Table Of ContentImagining the Postcolonial
Imagining the Postcolonial
stuvs
Discipline, Poetics, Practice
in Latin American and
Francophone Discourse
JAIME HANNEKEN
SUNY
P R E S S
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hanneken, Jaime, 1978– author.
Imagining the postcolonial : discipline, poetics, practice in Latin American
and Francophone discourse / Jaime Hanneken.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5621-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5623-2 (ebook)
1. Postcolonialism in literature. 2. Comparative literature. 3. Latin
America—In literature. 4. French-speaking countries—In literature. I. Title.
PN56.P555H36 2015
809'.93358—dc23 2014023235
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: Latin Americanism, Francophone
Studies, and Identity Thinking 1
1. Double Articulation and Wishful Thinking 19
2. José Lezama Lima and the Gnosis of American
Expression 41
3. Édouard Glissant’s Archipelic Thought and
Second Nature 65
Excursus: Poetics and Place from Autochthony
to Globality 95
4. Mikilistes and Modernistas in Paris: Consuming
Modernity’s Capital 107
5. Minor Truths: Menchú and Ouologuem in the
Multicultural Metropolis 135
vi Contents
Afterword: Commitment to the Negative 169
Notes 173
Works Cited 195
Index 209
Introduction
Latin Americanism, Francophone Studies,
and Identity Thinking
For those of us writing today, a full generation after “postcolonial” first gained
popular usage in English departments as a descriptor and then a category of
literature and culture, it is not considered particularly insightful to assert
that postcolonial studies is at a crossroads—or, to put it in starker language,
in crisis, even “dead.”1 Although conjecture on the end of the postcolonial
from the past decade or so has appeared to imbue critical exchange with a
renewed sense of urgency, in effect, one could argue that institutionally it
has always moved along an axis of crisis and that it is precisely because of
this movement that humanistic scholarship persists in discussing things in
postcolonial terms at all.2 Early polemics over the semantic and political
intrigue or the rightful historical and geographic purview of the term are,
in this sense, inseparable from more current concerns about its function
as an organon of critique, in that both attempt to manage the conceptual
identity of the postcolonial—what the postcolonial is as well as what it does.
This book deals with both senses of postcoloniality’s identity: It reas-
sesses some of postcolonial critique’s common assumptions in its encoun-
ter with Latin American and francophone discourse, two areas that have
largely remained on the sidelines of postcolonial studies’s historical and
critical panorama. The analyses I undertake here are thus preoccupied not
only with the predilect themes and problematics of postcolonial identity in
cultural and literary expression but also with disciplinarity’s stakes in that
identity, which are determined by the institutional and geopolitical places
that house Latin Americanism and Francophone Studies as much as by the
residual proprieties of postcolonialism as a metropolitan, anglophone, and
1
2 Imagining the Postcolonial
twentieth-century construct. My analyses attempt to track these features
simultaneously in theoretical approaches, regional historic cultural para-
digms, and practices of recognition and valuation, keeping in mind how
the same discursive properties work in tandem in each sphere. Through a
combined inquiry into discipline, poetics, and practice, comparison may be
able to pair the nominal or semantic decentering of the postcolonial—which
has already removed a number of barriers to considering ecumenically what
the postcolonial “is”—with a theoretical shake-up that has been slower to
arrive.
