1. This war will for a long time be referred to as “the events” or, to use an expression found in Les parapluies de Cherbourg—a film contemporary with Le joli mai—“what’s happening in Algeria.”
2. The French word parlure, which has been translated here as “parlance,” refers in general to the sociolect of a given group of language users and has most often been used to describe turns of phrase and manners of speaking unique to francophone Quebec. The author develops his own unique understanding of this term throughout this book. [Translator’s note]
3. Part 3 of this book outlines the current state of hexagonal thought in relation to the resistance to “postcolonial studies” in France.
4. I speak of France, since Mudimbé and Glissant teach or taught in some of the most prestigious universities, and the reflections of Fanon are central for Homi Bhabha, one of the stars of “postcolonial studies” today. Since the writing of this book, the situation of postcolonial studies in French academia has changed significantly. Interestingly, literary scholars are still lagging behind.
5. See, for example, Daniel Lefeuvre, Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale (Paris: Flammarion, 2006).
6. Many others have engaged in this effort, which in fact remains to be named; I would cite here, as a gesture of friendship, only the syncretism of Susan Buck-Morss (see Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009], 151) and Anthony Mangeon’s integrative (or integrated) history (La pensée noire et l’Occident: De la bibliothèque coloniale à Barack Obama [Cabris: Sulliver, 2010]).
7. I privilege this term at the core of the book for its historical, descriptive value. I am not unaware of its racial connotations, or of the negative meaning it sometimes carries. Yet I hope to indicate with this term the possibility of using words to surpass words. I will return to this problem at the end of chapter 4.
8. The French expression prendre la parole, which in everyday language means simply “to speak” or “to have the floor,” forms a central element of Dubreuil’s thesis about possession, dispossession, and language. It has been translated here most often as “to speak up,” which gives the sense of speech as an event that breaks with both silence and prescribed language; this translation lacks the full resonance found in the French. In other cases, I have given an overly literal translation (e.g., “to take the word”) in order to maintain the movement of a specific argument or point. [Translator’s note]
9. I worked on the first version of this book from 2004 to 2008, the date of the original publication in French by Hermann. For the English translation, I revised and expanded the French text in March, April, and July 2011.
1. This phrase, a commonplace expression in French textbooks, has become emblematic of the way that French education has both constructed the object of history and interpellated the schoolchildren charged with memorizing it. [Translator’s note]
1. Most of this passage is translated and quoted in David Hacket Fischer, Champlain’s Dream: The European Founding of North America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 370–71, from which the current translation has borrowed, with slight modifications. All other translations of quoted material are mine, unless otherwise indicated. [Translator’s note]
2. It was even originally called L’Ile de la Prise de Possession (Island of the Taking of Possession), a name conferred in 1772 by Marion-Dufresne.
3. Léry finds in Aygnan the equivalent of the devil. André Thevet, a contemporary and personal enemy of Léry, gives a nearly identical description in Les singularitez de la France arctique (1558; Paris: Maisonneuve, 1878), chap. 25.
4. For a broad overview of the language of possession in the Spanish-speaking context, see Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). For another overview of the connections between witchcraft, possession, or demons and colonial expansion, in the context of the first French colonial empire, see Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), chap. 3. Anthony Mangeon developed my hypothesis one step further, while incorporating it into his own scholarly perspective in La pensée noire et l’Occident: De la bibliothèque coloniale à Barack Obama (Cabris: Sulliver, 2010); see chap. 2 in particular.
5. There are many recent republications of the Code noir. One can consult the version in Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code noir, ou le Calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002). The text can also be found online.
6. While revising this work for the English translation, I found a structurally congruous motif in a sardonic libelle from 1790, addressed to Condorcet by the colonists who were hostile to the abolition of slavery. The authors describe freed blacks with these words: “They will always be in ecstasy, disengaged from matter, they will always be in their seventh heaven” (Adresse de la jeuneses du Cap-François, Isle Saint-Domingue à Monsieur le Marquis de Condorcet, surnommé le Grand-Prêtre JEAN, Apôtre, depute de l’Abyssinie [Cap Français, 1790], 6). Emancipation is presented derisively here as a second legal ecstasy that would cancel out the body for the benefit of pure spirit. Let us also note that at the Assembly in 1794 during a debate on the abolition of slavery, the deputy Pierre-Joseph Cambon asked that the following anecdote be written in the trial register: “A citizen of color, who regularly attended the meetings of the convention, and who shared in all the Revolutionary movements, has just experienced such an intense joy, seeing liberty granted to all her brethren by us, that she lost consciousness altogether” (meeting of 16 Pluviôse, Year II [4 February 1794]; available on gallica.bnf.fr; my emphasis).
