"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.
Towards an ecocritical postcolonialism: Val Plumwood’s Environmental Culture in dialogue with Patrick Chamoiseau
This essay participates in the work of synthesizing postcolonialism and ecocriticism by pointing to the texts and approaches that suggest a productive resolution of the tension between these two critical practices. At the heart of my discussion is Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002), by the Australian ecophilosopher Val Plumwood, which is a work that offers a corrective to critical postcolonialism’s “over‐culturalised sensibility”. Read in conjunction with a number of works by Martinican novelist and essayist Patrick Chamoiseau, Plumwood’s ecophilosophical insights into the distribution of capitalism’s negative externalities, the persistence of the centre/periphery model of politics, and the consequences of remoteness allow for readings that account not just for the human effects of the post/colonial condition but also for the effects on the non‐human world.
Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance
Edouard Glissant has written extensively in French about the colonial experience in the Caribbean. Since he is known primarily as a novelist and poet, his theoretical essays have so far remained largely unread by the English-language theorists in this field. This book situates Glissant within ongoing debates in postcolonial theory, making illuminating connections between his work and that of Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Focusing on language and subjectivity, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory moves between an analysis of Glissant's theoretical work and detailed readings of his novels to elucidate a network of related issues. Celia Britton addresses the major themes central to his writing-the reappropriation of history, standard and vernacular language, hybridity, subalternity, the problematizing of identity, and the colonial construction of the Other-and asks provocative questions relating to each. How does the colonized subject relate to a language initially imposed by the colonizer but subsequently, to some extent, subverted and reappropriated? How does this strategic use of language come to function as a crucial mode of cultural resistance? What role can fictional representation play in this process? This book represents the first presentation of Glissant's incisive theoretical work and analysis of his immensely powerful and subtle novels in the context of postcolonial studies. By juxtaposing them, Britton illuminates the significant contribution Glissant has made to this theoretical endeavor.