Prospects of Postcolonial Comparison
It cannot be denied that the metacritical interrogation of what the postco-
lonial “is,” both as a project and as a corpus, has substantially dynamized its
faculties: Some twenty-five years after it first circulated in English depart-
ments to theorize literary and cultural practices common to recently decolo-
nized populations of the anglophone world, the postcolonial serves more as
an intersectional site where scholarship on colonialism and imperialism in
an ever-larger number of historical moments and places, read through the
lenses of anthropology, geography, area and ethnic studies, feminism, and
languages and literatures, finds common ground. So strong is the impetus to
use the postcolonial label as a tool of comparison, in fact, that it has the aura
of an antidote to pessimism about the term’s continued usefulness. Many
roundtables, edited volumes, and conference panels that ponder the death
of postcolonial theory seem to find the answer in interdisciplinary conversa-
tions and strategic or radical adaptations of its reticulation.3 A central focus
of postcolonial comparativism is the dialogue among marginalized or “minor”
areas of study: In this vein of research one finds, for example, Françoise Lion-
net and Shu-Mei Shih’s volume Minor Transnationalism or Gayatri Spivak’s
essays in Other Asias, both of which are dedicated to excising Europe and
the United States as the ground of comparative intelligibility. Their projects
are aligned with Comparative Literature’s own reformulation into what Rey
Chow has called “post-European Comp. Lit”: This entails wresting analysis
from the European “grid of reference,” where the non-European becomes
visible only as an ancillary element, and learning to “judg[e] the value of
things horizontally, in sheer approximation to one another” (298).
My comparative study of francophonist and Latin Americanist uses of
the postcolonial stems from a conviction of a piece with the post-European
vision of these critics. But if we are to take seriously the assertion, implicit
in the horizontal grid Chow speaks of, that comparison is good when it
changes the operational as well as the thematic mode of the postcolonial—
not just what it means but also how it means—then bringing these areas
Introduction 3
together must involve a new way of engaging their specificities: In other
words, comparison should not simply add more examples to the same list of
traits and practices readymade for the postcolonial; it must aim above all to
transform the concept itself for the better. This is not the same as sizing up
the differences between Latin Americanist, francophone, and mainstream
postcolonial ideas about imperialism or opting between global and local
theory. Rather, my objective is to mobilize those elements of the texts exam-
ined here that defy the equalizing gesture associated with the postcolonial in
order to think the postcolonial against its identifications. For a provisional
definition of the fundamental problematic of postcolonial identity as equiva-
lence—both the individual equivalence invoked between people or things
and their representations and the ordering of heterogeneous elements into
uniform constituencies for knowledge, control, and exchange—it is useful
to recall Graham Huggan’s influential distinction between postcolonialism
and postcoloniality.4 The first term refers to “a local assemblage of more or
less related oppositional practices” (The Postcolonial Exotic 6) that “posits
itself as anti-colonial, and that works toward the dissolution of imperial
epistemologies and institutional structures” (28); the second is “a global
apparatus of assimilative, institutional/commercial codes” (6) that “is more
closely tied to the global market, and that capitalises both on the widespread
circulation of ideas about cultural otherness and on the worldwide trafficking
of culturally ‘othered’ artifacts and goods” (28). Signaling the differences
between the postcolonial’s two main “regimes of value”—in Bourdieusian
terminology, the mechanisms by which various agents and institutions assign
and endorse cultural capital—serves the larger purpose of unmasking how
each is bound up with the other: The point, in Huggan’s words, is “that in
the overwhelmingly commercial context of late twentieth-century commod-
ity culture, postcolonialism and its rhetoric of resistance have themselves
become consumer products” (6).
Huggan’s phrasing, to my mind, captures the core issue of contemporary
debates in anglophone postcolonial studies. But one need not assume an
exceptionalist stance to acknowledge that paradigms like Huggan’s “postco-
lonial exotic” grasp only partially the tensions of value-coding underlying the
postcolonial tenor of Latin American and francophone discourse. The catego-
ries of postcolonialism and postcoloniality set up by Huggan, sedimented in
multiple generations of Third World literature mass-produced for anglophone
multicultural audiences, pertain to an established structure of recognition that
gathers representatives of a territory coextensive with nineteenth-century
British imperial holdings, who are groomed to frame their craft within a set
of problematics—politics of language and translation, travails of decoloniza-
tion, migration, racial and religious difference—that bind them collectively
to the postcolonial apparatus. This structure only unevenly addresses Latin