7. Less than a century later, the black Dutch preacher Jacob Capitein will “justify” the enslavement of the body so long as it is accompanied by a spiritual liberation of black people through the Christian faith. At the level of “spiritual principle,” he writes, one can “be submissive to the empire of the Devil” (Dissertation politico-theologica de servitute, libertati Christianae non contraria [Leiden, 1742], III, 1).
8. In particular, see Viktor Schoelcher, De l’esclavage des Noirs et de la législation coloniale (Paris: Paulin, 1833), chap. 6, p. 41; id., Abolition de l’esclavage: Examen critique du préjugé contre la couleur des Africains et des sangs-mêlés (Paris: Paguerre, 1839), 23; and id., Des colonies françaises: Abolition immédiate des Noirs de la législation coloniale (Paris: Paguerre, 1842), chap. 5, p. 67.
9. See in particular the introduction and the conclusion in Frantz Fanon, Peau noire masque blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 28, 202.
10. On the connection between the Hegelian dialectic and the example of the slave revolt, see Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
11. “Z’hovas” is a version of “Hovas,” which refers to the class within the Malagasy Merina tribe of Madagascar against which the French fought during the Franco-Hova war of 1883–96.
12. In particular, listen to Chansons coloniales et exotiques (Paris: EPM, 1995), 2 CDs, “Arrouah Sidi!”, “La fille du bédouin” (1927), “Nuits d’Outre-mer” (1932), “Viens dans ma casbah” (1935). Also see “Vive l’Algérie” in Alain Ruscio, ed., Que la France était belle au temps des colonies: Anthologie des chansons coloniales et exotiques françaises (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001).
13. Tartarin is thus “taken with a singesse,” (singe [monkey] + princesse; there is also a possible connection to the word sauvagesse, mainly used to refer to a female savage). Daudet, Oeuvres 927.
14. From Casablanca et sa région, quoted in the republication by Abdelmajid Arrid from the 1951 study by Jean Mathieu and P. H. Maury, Bousbir: La prostitution dans le Maroc colonial: Ethnographie d’un quartier réservé (Paris: Paris-Méditerranée, 2003), 11.
15. It is difficult to establish a genealogy of the expression “safety valve.” The oldest occurrence I have found (although there may be older ones) dates from 1839: the economist Constantin Pecqueur speaks of the necessity, for Europeans, of a “valve by which the effervescence might escape.” See Pecqueur, Economie sociale: Des intérêts du commerce, de l’industrie, de l’agriculture, et de la civilization en générale (Paris: Desessart, 1839), 2: 392. “Safety valve” is also found in the article “Colonie” that Joseph Chailley-Bert contributed to the Nouveau dictionnaire d’économie politique (vol. 1, 439a), which he codirects with Léon Say. Carl Siger (pseudonym of Charles Régismanset), among others, reprises the argument in 1907 in his Essai sur la colonisation (Paris: Mercure de France, 1907), 173. In English, the image of the colony as safety valve seems to be even more common, and, in 1824, an author could already describe it as a “metaphor so commonly employed” (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 15 [1824]: 435).
16. See Laurent Dubreuil, De l’attrait à la possession: Maupassant, Artaud, Blanchot (Paris: Hermann, 2003).
17. Page numbers refer to the standard English translation: Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), which has been used in this translation, in slightly modified form, to accommodate Dubreuil’s own translations from the German. [Translator’s note]
18. I am playing on the meaning of “natural peoples” (Naturvölker) to designate savages (cf. Freud, Totem and Taboo 5 and passim).
19. For a more substantial critical assessment that is sympathetic to psychoanalysis, see Ranjana Khanna, Dark Contintents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
20. The interplay of “other” and “ours” is even more complex in the original French, where “une autre” (another) contains the phoneme “notre” (ours), while “un être” (a being) echoes it. [Translator’s note]
21. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 143; id., L’An V de la révolution algérienne (Paris: Maspero, 1959), 133–34.
22. The English rendering of the phrase fails to capture the metaphor embedded in the original French, “la défectivité ne sera pas recouverte,” in which “défectivité” evokes French grammatical defectives, i.e., words that lack all the forms found for other similar terms. The metaphor suggests that, likewise, “pure reason” lacks the “grammatical” resources to account for certain thoughts, experiences, subjects, or speakers. [Translator’s note]
23. The critique of “universalism” is still ongoing. Is this the most urgent task? Perhaps. The surreptitious “universalization” of this critique is, in any case, not a very intellectually attractive solution, and I will return to this point in my analysis of métissage in chapter 3. The ideal would be to maintain the promise of the universal, without universalism.
