Nick Nesbitt (University of Aberdeen)
In a situation of ongoing and global colonialism, we stand at a conjuncture in which we can remain faithful to the idea of decolonization, or abandon it to the pursuit of cultural studies and so-called cultural and identity politics. The initial period of political insurgency in the francophone world, in which culture and politics were fundamentally linked, stretched from, say, the 1930s to the 1960s, and went under the general name of decolonization. During this phase, culture and politics, while always remaining separate spheres of creativity, seconded one another. In this sense, the founding call of francophone studies remains Aimé Césaire’s injunction from his 1939 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: ‘Assez de ce scandale!’ This tight interdependency between poetry and politics was sustained into the 1970s, culminating in studies such as Edouard Glissant’s 1981 collection Le discours antillais and the hysterical realism of
René Depestre’s anti-Duvalier Le mât de cocagne, but by the mid-1980s, when the discipline of Francophone Studies came on the academic scene in the US and UK, a process of generalized depoliticization had set in. This conflict between a depoliticized, culinary exoticism and a militant cultural and political tradition has come to a head in recent francophone studies, impelled by the appearance of Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial in 2001, centered around the figure of Edouard Glissant. In addition to mounting a compelling critique of postcolonial studies’ celebration of a ‘cultural politics,’ which Hallward condemns as a ‘disastrous confusion of spheres’ (that is, of the political and the cultural), he mounts a specific and devestating critique of this process of depoliticization and an ever-increasing aestheticism in the post-1980 writings of Edouard Glissant. More recently, Chris Bongie’s 2008 study, Friends and Enemies has sustained Hallward’s axiomatic distinction between the cultural and political spheres in a far-reaching and subtle analysis of the ‘political turn’ in francophone studies that has been underway since 2001. Given this political turn and the concomitant critique of postcolonialist aestheticism, one that I’ve tried to probe and extend in my own books, we thus stand at a crossroads in the field. We can continue on the path of reactive subjectivity opened by Glissant after 1981, canonized by the Créoliste manifesto of 1989, and sustained most recently by the 44 signatories of the ‘literature-monde’ manifesto, further obscuring the commitment to universalism and a profound alliance between insurgent politics and cultural work that extends back beyond Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and Jacques Roumain, to Toussaint Louverture himself. Or, we can remain faithful to the unfulfilled promise of decolonization to democratize democracy in our world of global imperialism. That twentieth century decolonization may seem a belated, melancholic, or tragic endeavor says more about our own situation than about the persistence and terrible effects of imperialism today in places like Haiti and the Congo. To pursue the latter path of a renewed fidelity to decolonization as a politics of universal emancipation, we must nonetheless move beyond any abstract opposition between culture and politics. While it may well be that the amalgam of cultural politics has led to a ‘disastrous confusion of spheres,’ as Hallward claims, there nonetheless remain specific, rare instances in which literature and politics pursue, in their own respective domains, the reconfiguration of the world under the measure of universal equality. We must discover how to remain faithful to a single imperative: ‘ne pas céder sur le verbe!’
