Colonial! The word is everywhere. In newspapers, journals, and books; at conferences, lectures, and symposia. At times it seems as though the present has been invaded by the colonial past. And not just in Europe. What are we to make of the former colonial “possessions” that remain in thrall to an unresolved history, or to the nations of the Americas (from Brazil to the United States) that still resist complete repudiation of their former practices of domination? As for this most recent period of globalization, it sometimes feels as though we are currently experiencing the rebirth of the same imperialism that began in the Renaissance. And yet, while the colonial is being spoken of once again, the meaning and significance of the term are far from self-evident. In the virtual space that will be privileged throughout this book—that of “contemporary France,” whose very definition is so problematic and uncertain—this recent clamor over colonization contrasts sharply with the combination of silence and deafness that immediately followed the great wars of independence in the previous century. A Parisian, interviewed by Chris Marker in his film Le joli mai, would say of the moment in 1962 when the Evian Accords were signed, putting an end to the Algerian War: “Some events it’s best to keep quiet about” (Y a [des] événements qu’il est préférable de se taire [sic]).1 For the interviewee to say this was an implicit acknowledgment of the necessity of censure, and the anacoluthon in the sentence further suggests how deep the impulse was within the social order to pass over the “events” of Algeria in silence, and to merely “keep quiet” in general.
Certain “events” stifle voices; others—in the metropole and elsewhere—encourage a new discourse about imperialism and its colonial remnants. But is it enough simply to speak of the colonies in order to undo the pain? Certainly not. Oppression had its own dedicated, manifest forms of expression that became deeply and stubbornly embedded, even in the texts of contemporary well-meaning writers and thinkers. If we want to talk about the colonies let us first look at how discussions of empire and even our very language habits are linked to this ancient usage, established in the history and politics of the past. Let us also be attentive to the contrapuntal speech that we know today as postcolonial francophonie. And let us not create too wide a gap between research relating to the imperial past and the critique of language that in fact allows for this inquiry. This is one of the major aims of this book, which develops a critique of colonial experience through an examination of its linguistic reality. The colony is also valuable as an example of other processes of domination and liberation, where the real is still grasped in words and meanings. To speak of the colonies can be a critical gesture and, at the same time, the means for moving beyond the specifics of one particular colonial case—the end goal being to steer us toward a broader consideration of the relations between speech and political society as a whole.
Let me be even more specific. Language is not all there is to it; that which is said also acts. One forgets this, however, whenever “the time of action” is put in opposition to dialogue, to the soliloquy, to proclamations. Although it may appear to go against the grain, the hunt for improper turns of phrase, the desire to purify speech in order to adapt it to “modernity,” is in fact one more way of not understanding the empire of language in society. There is no predetermined destiny that has condemned speech to futility in advance; although, yes, all too often we engage in empty talk. Yet to assign equal value to things and to their verbal designations in general only creates a neutral space with an ineffective basis. Thus, replacing the French word clochard (hobo) with sdf (sans domicile fixe, i.e., “homeless”) might seem to be an improvement, but the fact remains that by stripping away precisely the improbable sublime quality of misérable (wretch) and replacing it with a technocratic abbreviation, we are left only with the notion of poverty in its place. We live the phrases we hear, repeat, and pronounce; we live on them, as well.
In the so-called domain of scholarly knowledge, the impact of the “linguistic turn” has been widely felt since at least the 1960s. Philosophers, linguists, theoreticians, and critics have devoted endless energy to studying the verbal dimension of collective action and subjective subsistence. Endless, and perhaps excessive. Some might therefore say that it is time to “close the parentheses,” forgetting that in making such a statement they are using a typographical metaphor and that they continue to speak. The concern with language would only disappear with the arrival of extraverbal communication allowing us to accomplish as much as, or more than, verbal communication does. While we await the arrival of direct telepathy that will short-circuit our current discourses, it is probably best in the meantime to distrust the effects of transparency. The force of the fist, the humming of the city, the sight of the squirrel outside my window, the snow falling on my head, the polluted air I breathe, all affect me without speaking, yet the moment I speak of them they take place otherwise, and their effects differ. Others reckon that, to the contrary, everything has been affirmed, and thus all we need to do now is repeat. Most likely, newness is never anything but an unprecedented reordering of the old; this scarcely means eternal repetition.
