Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World (review)

The task of mapping out a new area of academic study is at once exhilarating and perilous. There is no doubt a great thrill in drawing together under a new banner related threads of critical thought and creative work and in defining the conceptual terms and frameworks that will direct future studies in the field. The peril lies in prescription and limitation, in defining the frameworks and the terms too narrowly, and in the inevitable blind spots that exclude key places, times, and figures. From the publication of their first joint volume, Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (London: Arnold, 2003), the editors have relentlessly, and skilfully, shaped the contours of this new field, a hybrid of more ‘traditional’ Francophone studies and postcolonial theory. This is a laudable project, based on a justified feeling of discontent with its two cognate disciplines. Their latest volume ranges widely across the extremely rich and diverse field of non-metropolitan French-language thought, and will serve as an ideal introduction, especially for Anglophone postcolonialists. The uniformly excellent individual chapters deal with virtually all the major figures (the one obvious exception is the lack of Haitian material), and together confirm the fundamental importance of French-language intellectuals to the development of anticolonial thought. At the same time, the challenge to Anglophone postcolonialism and conventional French Studies binds the project to those disciplines in critical ways, and creates an underlying sense that the primary interlocutors envisaged are those in the two related fields. In addition, there is an implicit and explicit anxiety that runs throughout the volume over the fate of metropolitan France and its apparent inability to come to terms with its colonial past and postcolonial present, which perhaps deflects attention away from the nonmetropolitan, postcolonial world and creates an exaggerated sense of France’s importance to these debates. What is also interesting is that the authors of the twenty-four chapters virtually all work in European and North American universities, which exacerbates the sense that the centre of these debates is far from the non-Western sites whose cultures and intellectual traditions are being discussed. To ensure the continued development of Francophone Postcolonial Studies it will most likely have to engage more directly with, and no doubt prepare to be challenged by, intellectuals living and working outside of Western academia, who may not feel, for example, that colonialism remains the determining feature of the societies they live in, and that everything that goes wrong there may not be directly imputable to colonialism or the influence of former colonial powers. In short, such non-Western intellectuals may argue that the terms and focuses of the debates need to be altered to reflect more accurately contemporary realities in the worlds they live in. This kind of engagement would move the debates out of their Euro-American nexus and force them to enter into a perhaps more dissonant and unsettling, but also more productive, dialogue with the postcolonial world.