24. The expression comes from the sixth stanza of Baudelaire’s “L’Héauton-timoroumenos” (“The Self-Tormentor”) from Les fleurs du mal: “Je suis la plaie et le couteau! / Je suis le soufflet et la joue! / Je suis les membres et la roue, / Et la victime et le bourreau!” [Translator’s note]
1. I have been developing the notion of singularity since the late 1990s. The term “singularity” is in no way my own, and it has become so widespread in so short a time that I sometimes doubt its effectiveness. To my mind, singularity is not preindividual (as in Deleuze and Guattari); neither is it a transcendental unity, radical oneness, quiddity, or the kernel of the subject. There is “singularity” when despite all the fragmentations, dissolutions, and openings, something obstinately persists, in diverse instances, designating a resistance as much to unification—in principle, synthetically, or a priori—as to complete dispersion. This process, to play with the words involved, is thus always bound to remain bizarre, strange, singular; it is ultimately eminently fragile. If works of art create singularities, including “us,” they are of course not the only sites for such events. An affable relationship, a statement, the experience of a rapture might prove comparably fortuitous. It is in this sense that I use the word “singularity” in this work. Two notable voices use a similar vocabulary within the articulation of francophone and postcolonial studies; I am thinking of Peter Hallward (Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001]) and Nick Nesbitt (Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008]). However many points of convergence exist between these authors and my version, it should be obvious that what I call singularity has nothing to do with the “singular individual” acting like a transcendental “creator-God” (Hallward 1), nor with a given historical process of “singularization” (cf. Nesbitt 20). All this shows, if it is necessary to do so, that similarity of vocabulary is only meaningful under certain conditions, which are always to be constructed (by the exhaustion of a phrase, for example; the possible work toward such a task I leave to others).
2. “La plus grande France” is an expression that first emerged in the 1880s in the context of the European “scramble for Africa” and French parliamentary debates on the necessity and the meaning of French overseas expansion. See Roger Little’s brief but insightful “Comment” on the term in French Studies Bulletin 26.95 (Summer 2005): 19–20. [Translator’s note]
3. The full title of the Crémieux Decree: Décret qui déclare citoyens français les israélites indigènes de l’Algérie, 24 octobre–7 novembre 1870.
4. Sénatus-consulte du 14 juillet 1865 sur l’état des personnes et la naturalisation en Algérie, arts. 1 and 2.
5. The leading ideologist of anti-Semitism in France, Drumont was an ardent anti-Dreyfusard who, as the deputé from Algiers, tried unsuccessfully to repeal the Crémieux Decree. [Translator’s note]
6. See “Ce que l’homme noir apporte” (What the Black Man Brings) in Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté (Paris: Seuil, 1964), vol. 1.
7. Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934) was a general, a colonial governor, and a member of the Académie Française whose views tended to favor autonomy over assimilation. Louis Léon César Faidherbe (1818–89), French general, colonial administrator, philologist, and archaeologist, is perhaps best known for creating the Senegalese Tirailleurs. [Translator’s note]
8. See part 1, note 1 in this book.
9. “La décadence des races” is the fourth chapter of Le Bon’s Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peoples (Paris: Alcan, 1894).
10. The series Bibliothèque de philosophie scientifique, in which Jules Harmand published Domination et colonisation (Paris: Flammarion, 1910), was directed by Le Bon.
11. In this same order of ideas, one thinks of the figure of the born criminal, of the survival of ancestors in him, in Gabriel Tarde’s La criminalité comparée and of Emile Zola’s La bête humaine.
12. It is worth noting here that although Mitterand held different positions regarding France’s various colonial possessions, during this period he was a staunch opponent of decolonization, stating famously that “Algeria is France.” He would later serve as the French president in 1981–95. [Translator’s note]
13. See James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000).
14. See Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Les sélections sociales (Paris: Fontemoing, 1896), chap. 15, on Native Americans. Also see Lapouge, L’Aryen, son rôle social (Paris: Fontemoing, 1896), 470: “It will be enough for the Jews to reserve the offices of justice and high military positions for themselves in order to maintain the submission of their subjects, as the French do in Indochina and the English in India.”
15. On the history of the concept of diarchy, see chapter 2 of Ramona Srinivasan, The Concept of Diarchy in Special References to Its Working in the Bombay Presidency (1921–1937) (New Delhi: NIB, 1992). For the transcription of his speech: http://projectsouthasia.sdstate.edu/Docs/history/primarydocs/Political_History/ABKeithDoc046.htm).
16. In 1909, when Gandhi is still in South Africa, Lord Morley rejects the “extremist” ideas of “self-government” (see http://projectsouthasia.sdstate.edu/Docs/history/primarydocs/Political_History/ABKeithDoc035.htm).
17. http://projectsouthasia.sdstate.edu/Docs/history/primarydocs/Political_History/ABKeithDoc025.htm.
