Françoise Lionnet

The Creolization of Theory

Introducing this collection of essays, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back—investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines—offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic studies programs and “French theory” originated in decolonial impulses, over time, French theory became depoliticized in the American academy. Meanwhile, ethnic studies, and later also postcolonial studies, developed politically and historically grounded critiques of inequality. Suggesting that the abstract universalisms of Euro-American theory may ultimately be the source of its demise, Lionnet and Shih advocate the creolization of theory: the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical approach attentive to the legacies of colonialism. This use of creolization as a theoretical and analytical rubric is placed in critical context by Dominique Chance, who provides a genealogy of the concept of creolization. In their essays, leading figures in their fields explore the intellectual, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the creolized theory elaborated by Lionnet and Shih. Edouard Glisssant links the extremes of globalization to those of colonialism and imperialism in an interview appearing for the first time in English in this volume. The Creolization of Theory is a bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities. Contributors . Etienne Balibar, Dominique Chance, Pheng Cheah, Leo Ching, Liz Constable, Anne Donadey, Fatima El-Tayeb, Julin Everett, Edouard Glissant, Barnor Hesse, Ping-hui Liao, Francoise Lionnet, Walter Mignolo, Andrea Schwieger Hiepko, Shu-mei Shih

Shipwrecks, Slavery, and the Challenge of Global Comparison: From Fiction to Archive in the Colonial Indian Ocean

ACLA meeting. I am focusing here on the literary elements that are more appropriate for Comparative Literature. I thank the journal and our Association for this opportunity to share a small aspect of the literary history of my country of origin, Mauritius, the Ile de France of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s time. The island’s two-hundred-year tradition of Francophone literature remains little known to most scholars working in the United States today. This essay is an adapted and translated version of a section of my 2012 book Le su et l’incertain. I thank Alexis Pernsteiner for her help with translations. See also Lionnet, “‘New World’ Exiles” for a discussion of both eighteenthand twentieth-century authors from the Mascarene region.

Postcolonialism, language, and the visual: By way of Haiti

Who can claim the condition of postcoloniality and how can it be represented today? What is the role of cinema in disseminating knowledge about the “periphery”? This paper will argue that when a film privileges linguistic diversity, it can communicate better than the written word the full texture of minor or resistant identities. My example is taken from a series of short stories by Dany Laferrière that deal with sexual or “romance tourism” in Haiti, and that form the basis of French cinéaste Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud. Much more than a film “adaptation” of the written text, Cantet’s film is a statement about Haiti, poverty, political tyranny, and “work” as alienated labor (a recurrent theme of all his films). What are the interpretive and critical issues that arise from the circulation of words and images in a global cultural market that can exacerbate the traffic in desire between North and South, as well as between writers, filmmakers, and their audiences? Is Cantet a “postcolonial” filmmaker, and, if so, might his films enable us to think through some of the theoretical issues posed by postcolonial studies?

Childhood, autobiography and the francophone Caribbean

representatives on the theatrical stage. James is in the best company, for this is, of course, a problem pointed up if not solved in the depiction of Cade’s revolt in a memorable if impossible stage direction from the fourth act of Henry VI, Part 2: “Enter Jack Cade, Dick the Butcher, Smith the Weaver and a Sawyer, with infinite numbers”! The play should be read, in my view, principally as a companion to James’s 1938 masterpiece The Black Jacobins, his history of the Revolution of 1791 to 1803, which depicts Toussaint’s career in dramatic terms as a tragedy. James’s abiding theme was the development of democracy in world history. He had a profound and abiding trust in the political power, artistic creativity and capacity for democratic self-organization of apparently ordinary people, a faith that, as he put it in a pamphlet on direct democracy in the city states of ancient Greece, “every cook can govern”. Why should we pay attention to this long-lost and largely forgotten play? We should do so because it is among the first efforts of one of history’s great anti-colonial voices, wrestling with the distinctive aesthetic quandaries of form and performance, to show that freedom from imperialism is just a phrase if it does not entail direct democracy and universal rights. James was nothing if not ambitious.