Introduction

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Volumn 24, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 1-11

  Britton, Celia ^a   Syrotinski, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79954902635     PISSN: 02648334     EISSN: 17500176     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/jsp.2001.24.3.1     Document Type: Review

References (17)

1. David Macey quotes the LA Free Press of 18 August 1967: The important literature now is the underground press, the speeches of Malcolm, the work of Fanon, the songs of the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin . Macey recalls the importance Fanon had for Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver in the 1960s, commenting that most of Fanon s American readers appeared not to have noticed that Les Damnés de la terre is, at least in part, a book about Algeria and not America . See David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life (Cambridge, Granta Books, 2000), p. 24.
2. Two examples of this are Max Silverman s Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (New York and London, Routledge, 1992), and Alex Hargreaves s Postcolonial Cultures in France (New York and London, Routledge, 1997).
3. The Global and the Particular in the English-Speaking World: Post-Coloniality and Irishness , 6-7 April 2001. The conference was organized by Jean-Pierre Durix, who was one of the first French academics to become involved in anglophone postcolonial literature and theory. See his The Writer Written. The Artist and Creation in the New Literatures in English (Westport CT, Greenwood, 1987).
4. A History of Literature in the Caribbean (Amsterdam, J. Benjamins, 1997).
5. See for instance Michel Beniamino, La Francophonie littéraire: essai pour une théorie (Paris, L Harmattan, 1999). Antoine Compagnon has vigorously challenged the French attitude to postcolonial theory in L Exception française , Textuel 37 (2000), 41-52. (We are grateful to Charles Forsdick for drawing our attention to these.)
6. Jean-Marc Moura, Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). Amaryll Chanady s Entre inclusion et exclusion: La Symbolisation de l autre dans les Amériques (Paris:Honoré Champion, 1999) is not primarily about the relation between postcolonial theory and francophone writing, but is an as yet rare example of their being illuminatingly brought together.
7. Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Nationalists and Nomad: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998).
8. The idea of post-colonial literary theory emerges from the inability of European theory to deal adequately with the complexities and varied cultural provenance of post-colonial writing. European theories themselves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden by false notions of the universal (Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (New York and London, Routledge, 1989), p. 11).
9. It is introduced very defensively, in a series of sentences whose emphases repeatedly contradict each other: These theories offer perspectives which illuminate some of the crucial issues addressed by the postcolonial text, although postcolonial discourse itself is constituted in texts prior to and independent of them (. . .) we need to avoid the assumption that they supersede or replace the local and particular (. . .) But is it also necessary to avoid the pretence that theory in postcolonial literatures is somehow conceived independently of all coincidence (. . .) In fact [European theories] clearly function as the conditions of development of postcolonial theory in its contemporary form and as the determinants of much of its present nature and content. Despite the recognition of this relationship, the appropriation of recent European theories involves a number of dangers, etc. (p. 155, our italics).
10. Speaking in the name of some counter-authority or horizon of the true (in Foucault s sense of the strategic effects of any apparatus or dispositif ), the theoretical enterprise has to represent the adversarial authority (of power and/or knowledge) which, in a doubly inscribed move, it simultaneously seeks to subvert and replace ( The Commitment to Theory , The Location of Culture (New York and London, Routledge, 1994), p. 22).
11. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 1.
12. Julia Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mOemes (Paris, Editions Fayard, 1989); Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l autre (Paris, Editions Galilée, 1996).
13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Pour une littérature mineure (Paris, Minuit, 1975); and Mille plateaux (Paris, Minuit, 1980). The first connection between theirwork and the postcolonial was in fact in the francophone area-Edouard Glissant s use of the rhizomes of Mille plateaux in his Le Discours antillais (Paris, Seuil, 1981) and Poétique de la relation (Paris, Gallimard, 1990).
14. Hélène Cixous, Le Jeune née (en collaboration avec Catherine Clément) (Paris, UGE, 10/18, 1975).
15. For instance, Forsdick quotes René Ménil on this internalized colonial exoticism.
16. Maryse Condé in her provocative Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer (Yale French Studies 83, 1993, 121-35) in fact targets both simultaneously: while she wearily complains Are we condemned ad vitam aeternam to speak of vegetable markets, story tellers, dorlis , koutem . . .? (p. 1130), she does so in the course of primarily distancing herself from Césaire s famous claim that My mouth will be the mouth of those who have no mouth, my voice the voice of those who despair (Condé, p. 122).
17. This does not of course mean that the battle is not still a long way from being won-viz. the embarrassing and entirely unintentional fact that none of our contributors have chosen to write on female authors.