18. This is one of the arguments of my book De l’attrait à la possession [From Attraction to Possession] (Paris: Hermann, 2003), which responds, through the question of haunting, to Maupassant’s critics’ obsession with the double.
1. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945).
2. The author uses the term “alter-mondialistes,” which is usually translated as “partisans of antiglobalization.” The French term, however, with its implication that an other world is possible, more closely echoes the affirmation of “Third-Worldist” (or “tiers-mondiste”) than the negative position of “anti-globalization.” [Translator’s note]
3. This and the quotes that follow in this paragraph come from the television show A vous de juger (You Be the Judge), broadcast on France 2, 8 February 2007.
4. This lexicon can be found at http://www.hci.gouv.fr/-Mots-de-l-integration-.html or in André-Clément Decouflé, “Mots de l’immigration et de l’intégration: Eléments de vocabulaire,” Notes et documents 42 (1998).
5. See Sylvie Tissot and Pierre Tévanian, Dictionnaire de la lepénisation des esprits (Paris: L’Esprit frappeur, 2002).
6. See, for example, Roger Toumson, Mythologie du métissage (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); and Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).
7. Quotations from the first volume of Gobineau’s Essai are from Adrian Collins’s 1915 English translation, which was reissued in 1967 by Howard Fertig. Quotations from the second volume, which to my knowledge has not been translated, are my own translation. [Translator’s note]
8. The “Nuit Blanche” is an all-night arts and music festival. “Sous le signe du métissage” was the official slogan of the 2006 event. [Translator’s note]
9. This word appears in English in the original text. [Translator’s note]
10. See the documents reproduced on pp. 112–13 of Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, Relation Authentique du Voyage du Capitaine de Gonneville ès Nouvelles Terres des Indes (Paris: Chalamel, 1869). Paulmier de Gonneville had returned from America in 1505 with a young indigenous man (“because it is the custom of those who reach the new lands of India to bring certain Indians to Christianity” [101]), who then married his daughter.
11. Code noir, art. 13. I am referring here to the legal decision more than to its application.
12. See Erick Noël, Etre noir en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Tallandier, 2006), 134–38.
13. Regarding this intensification of policing, see Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
14. Pecqueur was also one of the first defenders of the doctrine of European “association.” He was close to the utopianist circles (Fourierism, Saint-Simonism) that conducted a number of social experiments in Algeria. Prosper Enfantin, the “father” of Saint-Simonism, while praising the reciprocal influence of the East and the West, did not go as far as Pecqueur and instead recommended the spatial separation of different ethnic groups in Algeria (see Prosper Enfantin, Colonisation de l’Algérie [Paris: Bertrand, 1843], 482–83).
15. In particular, see chapter 2 of José Vasconcelos’s La raza cosmica: Misión de la raza iberoamericana, Argentina y Brasil (México: Espasa-Calpe Mexicana, 1948).
16. See chapter 14 of Vasconcelos’s “De Robinson a Odiseo,” also in La raza cósmica.
17. See all of chapter 6 of Gilberto Freyre, New World in the Tropics: The Culture of Modern Brazil (New York: Knopf, 1959); see in particular pp. 149 and 192.
18. I allude here to the final pages of Gruzinski’s La pensée métisse.
19. Caroline Ferraris-Besso, personal communication.
20. “Relation planétaire” (planetary relation) is a reference to the thought of Edouard Glissant, who sees in the Antillean colonial experience the realization of the concept of relation. Philosophically, Glissant’s theory is a pairing of the conceptual incarnation of Hegel and Deleuzian rhizomatics. The question of métissage is secondary here to the structure of relation.
21. See Catherine Bouthors-Paillart, Duras la métisse: Métissage fantasmatique et linguistique dans l’oeuvre de Marguerite Duras (Geneva: Droz, 2002).
22. See Bouthors-Paillart, Duras la métisse, 189–213, for an examination of Duras’s syntax.
23. During the Renaissance, the humanist Juan Latino, who taught at the University of Grenada, may well have been the first black slave to have composed using an “Ethiopian” poetic “I,” during a period in which Latin was the chief written language, in his poem Austrias (1573); see the extract cited in V. B. Spratlin, Juan Latino: Slave and Humanist (New York: Spinner, 1938), 40.
24. Williams’s text in Latin with a French translation can be found in Abbé Henri Grégoire’s book De la littérature des nègres [On Negro Literature] (Paris: Maradan, 1808). The sardonic commentary on the black muse is described on p. 239. Invocations of the autochthony of the new muses created by colonial expansion is even older than this example. In like fashion, Marc Lescarbot, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, titled a collection of poetry that he wrote while in North America Les muses de la Nouvelle-France (The Muses of New France) [Williams’s original Latin poem appears with an English translation in Vincent Carretta, “Who Was Francis Williams?” Early American Literature 38.2 (2003): 213–37—Trans.]. Chapter 3
1. See Spinoza, Tractatus, chap. 17, p. 191.
2. It is not irrelevant, but neither am I making a historical type of argument here. One must distinguish between my reclamation of the theologico-political and a design that would inscribe what follows into the posterity of the radical Enlightenment, to cite the celebrated work of Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). In chapter 5 of Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Israel points out in passing that enlightened “radicalism” is not always anticolonial.
