Description
Book SynopsisIn this timely contribution to debates about the future of postcolonial theory groundbreaking scholar Chris Bongie explores the troubled relationship between postcolonial theory and ‘politics’, both in the sense of a radical, revolutionary politics associated with anti-colonial struggle, and the almost inevitable implication of literary writers in institutional discourses of power. The book builds directly on Bongie’s Islands and Exiles (Stanford UP, 1998), which was described by the eminent Caribbeanist Peter Hulme as a book that “may well be the greatest single contribution yet to expanding the field of postcolonial studies.” Bongie explores the commemoration and commodification of the post/colonial using early nineteenth-century Caribbean texts alongside contemporary works. Taking Haiti as a key example he writes lucidly of the processes by which Haiti’s world-historical revolution has been commemorated both in the colonial era and in our own postcolonial age—an age in which it is increasingly difficult to separate the reality of memories of anti-colonial resistance from the processes of commodification through which alone those memories can now be thought. Never less than stimulating and frequently controversial, Friends and Enemies is likely to provoke new debates among scholars of postcolonial theory, Caribbean studies, francophone literature and culture, and nineteenth century French studies.
Trade ReviewThis study is both meticulous in its readings and ambitious in its intellectual reach.
Alison DonnellChris Bongie’s openly polemical volume is by turns profound in its insights, meticulous in its archival research, startlingly original in the boldness of its theorizing, and extraordinary in the breadth of its references.
Michael Syrontinski, Modern Language Review, 105.1Table of Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements: Entrances
- Introduction: Literature, Politics and Memory
- Part One- Humanitarian Interventions: The Haitian Revolution in Translation, 1793-1833
- Incursion I
- France and Haiti, 1804-2004: Postimperial Melancholy, 'New Humanist' Elation
- 1. 'The Friend of Equality': Terror and Forgetting in the Novels of Jean-Baptiste Picquenard
- 2. ' The Cause of Humanity': Victor Hugo's 'Bug-Jargal' and the Limits of Liberal Translation
- Part Two - Between Memory and Nostalgia#; Commemorating Post/Colonialism, 1998-2004
- Incursion II
- 3. 'Chroniques de la francophonie triomphante': The Dutiful Memories of Regis Debray
- 4. A Street Named Bissette: Assimilating the 'Cent-cinquantenaire' of the Abolition of Slavery in Martinique (1848-1998)
- 5. 'Monotonies of History': Baron de Vastey and the Mulatto Legend of Derek Walcott's Haitian Trilogy
- Part Three - Exiles on Main Stream: Browsing the Franco-Caribbean Canon
- Incursion III
- Futures Past? David Scott's Black Jacobins and the Dead End Of Cultural Politics
- 6. Withering Heights: Marayse Conde and the Postcolonial Middlebrow
- 7. Spectres of Glissant: Dealing in Relation
- Bibliography
- Index
