already received by the film (expertly synthesized here), Chandna's sensitivity to the entanglements of colonialism, space, and subjectivity draws out several illuminating insights. For Chandna, Georges (played by Daniel Auteuil) embodies the "colonial psychotic," whose individual lies are both metaphors and metonyms for the "national lies" about France's colonial violence, including the suppression of the demonstration by Algerians in Paris in October 1961 during which Majid's parents disappear. It is worth noting that Leuven has published Chandna's book under a non-commercial licence, making it freely available in PDF format. Doing so should help it secure the extensive readership and reach it undoubtedly deserves.