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2 Self and the City Glissant and Chamoiseau as Martinican Self-Ethnographers in Paris TROPIQUES shows this paradoxical pattern: Martinican literature seems to start in Paris, but it is only in Martinique that it blossoms . The urban space of the capital becomes a ground for exploration, which both brings the writers back to their own land and changes the ways they experience the colonial capital. But it is not until the 1950s that the Martinican writer’s situation in France features as a distinct literary theme relevant in the Caribbean. In the 1930s Aimé Césaire’s encounter with Paris leads to a second, imaginary journey from Paris to Africa and then back to Martinique. The experiences with the colonial capital and the other seem detached from the literary scene. In comparison, a later generation of Martinican writers proves to be sensitive not only to the brutality of being black in Europe but also to the latent irony in the situation: now they are the ones observing the world of the other, not the other way around. Paris, as it turns out, acts as an inverted mirror, bringing writers back to themselves and prodding them to turn inward and question the foreignness within. From that moment on, the writer’s concept of Martinique is indirectly or directly mediated through Parisian reality. This new perspective displaces the ethnographic literary paradigm put in place by the authors of Tropiques and serves as a means to frame self-interrogation. Ménil and the Césaires, who found their radical voice in Paris, then trained a new generation of authors such as Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant in Martinique. Thus, the next generation took part in a new educational program , valuing a different, dissident French culture and, above all, an African cultural heritage in the Caribbean. In addition, the election of Césaire as Martinique’s deputy in the French parliament confirmed that the black community in Martinique could indeed have an impact on the future of the country ; negritude had, at least to a certain extent, been realized politically. 55 Self and the City This context gives clues as to why a self-reflexive tone surfaces at this particular time. The path for the group involved with Tropiques was more straightforward: to resist against an overt oppressor by defining African heritage as a counterculture. The new generation’s path was less clear: these writers wanted to define the self and keep their integrity at a time of cultural and political assimilation to France. The intellectual no longer had a given place in this new Martinican reality, not in regard to the French other nor to the Martinican other. In addition, the author’s role as the voice of the people now seemed far from self-evident. In part, Césaire had already filled that role, but insidious French policies had also leveled all kinds of direct opposition. In the 1950s the hope that departmentalization would mean a higher degree of independence had already started to crack as France launched its politics of assimilation. French values were effectively disseminated through changes like the construction of roads, the establishment of supermarkets with imported French products, and television broadcasting from Paris; a powerful process of internalization of French values began, laying the foundations for an intricate pattern of co-dependence and (post)colonial neurosis that Glissant would later analyze in Caribbean Discourse. If ethnography were still to have any relevance, the focus on Africanism and a cultural other would need to change; a direct rejection of French colonialism was no longer relevant. Yet the idea of using ethnography as a means for resistance would prevail, although not in the shape of self-affirmation. As Michael Dash has pointed out, linking ethnographic poetics to resistance can be tied to the surrealist aesthetics introduced by Tropiques in the 1940s (“Caraïbe fantôme,” “Le Je de l’autre”). However, when the urban space emerges as a literary scene for the next generation of writers, the surrealist predilection for the marvelous is largely replaced by the trope of objective chance. As in Breton ’s famous opening sentence in Nadja—“Who am I?”—the encounter with the city and its objects is precisely what leads to the self-interrogation and metareflections that will, from now on, dominate Martinican narratives. Paris of the 1950s was very different from the capital that Aimé Césaire and the others had faced in the 1930s. Europe was recovering from the scars left by the...

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