Francophone Postcolonial Studies

A critical introduction

Charles Forsdick, David Murphy

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134667451
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Languages & Linguistics
• Sous-sujet: Languages

This landmark text constitutes the first comprehensive overview of Francophone Postcolonial Studies. Moving away from reductive geographical or linguistic surveys of the Francophone world, this collection of original essays provides a thematic discussion of the complex historical, political and cultural links between France and its former colonies. Providing a theoretical framework for postcolonial criticism of the field, it also aims to trigger a genuine dialogue between Francophone and Anglophone scholars of postcolonialism.Part I provides a historical overview, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, addressing issues of colonialism, slavery and exoticism. Part II looks at language issues and discusses France's belief in the universality of its language and culture and the postcolonial challenges to that view. Part III discusses issues of diversity and multiculturalism in contemporary Francophone cultures. Part IV concludes with an analysis of the French-language contribution to postcolonialism as well as an examination of Francophone postcolonial thought and culture in the principal areas of the French-speaking world.Edited by two of the up-and-coming names in Francophone Postcolonial Studies, the collection includes contributions from an international team including some of the world's leading scholars in the field.

Part I
Historical Perspectives: From Slavery to Decolonization

1
Seeds of postcolonialism: black slavery and cultural difference to 1800

BY ROGER LITTLE

Postcolonialism is an intellectual fashion, and like all ‘isms’ will in due course become a ‘wasm’. Scholars disagree about its scope and meaning: its life will be shorter if, as a critical tool, it is perceived as unclear and confusing, or longer if it appears to reward continuing clarification and exploration.

The term presupposes a viewpoint prompted by the end of colonialism, the high period of which, for France, was roughly 1870–1920. Many have assumed that only texts written after that time (and particularly those by colonized peoples, as in the Negritude movement) – or even after the independence of former colonies – deserve their attention. This is to confuse postcolonialism as a critical stance and post-colonialism (with a hyphen) as a historical era. France embarked on colonization towards the middle of the seventeeth century, so there is every reason to suppose that postcolonialism can profitably explore the colonial and post-colonial from that time onwards. And since colonization was an adventurous encounter with, and an exploitation of, the Other, it was in turn preceded and accompanied by Europeans who stayed at home and reflected on the nature of individual, social and cultural identity. Their stance, one still often found today, used the Other as sounding-board, giving priority to their own preoccupations, something which postcolonialism endeavours to turn on its head. But post-colonialism has probed such earlier relationships to good effect and highlighted authors and writings traditionally excluded from the canon. Such revision is salutary and stimulating: it legitimizes the present study as well as the fresh consideration (and therefore republication) of previously neglected texts.

The interactive evolution and particular dosage of theories of economics, justice, religion and politics have, at any given time and place in human history, determined attitudes taken towards the employment of slaves. Only the strong-willed have ever bucked the general trend of the moment. In the ancient world, where citizenship was not dependent on skin colour, slaves were, by force of circumstance, predominantly indigenous. Later, closing ranks, Christians avoided taking slaves of their own persuasion, a position enshrined in law in the sixth century by the emperor Justinian. During the crusades, Saracens and Mahometans were therefore legitimate grist for both slavery and conversion. True to this logic, and supported by spurious arguments drawn from the Book of Genesis (9: 22–5, where Ham is cursed by his father, Noah, for seeing him drunken and naked, as if that were Ham’s fault, and as if it were proven that black Africans were descended from Ham), popes had no qualms in declaring Blacks subject to a similar double whammy. The great commercial opportunity came after 1492, when Columbus ‘discovered’ America – the inverted commas encapsulating the postcolonialist problematization of discovery.

That event, epoch-making in so many ways, was psychologically momentous in that, to echo Malvolio, Europeans had alterity thrust upon them. They were to react as Columbus did from the outset: on the one hand, a new world was revealed to be marvelled at and converted to Christianity, while, on the other, temporal sponsors needed satisfying and there was prospect of gold aplenty. On his second voyage, Columbus already had a coffle of slaves on board. In 1517, at the request of Las Casas, a Dominican prelate, ‘Charles V authorised the export of 15,000 slaves to San Domingo, and thus priest and king launched on the world the American slave-trade and slavery’ (James 1963 [1938], 4). Commercial motives were tricked out with humanitarian ones. It was purportedly to relieve suffering as well as to save souls that church and state colluded to have slaves taken to the new world from Africa to work the mines and replace the indigenous Caribs who had already succumbed to the rigours of forced labour.