3. The text of the law is available online at http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/histoire/villers-cotterets.asp.
4. See Shenwen Li, Stratégies missionaires des jésuites français en Nouvelle-France et en Chine au XVIIe siècle [Missionary Strategies of the French Jesuits in New France and China during the Seventeenth Century] (Saint-Nicholas/Paris: Presses de l’Université Laval/L’Harmattan, 2001).
5. On the uncertainty concerning the relationship between nation and language, see Daniel Nordman’s Frontières de France: De l’espace au territoire XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), sec. 5.
6. What about women of color, the noires? The movement does not seem comparable and still falls short of feminist revolutionary expression in the metropole.
7. The Cahiers de Doléances (Records of Grievances) were a list of specific complaints drawn up by each of the Three Estates and presented at the meeting of the Estates-General on 5 May 1789. [Translator’s note]
8. The same rhetoric appears in Grégoire one year earlier: “They are our children. Your children, and the paternal heart, repulse them” (Lettre aux Philanthropes 17).
9. Another commentary on this letter can be found beginning on p. 86 in Laurent Dubois’s excellent book A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
10. Ever since the Revolution it has often been said that Toussaint is not the real author of the texts ascribed to him. Certainly, they were proofread, perhaps ameliorated in a few places. But to claim that Toussaint was incapable of speaking and dictating is a surprising continuation of the phrase of colonial possession, in this case, turning the great general into a marionette.
11. On the historiographical quarrel surrounding the Bois-Caïman ceremony, see David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), esp. 89–92. Also see the commentary by Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), beginning on p. 139.
12. One need only point to the very small proportion of recent studies on Haitian literature from the nineteenth century. However, see Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), and also the work of Michael Reyes, who is currently working under my supervision on this neglected textual corpus.
13. Le Bon could be adapting the following atrocious reflection from the philosopher Hume: “In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.” David Hume, “On National Characters,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 213.
14. Sophie des Déserts, “L’homme du CRAN,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 December 2005. Of course, the French expression fils prodige is a play on words indicating “child prodigy” as well as recalling the evangelical context of the parable of the prodigal son.
15. Introduction to Rue d’Ulm, ed. Alain Peyrefitte (Paris: Flammarion, 1963), 14 [a normalien is a student at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure—Trans.].
16. An official memo from 1901 about teaching in Madagascar defines “reduced French” as “only including words and their usages in the language of everyday life, almost entirely corresponding to material things, qualities, and actions.” L’enseignement aux indigènes [Teaching Indigenes] (Brussels: Institut Colonial Intérnational, 1919), 2: 69.
17. See Louis-Jean Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme: Petit traité de glottophagie (Paris: Payot, 1974).
18. The Appel des indigènes de la république (Appeal of the Indigenes of the Republic) dates from 2005; it allowed for a movement and then a party (Indigenous People of the Republic) whose “primary objective” would be a “convergence” within a single antiracist and anticolonial dynamic (http://www.indigenes-republique.fr). I will have much to say about Bouchareb’s film and about the Indigenous People party.
19. Indigenism is sometimes accompanied by a catch-all mystique of Indian identity, authorizing a form of authoritarian and national social economy, from the Ecuadorian Victor Gabriel Garcés (see his Indigenismo [Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1957]), to the Bolivian Evo Morales and the Venezuelan Hugo Chavez. For a more positive view of the phenonmenon, see Courtney Jung, The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
20. For an introduction to Latin America, see René Prieto, “The Literature of Indigenismo,” in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, ed. Roberto Gonzaléz Echevarria and Enrique Pupo-Walker, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the first Haitian indigenism movement, see La revue indigène, 1927–1928 [periodical] (repr., Nendeln: Kraus, 1971).
1. Compare with the emphatic pronunciation of “Allah Akbar” and colonial songs such as “Arrouah Sidi!” (1914) and “Allah Oulla” (1931), in the CD anthology Chansons coloniales et exotiques (Paris: EPM, 1995).
2. This is also a way of remotivating and specifying the common identification between dogs and adversaries. This derision is ancestral. In the colonial context, it is equally ancient, and in the Spanish Golden Age, the protagonist of the Comedia famosa de Juan Latino (a black scholar) is constantly assailed by this insult. See Diego Ximénez de Encisco, El encubierto y Juan Latino (Madrid: Aldus, 1951), 182, 183, 188, 262, and 268.