So, to come to the end of the first part of this prologue: the book you are reading concerns itself with its own act of enunciation. Research can have an object; or, more modestly, it can concern itself with a phenomenon. But scholarly work must also be cognizant of its own manner of speaking if it intends to touch on points where the real is spoken. Ultimately, it must speak up, instead of simply repeating ready-to-use phrases without attempting to comprehend them. This book is about how events, states, and individuals can alter established orders and existing connections in the world by means of a discourse that simultaneously describes and prescribes. It asks how it is possible to impose a situation while speaking to other people, how to construct a verbal trap from which there is no easy exit, how to build one’s life by resisting the customary jargon. If I must locate my work as it relates to established fields, if only to reassure readers, let me say now that what I am doing here can be called a critique of the power of language, one that is grounded in literary study as well as in other institutional fields, including history, philosophy, and political science. The goal is to grasp more fully the medium of our expression each time we designate what happens between the order of the world and that of language. It is necessary, therefore, to consider multiple genres and modes of discourse (legal texts, travel narratives, drama, poetry, folklore, etc.), and to account for differences among them so that we are able to recognize that not all tones are of equal value and not all words correspond. Variation exists according to who utters the words—when, how, and where.
Simultaneously, my work is part of a more circumscribed field of study, that of colonization in the modern era, starting with France and moving overseas. Beginning with the “discovery” of the New World, the variable country that is La France constituted different expropriations, in America, in Asia, in Africa, in Oceania, that one usually calls “colonial empires.” The “empire of language” refers to the mobilizations of speech, usage, and discourses in the formation of this type of domination. Yes, the colonies were created with the help of new modes of exploration, by the voice of the canon and the language of the bayonet, but they were equally created by the repetition of formulas and verbal injunctions, the expressions of thinking in French. The empire of language both does and undoes the social fabric. Empire returns to itself, so to speak. The words and utterances of the language take on such a force that they authorize a response from other speakers. A debate presents itself otherwise; a confrontation is heard that uses parlances,2 disassembles them, and breaks the fortuitous yet tenacious captivity of ready-made phrases. A theater of words, having been constructed through the accumulation of colonial discourses, can be disrupted when other voices come forth to smash the framework of the preceding representation. This process is that part of decolonization which happens through the advent of a rebellious francophonie, a voice expressing itself in French against colonial usage. Because literature is born from the transpiercing of ordinary languages, it plays a singular role in this defection from social prescription. So it was for French colonization, which quickly found itself attacked by books at the same time as by weapons and bombs. The trouble with language (which is also, of course, its oblique, menacing power) is that it does not allow anything to be said once and for all. What remains for us who speak French are the colonial lexicon and turns of phrase, the framework of thought that commandeered the place of domination through verbal expression. For this reason the word “postcolonial” should only be written with certain precautions, such as the form I most often use, (post)colonial. If one situates the historical and national event—which I am not sure exists in a pure state—in the colony, one allows oneself to refer to the “postcolonial” as to the end period of the empires assembled by the countries of Europe during the last several centuries. If, on the contrary, colonization is understood in light of the linguistic knot of power, any discursive resistance prompts us to admit that for the time being it is only a question of the (post)colonial: the afterward is announced as structurally prevented, impeded, disrupted.
We feel this acutely in France. The recent presidential controversy regarding “national identity,” the commentaries on the “cry for help” or the “silence” from the banlieues, the idea of endowing a black person with speech so that she might read the news on television, the editorial or media debates about colonial amnesia or fracture, and even advertising about métissage or cultural dialogue: these are a collection of marks, of symptoms. (Post)colonial questions, sometimes considered by their very nature to be incompatible with French life,3 have in a very short period come to occupy an important place, in face-to-face discussions among friends as well as via new forms of digital communication, and in historical essays as well as political speeches. Critique has a reactive element, a present from which it is cut off by the evolution of its thinking, and which helps to inform it. The time of thought is not that of the moment, but it is nonetheless concerned with the present state of the world, the linguistic veins of the social, so we will not segregate our bel aujourd’hui. It is self-evident that the (post)colonial is not the only prescription that weighs on us; it is not necessarily the most lasting form of domination. A particular interdiction, however, weighs things down here, perhaps even more pervasively than the monitoring of gender and sexuality or the suppressing of the voice of the poor. As we shall see, it is an interdiction, in any case, whose rules have been examined and reproduced with a rare insistence for some years now. In the anglophone world, postcolonial studies have provided an academic response to these kinds of sociohistorical problems. Notoriously, France has had difficulty tolerating what is often perceived as a typically “Anglo-Saxon” mode or obsession. One might argue, however, that francophone writers of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Albert Memmi, and Frantz Fanon, were already writing (post)colonial works. One could add to this list names from the more distant past, such as those of Haitian political theoreticians Demesvar Delorme and Anténor Firmin, or from the recent past: Valentin-Yves Mudimbé or Edouard Glissant. Is it irrelevant that Glissant wrote, and Mudimbé and a number of others continue to write, from the American campuses where they work? In other words, there is no shortage of (post)colonial francophone studies; it is only in hexagonal France that they tend to go unrecognized.4 The situation, however, is gradually changing within the French intellectual and editorial scene. Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha are being translated into French. Historians of colonization, who not long ago could find only a very limited readership in France, now have access to the most powerful publishers. The problem, of course, is that the translation lag immediately obscures the debates that were triggered by works just now appearing for French readers; polemics developed on a larger scale will be restarted twenty years later at the local level. Then the French publication of Spivak or Bhabha is executed in the name of recognized values, and the absence of risk taking neutralizes their claims. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture will be the subject of discussions no more profound than those of the significance of Tom Cruise’s latest movie; recognition will not involve ideas but rather judgments about the star system of the American university. The result is a bifurcated situation, where essential texts in postcolonial studies are introduced in abridgments or adaptations, emptied of substance. The more important these works are in their original form, the more frightening is their theoretical flaccidity when that original form is lost, and they become, in their revision, a model for others to follow. In many respects, this book is different than much of what is published these days, and it will puzzle those who think that the colony should be studied in a single way. I consider the historical dimension, critical thought, and francophone pluralities together. The (post)colonial is neither a piece of evidence nor a mere speculative motif. Never mind that I am breaking with the habit of considering only one dimension of the subject: such is the price of the renewal of this field. To continue to speak about speech and the colonial, after Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, or Homi Bhabha, will only make sense on the condition of creating a singular approach.
The (post)colonial is a category constructed by interpretation. The actuality of conquest and imperialism as historical events is not the issue. Categories do not exist in a free state. To speak of the construction of the (post)colonial according to the contours I present in no way means that I am neglecting history. On the contrary, a certain set of gestures, acts, and statements is articulated in such a way that the colony means something other than a vague label. My demonstration is governed neither by the “essence” of the (post)colonial nor by the events “alone”: it refers to the facts, by pointing out their artificiality (they are made, or facta in Latin). I have chosen to situate the (post)colonial in the moments where European agents and ideas meet people from other continents, beginning in the Renaissance. In the first section I will clarify that the experience of the colony is, for me, dependent on geographical expansion, on slavery, and on the social control of populations considered to be exogenous. My favorite examples throughout are those that depend on the history of “France”—France being the performative name of the specific set of linguistic, legal, and political practices that shaped a country. On occasion, I will depart from the French colonial empire to examine other sites, especially the American context of the anglophone world. These boundaries may well seem incidental, determined largely by my own history as a French citizen now working in the United States, but there are also important similarities and correspondences among the different (British, American, French) empires.
Let me add a side note regarding this last point. People complain today about the mania of contrition and repentance.5 I for one believe neither in the innate virtue of formerly colonized peoples nor in the wickedness of European civilizations. What the Japanese did in Korea and China might rightly be called colonization. The spectacle of dictatorships in the Third World prevents us from thinking of any automatic goodness of the formerly oppressed. Even in the heart of Europe, I do not think France was “the worst,” insofar as the scale of values in this case simply makes no sense. In addition, I am not demanding contrition, if this is understood as a nice, tearful ceremony, as financial compensation teeming with ulterior motives, or as an apologetic preamble to every decision. That neither France nor Europe has a monopoly on imperial domination, that they did not absolutely exterminate Africans or Indians, must not drive us to minimize, leave to the side, or excuse colonization. Without making a moral issue of it, this book casts a keen eye on (post)colonial domination and on domination tout court.
Colonization, then, will be able to speak itself here—especially in the French language, with obvious consequences for the idiom itself. The communication and competition among the European powers help us nevertheless to surmise that theories and solutions have been developed in response to one another, from one place to another. It is worth pointing out that, counter to the majority of current thinking on the subject, I take into consideration not only different positions within the colony (the colonist, the administrator, the commentator, the indigene, the soldier, the priest, etc.), but differences between, in particular, the first and second colonial empires. During the Grand Siècle especially, a manner of thinking about the colonial other came to be, enabled by a ready-made language. This language emerged not from the accumulation of texts; rather it was a phrase, a syntax of thought created by language, which concretized into phraseology. Every society is phraseological, transmitting statements and sets of ideas carried by ordinary speech, dominating us when we aren’t thinking, speaking in our place. The weather and our health—we hear ourselves talking of these things, perhaps with disappointment, but most of the time without major consequences. But when the male chauvinist, antiproletarian, or racist phrase nourishes our thinking, then the trouble grows. In every case, society prescribes what we speak and think; it is only the intensity and the scope that vary.