This commercial speculation underpins the imaginative speculation reflected in what primarily interests us here, but some background facts are worth recording. In 1626, the first African slaves were held by the French in the West Indies (Munford 1991, II, 362). Following the creation of the Compagnie française des Îles d’Amérique in 1635, the French landed in Guadeloupe and Martinique, slavery in the West Indies being authorized by Louis XIII the next year. Colbert, Louis XIV’s energetic minister, was instrumental in establishing trading companies which led to further colonization. In 1664, for example, he formed the Compagnie du Sénégal et de Guinée, the better to organize the slave trade. It is scarcely surprising that accounts of travel in both Africa and the new world proliferated exponentially and were read avidly as contacts developed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. They fixed the representational paradigms and stereotypes which remained largely in place until the advent of postcolonialism.

Although France was not historically the first to engage in the exploitation of Blacks in settlements and planter colonies in the Americas, not doing so indeed on any scale until the last quarter of the seventeenth century, after Guadeloupe and Martinique had been declared crown property, it became second only to Britain in what was known as the triangular trade. At its height in the eighteenth century, this was an immensely profitable circuit, and colossal fortunes were made. Each stage brought handsome returns: on the African coast, guns, alcohol, iron bars and trinkets from Europe were traded against prisoners captured in internal wars; the ‘middle passage’, terminal for them, took them as mere commodities across the Atlantic to be sold to planters; and what they produced – gold rapidly being replaced by coffee, tobacco and, the most labour-intensive, sugar – returned to Europe, where a snobbish fashion for sweet coffee became a habit and a necessity. However much it cost the consumer, it cost the workers who had produced it, quite literally in Helvétius’s striking image (De l’esprit [1758], Chapter 7), popularized by Voltaire in Candide (1759, Chapter 19), an arm and a leg.¹

Meantime, in 1571, a law had been passed whereby ‘there are no slaves in France’ (Peabody 1996), mainly meaning that on French soil medieval serfdom had officially come to an end, but also covering the case of imported slaves. Its force would be whittled away only towards the end of the eighteenth century (whereas Granville Sharp introduced just such a law in Britain in 1772). What regulated relations between master and slave in the French colonies was the Code Noir, promulgated in 1685, the year of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Just as the latter was intolerant towards Protestants, so the former, under the guise of neutral jurisdiction, gave rights to owners which included violent physical punishment and even the death of their slaves. It is a clear-cut case in which justice and the law are two quite different things. Successive modifications to the Code Noir, made largely under pressure from the slave traders and plantation owners, articulate in their own interests, tended towards even greater limitations on slaves who, being illiterate anyway, remained unaware of any rights they might have. The law was not repealed until 1794, only to be reinstated by Napoleon in 1802. Not until the final abolition of slavery in the French colonies, in 1848, did it finally disappear from the statute books.

Legal, commercial and religious attitudes combined to entrench a sense of the white man’s superiority, with consequences that still resonate today. Both inferiority and superiority complexes are damaging to psychological and social health. While regulatory laws passed an ocean away could be ignored when found inconvenient, and the benefits of naked self-interest be allowed to override humane considerations on the grounds of an arguable common weal, the greatest paradox lay in the opposing forces, seemingly irreconcilable in the exploitation of black slaves, of Christian principle and practice: spreading the Word ‘legitimized’ the spreading of power. The ordinance to convert as many heathen souls as possible and the precept of loving your neighbour as yourself held no sway against the forces of capitalism, itself supported by the biblical parable of the talents (Matthew 25: 14–30). Only Quakers managed to square the circle, acting with exemplary humanity, providing education and decent conditions which proved to be entirely compatible with successful profits (Jones 1911). Ultimately, in all other cases, a minor but manifest biological difference, that of skin colour, reinforced by the deeply rooted symbolism of blackness as evil, was allowed to dominate all other considerations. Although exploitation would take other forms and a legal framework be put in place to guarantee liberty and equality, the persistence of this attitude shows how difficult it is to legislate for fraternity.

The principles of the French Revolution alluded to here are clearly at odds with the ownership and enslavement of other human beings. They are, however, ideals, and they were developed over decades of preliminary debate conducted between, on the one hand, those with vested interests in belittling Blacks, considering them as less than human beings, and, on the other, the ‘philosophes’ who, even if they sometimes had shares in the slave trade, argued as a matter of principle that, in the terminology of the Revolution still current today, they had human rights. There is and always has been a chasm between Republican idealism and the reality of French policies (see Dubois, Chapter 2).