3. See Guido Cifoletti, La lingua franca barbaresca (Rome: Il Calamo, 2004).
4. See Henri Estienne, Deux Dialogues du nouveau langage françois italianizé et autrement desguizé, principalement par les courtisans de ce temps, 2 vols. (1578; Paris: Lemerre, 1885). These examples are given, respectively, on pp. 83, 96, 101, and 281 of vol. 1.
5. Gleaned from listening to songs from 1910, 1931, 1934, and 1942 (respectively) from Ruscio’s anthology Chansons coloniales.
6. “Les Zouzous,” in the version by Léon Lehuraux, Supplément 1, in L’Afrique française, January 1932, 15. “Coquine,” an adjective expressing an inherent quality, also shares a phonetic similarity with “cocu” (cuckold, cuckolded). [The still-contemporary racist slur for a North African Arab in French, “bicot,” is a truncated form of “Arbicot” or “Arbico,” which are diminutive forms of “Arbi,” roughly equivalent to the English “Araby,” both of which are closer to the Arabic word for “Arab” (‘arabı-) than are the contemporary French (arabe) or English (Arab). The pun in question works only with this older form in French, where “Arbico–cu” condenses “Arbico” and “cocu”—Trans.]
7. Compare this with the Algerian nationalist group L’Etoile Nord Africaine, which is described as having just “thieved its juridical existence in a razzia” (L’Afrique française, 1935, 489).
8. A “chacal” is a soldier in the colonial army.
9. The phrase appears throughout Bhabha’s book, most prominently in chapter 4.
10. Claude Favre, seigneur de Vaugelas (1585–1650), was a grammarian and original member of the Académie Française. His name has become synonymous with elegant and correct French usage. [Translator’s note]
11. The Littré’s second definition of the term indigène (“That which has always been established in a country, speaking of nations”) gives the following example from Voltaire’s “Essay on General History and on the Customs and the Character of Nations”: “It is the peoples of Araby properly said, who were truly indigenes, that is, those who from time immemorial had inhabited this fine country without mixing with any other nation, without having ever been the conquered or the conquerors” (Ce sont les peuples de l’Arabie proprement dite, qui étaient véritablement indigènes, c’est-à-dire qui, de temps immémorial, habitaient ce beau pays sans mélange d’aucune autre nation, sans avoir été jamais ni conquis, ni conquérants). [From an online version of the Littré, available at http://littre.reverso.net/dictionnaire-francais/definition/indig%C3%A8ne.—Trans.]
12. I have received multiple confirmations of the appeal to petit-nègre as a pedagogical spur for schoolchildren up through the 1990s.
13. See Louis A. L. A. Lahontan, Nouveaux Voyages, 1703, vol. 1: “There are no figures in all of our Rhetoric more lively, nor more energetic, especially regarding matters hyperbolic, than there are in the Harangues and Songs of these poor people, who only express themselves with transports”; also “Metaphorical Harangue [made by an Onondanga leader, called in French Grangula, or Bigmouth] that was so stuff’d with Fictions and Savage Hyperboles,” in Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan, English preface to the New Voyages to North America (London: Bonwicke, 1703), A4.
14. This work, in its postwar version, is discussed in chapter 3 of Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs.
15. For this other take on Diallo, as well as a review of the majority reading of his work, see Janos Riesz, “The Tirailleur Senegalais Who Did Not Want to Be a ‘Grand Enfant’: Bakary Diallo’s Force-Bonté (1926) Reconsidered,” Research in African Literatures 27.4 (1996): 157–79.
16. Perhaps one should recall here the title of a book published in 1910 by Charles Mangin that played a decisive role in the strategic conception of a massive influx of African soldiers during World War I: La force noire (Paris: Hachette, 1910).
17. Which has nothing to do with “black writers” or “African writers.” One can be black and African and not seek to initiate one’s language in such a way.
1. See the report issued by the General Director of Academic Education, Ministry of National Education: Français: Classes de Seconde et Première, Futuroscope ([Poitiers]: Centre national de la documentation pédagogique, 2007).
2. Yves Bordenave and Mustapha Kessous, “Une nuit avec des ‘émeutiers’ qui ont ‘la rage’ ” [A Night with the ‘Rage-Filled’ Rioters], Le Monde, 8 November 2005.
3. See, for example, Pascal Ceaux and Marie Huret, “The Law of Silence,” L’Express, 27 February 2007.
4. See Guyotat’s Littérature interdite (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). One may also consult a 2010 interview with Guyotat in which he discusses his book Arrière-fond: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcs5ki_pierre-guyotat-1–5-ecriture-biograp_news.