Beyond the question of complicity, each empire has developed particular accents for its (post)colonial phrase, and I will focus on these nuances. One could be still more specific and deny that there is one phrase of the French colony. There is most certainly not simply one discourse. However, I maintain the importance of seizing a phrase that produces discourses, and then prompts adversaries, attentistes, and colonial servants and agents to speak in a comparable register. The historical centralization of France, dating from before the Revolution, gives factual support for this hypothesis. The fact remains, I confess, that all things being fragmentable, we may come to doubt the existence of “colonization” (as a single, unified concept), even in a limited space and time. Plurality exists, but it does not prohibit singularities. I find a value, if only a heuristic one, in constructing the (post)colonial, in seeking out differential repetitions, from the time of Jean de Léry (1534–1613) to our time. The construction of the (post)colonial is valuable for what it allows us to think, whereas its rejection, by means of a discontinuous relativization of people and periods, serves the caricatural return of the past.
No thought comes without risk. Reservations about the longue-durée approach, about the linguistic turn, and about comparative analysis are innumerable. If I were not sympathetic, at least to a degree, with these reservations, this would itself be a bad sign, or the symptom of a risk-free approach. It is not in anyone’s best interest to carve research up into specialties where habit and prudence chip away at the necessary peril that must exist for thinking to occur. Without this intellectual peril it would be better to enter a corporate office than to venture into books and archives. Nor is it enough to locate patterns, motifs, or tropes and then to simply denounce the effects they produce (deprecation of the Oriental, racism against the Other). It is still necessary to show that a prescriptive diction, the usage of which was once commonplace, is still capable of speaking (to) us. In this case, it is not the unconscious expressing itself, even if it sometimes takes advantage of the already-said. That which makes itself heard is neither ourselves nor others, but the worst element of a society that we allow to become an external and objective force: the “general in the head,” as they said during May 1968. The good news is that language, by all the measures of its empirie, its empiricism (utterance, phrase, discourse, langue, tone, style, voice, speech, text, discipline, literature, etc.), can do a service or a disservice to the empire that it undergirds. One must study the trap before trying to dismantle it. The demonstrations in this book also interrogate how the emergence of an unexpected word, one that explodes interdictions and apparent limits, contributes to the weakening of domination. Literature, above all, which finds itself a kind of guarantor of meaning, both decomposes ordinary languages, and more often than political declarations, law, or conversation, produces singularities that repel the effects of coercion.
My goal in this book, therefore, is to interrogate the general connections between human verbal language and the social or political order, without identifying these different elements a priori, or considering them to be fortuitously paired. The specific category of the colonial, and of the postcolonial, is our explicit problem. Within this existing framework, I opt for the long historical view, going from the territorial expansion of Europe to the “New” World up until today. This inclusion of the first colonial empires, of the conquest of America, of slavery, and of the first battle for independence (with the striking example of Haiti) is to my mind indispensable and salutary—especially so given that postcolonial studies, and especially postcolonial “theory,” have for so long confined themselves to the last two centuries. I am more concerned, as it will become clear, with the corpus in the European vernaculars, particularly but not exclusively French and English. This is a way of focusing the study on common languages, whose elocutionary practice affected domination as emancipation—whereas Arabic, Bambara (or Bamanankan), Khmer, or even the Creoles were not used both pro and contra to the same extent. This refusal to ignore languages with contradictory usage is thus an epistemological decision that correlates with my desire to consider together the words and works of both colonizer and colonized, in order to better understand a past that is not past. To deny or attempt to erase the phenomenon of colonialism is neither viable nor is it even possible, and this is why I try in these pages to reconfigure our vision of the world from the perspective of a difficult liberty, acquired through an intense and particular kind of domination. However, to consider the “postcolonial” as an infinite era succeeding the wars of independence (that is, turning this category into a new eternal, unitary horizon) would quite simply be to continue anew along the same old path. There can be no postcolonial moment without taking into account the still living and unfolding fullness of the colonial; yet as soon as the instant of this after comes, it will be high time to open an aftermath, to which I hope this inquiry will be able to contribute. It is my goal to prepare and specify the composite mode of a neo-global experience, facing the tensions between anachronism and event, between the singular and the promise of the universal.6
This book is divided into three parts, which approach the francophone (post)colonial through three successive examinations of the experience of language. Part 1, entitled “Phraseologies,” considers the articulation of the discourses of colonization and finds within their boundaries the practice of a possession. The dark side of the Enlightenment is affirmed once again; moreover, before and after the era of the philosophes, the colonial empire is described and controlled as the land of enchantment—of magicians, phantoms, spirits, ecstatics. Beyond the effective appropriation of resources, of labor and of bodies, the description of savages as possessed, and their transformation by texts into magical primitives, serve the illusory design of civilization—that fallacious process that would banish the supernatural while trying to propagate its practice outside the closed field of Europe. The colonial phrase of possession organizes imperial politics. Coexisting in a contradictory manner, doctrines of domination find a meaning in the improbable coexistence of colonists and indigenes. The contemporary treatment of immigration is still partially articulated based on the syntax of thought that the Code noir consolidated, on the narratives of Jesuit fathers, or on the pedagogical treatises of the Third Republic. Even the term métissage is not quite the positive category it is sometimes thought to be, and an investigation into its success (from its use by black African intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s to contemporary phraseology) demonstrates a solidarity with the hybrid, which is the westernized autochthon. None of the positions are identical in the cases examined; Frantz Fanon is neither Victor Schoelcher nor René Depestre. The fact remains that a textual collectivity reestablishes the phrase of possession, helping us to think how to speak from this place without letting the predicted ventriloquism become a reality. Confronted with prescription, as with colonial enchantment, speakers emerge to cancel the well-understood partitions and to allow the advent of other thoughts. This hijacking was already in the works at the end of the eighteenth century when a black poet writing in Latin lifted up the voice of an “African Muse” in Jamaica.