The most powerful eighteenth-century representations of Blacks and of the arguments surrounding them figure in the literary writings of philosophes and of their like-minded precursors and followers. Montaigne, for example, had shown a willingness to tackle concepts of property and, notably in his essay ‘Des cannibales’ (1580: Essais, I, xxxi), to conduct a sympathetic discussion into the status of otherness, launching irony as an appropriate literary mode for such questions. Lahontan placed the Other at centre stage and injected a new dynamism into the debate about cultural difference. His Dialogues [avec] un sauvage de l’Amérique (1990 [1703]) were the result of time spent in North America, and they had a major influence on subsequent debate by the philosophes. Montesquieu, in Lettres persanes (1721), likewise gave the Other a voice and, with his greater literary talent, set a powerful fashion. Two foreigners in Paris critique and satirize French society. The famous remark ‘Comment peut-on être Persan?’ [How can one possibly be Persian?] implying incomprehension at otherness became a catchphrase and resonates to this day. Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, written in the 1770s, in which Tahitian civilization is shown to be admirable in many ways, continues and reinforces the tradition. Extensively studied by Todorov (1993 [1989]) in On Human Diversity, these texts are major stepping stones in the forging of a cultural identity. Even if such writings were more a critique of contemporary French society than a fully informed exposition of another culture, they may fairly be seen from our present perspective as of legitimate interest to a post-colonialist discourse.

While the thrust of financial and imaginative speculation was directed towards the new world, which provided the model for Rousseau’s (and, later, Chateaubriand’s) noble savage and the object for anti-slavery pleading, Africa remained the largely unexplored origin of wealth-creation. The widespread supposition that Blacks were inferior to Whites and that slavery was somehow their natural condition diverted attention away from Africa to the region where slavery was massively practised. Traders kept to a narrow coastal belt of West Africa. Only in 1799, at the very end of the period covered by this essay, did the world learn of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa of 1795–7, the first foray into a vast hinterland. Overland journeying to ‘black’ Africa was blocked by the Sahara; there was no Suez canal; all traffic went by sea down the west coast. Where Portuguese navigators had shown the way in the fifteenth century, other European nations sailed in search of trade and profit, with occasional subsidiary hints, in increasingly numerous travel narratives, of disinterested discovery. It was not until 1639 that France set up its first West African trading post, near the mouth of the Senegal river.

A hundred years later, despite the anonymous author’s wayward sense of geography, it is clear that the first black African hero in a French novel, Histoire de Louis Anniaba (2000 [1740]), returns to reign over an area upstream from Saint-Louis du Sénégal. In 1724 and again in 1736 and 1738, royal decrees had increased the severity of the Code Noir, adding new restrictions on Blacks. One of these was a ban on interracial marriage, and the extraordinary tale of Anniaba, based on historical fact, has him travel to France and after many adventures marry a white Frenchwomen. Cocking a snook at royal edicts in this way doubtless prompted the author’s anonymity, but the courage of his convictions stops short of foolhardy confrontation: his hero belongs to a relatively pale-skinned ethnic group (the Fulani, or Peuls) which does not have negroid features and can therefore be taken as Mediterranean in type; and, rather than denouncing the law head on, the author extols the principle of tolerance through various episodes, culminating in a stout defence of religious toleration in Anniaba’s kingdom. In other words, the author’s preoccupation is less with the Other as such than with attitudes in France. What is most surprising to the modern reader, perhaps, is the complete lack of racism evident in the novel. While we recognize that this is integral to the book’s didactic purpose (though it remains primarily a romp of adventure, suspense and derring-do), we may fairly assume that racism as we now understand it was not endemic to eighteenth-century French society (Little 2001a). Rather it took the form of a principled assumption that the Black was non-Christian, then sub-human, then anthropometrically ‘proven’ to be inferior.

This is clear in Marivaux’s play La Dispute, first performed in 1744, where black guardians are employed to bring up four children in a state of nature so as to help resolve a dispute – never resolved of course – about whether men or women were the first to be unfaithful. This play-within-a-play had a direct influence on a celebrated modern novel, La Planète des singes by Pierre Boulle (1963), not just through its form and its interplay of races, but also through the very name of the key character Mesrou/Mérou (Little 2001b), showing its abiding relevance.

Less ambiguous black heroes entered the field of French awareness shortly after Anniaba, and did so via translation, a factor often neglected in considering the development of preoccupations and tastes. Just as material drawn from Spanish sources had given some of the earliest images of the new world, so the arrival in French, in 1745, of Othello and Oroonoko from Shakespeare and Aphra Behn respectively marked a sea change. As so often happens, the more simplistic hero had the greater impact. Oroonoko became the model of the black rebel leader, his characteristics and even his name being echoed in the representation of Blacks to the present day (see Seeber 1937; Little 2002b). Shakespeare’s problematic Caliban has been revived and transformed, especially among West Indian writers, and become an almost inevitable point of reference for postcolonialist scholars. Hard on English heels came one of the hardest-hitting theoretical indictments of slavery in Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748, Book XV), building on his critique in Lettres persanes. From the middle of the century onwards, as they became increasingly synonymous with slaves, Blacks would be foregrounded more and more in philosophical debate and in all the genres of literature.