5. Crouille is a racist pejorative used to indicate someone of Arab appearance. [Translator’s note]
6. See Alain Ruscio, ed., Que la France était belle au temps des colonies: Anthologie des chansons coloniales et exotiques françaises [sound recording] (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001).
7. The clip is accessible online at YouTube. The most contemptible kind of colonial racism permeates this tele-trash, which aims to domesticate the masses: from the grimaces of the fatma to the visual identification between the Arab and the trash can. [The song also hit #1 on the French pop charts.—Trans.]
8. It is known that this euphemistic expression in particular designated the actions of the French state during the Algerian War.
9. Chichmah (“shishma” in standard English transliteration) means “toilet” or “cloakroom” in Algerian dialectical Arabic. [Translator’s note]
10. These courses have been transcribed in issues of La revue littéraire, published by Editions Léo Scheer. A video of Guyotat’s first lecture is available online at http://www.leoscheer.com/spip.php?article693.
11. Double page numbers refer first to the French original, and then to the English translation. Single citations refer to the French. [Translator’s note]
12. The interplay between the hidden and the secret is constant. One recent example would be the title of Régis Debray’s book, Ce que nous voile le voile: La République et le sacré [What the Veil Veils: The Republic and the Sacred] (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).
1. The translation is my own, although I have referred to the English translation by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. Page numbers cited refer to the French edition. [Translator’s note]
2. Sonacotra (now called Adoma) was a state-run organization founded in 1956 that built and administered housing for migrant workers in France. [Translator’s note]
3. For example, see Theresa Parry, ed., The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).
4. See Marcyliena Morgan, Language, Discourse, and Power in African-American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
5. The translation of M. A. Screech has been modified slightly in places. All quotations come from chapter 56 of Le quart livre (The Fourth Book).
6. Graffiti from the ends of the platforms at the Gare de Lyon (Paris) and the Gare de Nîmes, observed in 2007. Of course, the graphic quality of these severed words is greatly diminished as presented here: many of these words are written in capital letters on the walls.
7. Claims of this sort were made by Jamel at the Zenith in 2005.
8. The original French text gives the URL for this website of this group (http://www.labanlieuesexprime.org), which has since been shut down under shrouded circumstances, likely having to do with content understood as being anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic, or both. [Translator’s note]
9. See Onésime Reclus, France, Algérie et colonies (Paris: Hachette, 1886), 422, where “francophone” and “francophonie” are used in quotation marks, indicating that for Reclus these words have yet to be normalized and widespread (whether they are personal neologisms or recently formed words).
10. I refer to the preface of Gilbert Gratiant’s Une fille majeure: Credo des sang-mêlé, ou Je veux chanter la France, poème; Martinique à vol d’abeille (Paris: L. Soulanges, 1961). In the body of the text, Credo refers to this work by Gratiant; “Credo” refers to the lines of this poem.
11. Gratiant was also a member of the French Communist Party (PCF).
12. This is a thesis running throughout Jean-François Lyotard’s book Economie libidinale (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1974).
13. http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1552. I also refer readers to the work of Meta DuEwa Jones, including both her book, The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), and her article, “Listening to What the Ear Demands: Langston Hughes and His Critics,” Callaloo 25.4 (2002): 1145–75.
1. The distinction between anthropology and ethnology is the result of this same history; I will return shortly to the specific gaps in these parasynonyms.
1. Regarding this child, who in 1800 emerged from a life lived in isolation in the woods in the South of France, there are articles by Philippe Pinel and Joseph-Marie de Gérando in Aux origines de l’anthropologie française: Les mémoires de la Société des observateurs de l’homme en l’an VIII, ed. Jean Copans and Jean Jamin (Paris: Place, 1994).
2. For example, see Clémence Royer, “Mémoire sur l’origine des Aryas et leur migrations,” in Congrès International des Sciences Anthropologiques Tenu à Paris du 16 au 21 août (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1880), 304–33.
3. The “dwarf” in question was the property of Stanisław Leszczyn´ski (1677–1766), king of Poland and Duke of Lorraine and Barrois. Bébé, whose real name was Nicolas Ferry, was famous for his maliciousness and intellectual limitations.
4. Mauss wrote this in 1914. See certain denunciations of colonial racketeering as a form of capitalism also included in Marcel Mauss, Ecrits politiques (Paris: Fayard, 1997) 190, 206.
5. See, for example, Out of Our Minds, Johannes Fabian’s book, cited in the part 1; also Vincent Debaene, L’adieu au voyage: L’ethnologie française entre science et littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).
6. In the early 1970s, the groundbreaking volume edited by Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973), was already taking stock of this crisis, in the context of English-language anthropology.
7. I am echoing here the expression that serves as the title of Marcel Detienne’s book, Comparer l’incomparable (Paris: Seuil, 2000).
