"Toutes ces eaux!": Ecology and Empire in Patrick Chamoiseau's Biblique des derniers gestes
Patrick Chamoiseau's latest novel, Biblique des derniers gestes (2002), is a staging of the tension between the defense of local particularity and immersion in what Hardt and Negri call Empire. This tension is explored most visibly through Chamoiseau's literal and figurative uses of water. The protagonist's relation to water constructs Martinican particularity, but it also catapults him into Empire, the network of interests that govern contemporary global relations. Water and other liquid forms also function as figurative models of political action and cultural identity that productively resolve some of the contradictions at the heart of contemporary postcolonial literature.
Conquering City: The Poetics of Possibility in Texaco
Reading Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco in terms of Joseph Meeker's notion of the "comedy of survival," Lincoln argues that the text affirms the pragmatic necessities of survival and continued "opposition," despite the evident impossibility of resistance at a time of political foreclosure; as such, it complicates Peter Hallward's and Chris Bongie's recent criticisms of the ideological and philosophical turn to autonomous "singularity" in contemporary postcolonialism. In Texaco, the "singular" experiences of Martinique's "wasted lives" prove to serve not as a retreat from universal "specificity" but rather as a basis for such relation, offering a sophisticated poetic articulation of how an open community grounded not on identity but on strategic alliance might look. It is precisely in a moment of defeat, or failure, at a time defined by "living without an alternative," that Texaco locates its richest hope and promise, its utopian turn, offering a paradoxical (or, perhaps, dialectical) redefinition of the terms of both literary endeavor and political practice.
Annual review article: Is it time to rethink the gender agenda in entrepreneurship research?
This article develops a critique of contemporary approaches to analysing the impact of gender upon entrepreneurial propensity and activity. Since the 1990s, increasing attention has been afforded to the influence of gender on women’s entrepreneurial behaviour; such analyses have highlighted an embedded masculinity within the entrepreneurial discourse which privileges men as normative entrepreneurial actors. While invaluable in revealing a prevailing masculine bias within entrepreneurship, this critique is bounded by positioning women as a proxy for the gendered subject. This is a potentially limiting analysis that does not fully recognise gender as a human property with myriad articulations enacted throughout entrepreneurial activity. To progress debate, we engage more deeply with the notion of gender as a multiplicity, exploring the implications of such for future studies of entrepreneurial activity.