The purposes of exploring cultural difference, a factor with which post-colonialism has engaged centrally, were well served by a succession of antislavery writings and noble savages, the latter acting as a kind of ultimate litmus test for ‘civilized’ society in the way that extraterrestrials do in modern science fiction. One of the most influential of them, himself influenced by Oroonoko, was Ziméo, the eponymous hero (with an initial Z as marker of his exoticism) of Saint-Lambert’s tale of 1769, purportedly narrated by a Quaker. To the time of the Revolution, he provided the model both for subsequent black heroes and, through the first edition’s closing authorial ‘Réflexions sur l’esclavage’, which neatly encapsulate the abolitionist position, for much of the ensuing debate, not fully critiqued until James (1963). Those remarks, reprinted in the widely read periodical run by Du Pont de Nemours, Ephémérides du citoyen, ou Bibliothèque raisonnée des sciences morales et politiques, include what we now recognize as unscientific old chestnuts but also other points which have not lost their validity (Saint-Lambert 1997 [1769], 21–3).

Hard-headed slave owners generally proved impervious to the blandishments of soft-hearted abolitionists, just as realpolitik ignores political idealism. Economic arguments against slavery, intended to strike at the very heart of capitalists’ thinking and operations, were frequently deployed. But, as Seeber writes, ‘the illusory appeal of free labor was not easy to dispel’ (1937, 93). The eighteenth-century impulse towards classification and categorization led scientists to explore (but never to explain satisfactorily) why Blacks were black (or occasionally albino, an unsettling ‘aberration’: see Little 1995), why they should be classed as nearer monkey than man, and why therefore they were by definition inferior creatures. Even the embryonic science of genetics could not explain the origins of difference. Many a writer, even those sympathetic to anti-slavery arguments, saw Blacks as fit for work in the tropics in a way that Whites were not, believing on biblical authority that Blacks were ‘scorched by the sun’ (New English Bible, Song of Songs, 1: 6), and felt that the American colonies would have to be abandoned if slavery were abolished. So science, ‘reason’ and capitalism reinforced each other against Blacks, a phenomenon that continued well into the twentieth century. Montesquieu was eloquent in his principled denunciation, on economic grounds, of such a position, and many ‘philosophes’, from Mirabeau to Du Pont de Nemours, followed his lead, forcefully echoed in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Voyage à l’île de France (1773, Chapter 12). Only in 1776, however, did Hilliard d’Auberteuil elaborate the first concerted programme of emancipation (Williams 2002), while the fullest economic argument was presented by Condorcet in his Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres (1781; Williams 1999). The cost of purchasing and maintaining slaves for a short working life and limited returns, it was demonstrated, exceeded that of even indentured labourers, who drew a wage but were neither bought nor housed, clothed or fed at the landowner’s expense.

A hugely influential work went through no fewer than thirty-four editions in half that number of years, expanding as it went and becoming increasingly abolitionist in its stance. That was the Histoire philosophique et politique du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770), its contents reflecting its ambitious title, of which the abbé Raynal was the prime mover but to which Diderot in particular contributed major antislavery components. It became a point of reference and a quarry for telling episodes to be recycled in other forms. Pigault-Lebrun, for example, opens his preface to Le Blanc et le Noir with the words: ‘J’ai lu Raynal, & j’ai écrit cet ouvrage’ (Pigault-Lebrun 2001 [1795], 3).

Two enlightened long-term observers of the American scene whose names reveal that their origins lay in France, Hector Saint-John de Crèvecœur and the Quaker Anthony Benezet, were particularly influential among French abolitionists in the 1780s. The former’s translation of his Letters from an American Farmer (1784) introduced the French to the writings of the latter and included comme...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the case for Francophone Postcolonial Studies
• PART I HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: FROM SLAVERY TO DECOLONIZATION
• PART II LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY IN THE FRANCOPHONE WORLD
• PART III POSTCOLONIAL AXES: NATION AND GLOBALIZATION IN CONTEMPORARY FRANCOPHONE CULTURES
• PART IV POSTCOLONIAL THOUGHT AND CULTURE IN THE FRANCOPHONE WORLD
• Bibliography
• Index