8. See Laurent Ferri, ed., Ils racontent la mondialisation: De Sénèque à Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Saint-Simon, 2005).
9. These essays are contained in Jean-François Duvalier, Oeuvres essentielles, vol. 1, Eléments d’une doctrine (Port-au-Prince: Presses nationales d’Haïti, 1968).
10. In a more comprehensive way, and mining similar theoretical territory, the recent and remarkable work of Anthony Mangeon, La pensée noire et l’Occident: De la bibliothèque coloniale à Barack Obama (Cabris: Sulliver, 2010), offers a more precise reading of the description I have just given.
1. Perhaps something should be said here about francophone literary studies in hexagonal France. Generally dispensable in the grand scheme of the education of students, francophone literary studies exist in a particularly erratic way. Certain archipelagoes should be signaled, on more than one occasion, in relation to the colonial past of a city: the University Bordeaux-III, for instance, a city with a long involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.
2. ACHAC, or Association Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine (Association for the Study of the History of Contemporary Africa), is a collective of researchers formed in 1989. [Translator’s note]
3. “Denial” is the master trope of the preface to La fracture coloniale, ed. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandire Lemaire (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), to which each also contributes several essays, including the preface. “Archetypes” and “collective unconscious” appear on p. 71 of the collective work Zoos Humains, by Pascal Blanchard et al. (translated as Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008]).
4. This well-known multivolume collection by Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), has been translated as Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). The page numbers from the English translation are given first, followed by those from the French original. The translation here is my own, however. [Translator’s note]
5. Perry Anderson, with Pierre Nora and William Olivier, eds., La pensée tiède: Un regard critique sur la culture française [Tepid Thought: A Critical Look at French Culture] (Paris: Seuil, 2005), followed by La pensée rechaufée [Thought Warmed Over] (Paris: Seuil, 2005).
6. One might add here that the conventional reading of Said as a postcolonial critic whose primary concern is with the “other” and the production of stereotypes of otherness has been strongly challenged in recent scholarly work, particularly that done by those associated with the boundary 2 collective. Aamir Mufti, especially, has done much to shift the understanding of Said from a leading figure of postcolonial criticism to someone more concerned with “secular criticism,” in the singular sense of these terms Said himself developed throughout his work, referring to a sustained engagement with the structuring and restructuring of knowledge and language practices on a planetary scale. See Mufti’s “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Paul A. Bové (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 229–56; and the 2004 special issue of boundary 2, dedicated to the notion of what Mufti calls “critical secularism,” boundary 2 31.2 (2004). [Translator’s note]
7. The first and last sections of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), thus borrow, in disciplinary terms, from literary criticism and cultural studies.
8. I comment on “Le Cygne” at length in Laurent Dubreuil, L’état critique de la littérature (Paris: Hermann, 2009), chap. 4.
9. This bilingual edition (Albert Rivaud, Plato, Oeuvres completes, vol. 10 [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1925]) was used by Jacques Derrida, who, more generally, recalls a portion of this semantic field in Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 17.
1. All the same, the proximity to Bakhtin’s dialogical hybrid undoes the causal principle of this adherence.
2. Labyrinthe 17 (2004) and 14 (2003), respectively (http://labyrinthe.revues.org/index.html). I develop this line of thought in various venues, including “If Interdisciplinarity Means,” sans papier (http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/french_studies/publications/index.asp?pubid=3886); “What Is Literature’s Now?” New Literary History 38.1 (Winter 2007): 43–70; and “A Viral Lexicon for Future Crises,” Qui parle? 20.1 (2011): 169–78. A few occurrences of indiscipline appeared before 2003 in the work of the following and other scholars: Roberto Esposito, Categorie dell’impolitico (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), vii; Laurent Loty, “Sens de la discipline…et de l’indiscipline,” Pour l’histoire des sciences de l’homme 20 (Fall 2000): 3–16.
3. Regarding indiscipline and the postcolonial, see the part 3 of Anthony Mangeon, La pensée noire et l’Occident.
4. The work of Dipesh Chakrabarty could be the missing piece in the work of his friend Homi Bhabha, but does the historian move beyond his discipline? I would be hesitant to certify this.
5. See my “What Is Literature’s Now?” New Literary History 38.1 (2007): 43–70, as well as my essay L’état critique de la littérature (Paris: Hermann, 2009).
6. Nick Nesbitt would perhaps say so; see his Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).
7. Matthew Ward’s translation of The Stranger has been used here, and in some cases, slightly modified. Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). See also Albert Camus, Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 1162–68. [Translator’s note]
1. Those who choose not to use the parentheses, which I justified at the beginning of this book, cannot seriously hope that the artifice of writing in itself will project them into a future.