Description
Book SynopsisIn Experiments with Empire Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of knowing the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods and modes of thought, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire's political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris and filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampate Ba, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, and others, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. It also, Izzo contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.
Trade Review"
Experiments with Empire deserves an audience beyond the academic. Izzo makes some perceptive points about how seeing the connections between ethnography and fiction can help us reimagine the world." -- Emilie de Brigard * The Arts Fuse *
“The book’s scope is bold and impressive…. Izzo’s study is an important contribution to research on the French Atlantic and on speculative forms in general, and it offers a fresh look at the crossings between ethnography and fiction that go beyond questions of truth and veracity, mimicry and resistance.” -- Christina Kullberg * New West Indian Guide *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction: Ethnographic Fictions in the French Atlantic 1
1. Ethnographic Didacticism and Africanist Melancholy: Leiris, Hampăté Bă, and the Epistemology of Style 17
2. The Director of Modern Life: Jean Rouch's Ethnofiction 55
3. Folkore, Fiction, and Ethnographic Nation Building: Price-Mars, Alexis, Depestre, Laferrière 98
4. Creole Novels and the Ethnographic Production of Literary History: Glissant, Chamoiseau, Confiant 134
5. Speculative Cityscapes and Premillennial Policing: Ethnographies of the Present in Jean-Claude Izzo's Crime Trilogy 169
Conclusion: Empire, Democracy, and Nonsovereign Knowledges 203
Notes 217
Bibliography 257
Index 273