Part 2 focuses on the indigenous7 work of speaking up (prise de parole).8 With the structure of colonial possession in place, speech was made extremely difficult for the colonized. Under the ancien régime, slavery, by its very nature, denies even the possibility of black discourse. Yet in 1789, through alterations made to the theological and political control exercised by Catholic Missions, the unheard-of occurs. During the course of the Revolution, particularly in Saint-Domingue, black voices will resound in French. As a result, the censure of indigenous speech will be accomplished chiefly by means of control over the national language, which is occasionally granted to the “primitives” by the advocates of the second colonial empire. The polemics about the teaching of French, the gaps in school enrollment rates, and the celebration of the apprenticeship in language are tied to a concretization in the language itself. Colonial usage was spread by newspapers, songs, books, and teachers, which operated by and large independently of political changes. Modern censure would thus prohibit the extraordinary from happening by programming the indigene’s French, in which the options were to speak either pidgin French or the language of the whites, and by determining a structural deafness to the indigene’s French. Francophonie, if we can use this term in a maximal way, may designate the operation that consists, for the one who speaks, of designating himself or herself as colonized, while at the same time transpiercing prescriptive conventions. The pioneering writers of the 1920s opened a second voice. Yet the event must always start anew. All those who speak French today still have to disengage themselves from colonial usage. Citizens from the banlieue who grab our attention through words, writers for whom francophonie must be only a convenient term, journalists who too often remain within its parlance, people and passersby who speak among us, must bear witness to a beyond of the linguistic social field in the life of a word.
Scholars have a task of primary urgency here. If one is going to use the discourses of the academy to speak about colonies and colonialism—a project I undertake in this book—a special examination of these discourses inside the disciplines is absolutely essential. The languages of erudition have participated in the phrase, in the usage I analyze. They have done more than this, all while anchoring the colonial argument in reflexive thought. The third section asks which discipline(s) are most capable of speaking about the (post)colonial. Anthropologists are not in the ideal position they perhaps imagine themselves to be. It would perhaps be saying too much to point out that ethnology is not intended to educate colonists. Yet from its first formations to its successive reformations, the discipline bears a troubled relation to the colony. It needs the colony so it can alter itself, and it tries to make the colony disappear from its own image: by rejecting “the Occidentalizing process” in order to better study the “natural savage,” by fighting against white power for the benefit of a phantasmal autochthon, by declaring the colonial rupture complete. Postcolonial studies, which integrate the problems of discontinuous disciplines confronting empire, should provide the opportunity for an improved academic language. Yes, but on the condition of not restarting, or even of trying to reverse the unitary project of a “colonial science” that the principal European powers encouraged at the beginning of the twentieth century. To return to this failed ambition paradoxically highlights the current failures of a French-style anticolonial history that involuntarily repeats a theoretical censure that it did not know how to circumvent. I evoke the divergent example of Anglo-American “studies,” which with their deep concern for method, sometimes excessively attempt to found knowledge in the (post)colonial. But not everything should be deduced or reconfigured from the experiences of the colony alone. Theory itself remains to be remade, from the remnants of the disciplines, in the furrow of negative knowledge that literature brings to the social and to language. The real “post” of “postcolonial” will arrive through a displacement of this kind of order, far from repression, repetition, or obsession.9