ABSTRACTS

"Politicized Theories, Literary Practice"

Kaiama L Glover
(Barnard College, Columbia University)

This paper considers the manner in which literary and political concerns intersect with, overlap, and contradict one another within the specific context of the Caribbean islands. More specifically, I look at three perspectives that present specific guidelines for conceptualizing post/colonial literature: francophonie, regional transnationalism, and littérature-monde en français. All three perspectives grapple with issues of identity construction and self-representation in post/colonial communities largely defined by the capitalist and imperialist aims  past and present  of Europe and the United States. All three seek to move beyond restrictive affiliations with Western nation-states in the interest of positioning ex-centric writer-intellectuals as independent entities within a non-hierarchical global community.

Evaluating the viability of each of these perspectives, I reflect more broadly on the at times problematic conflation of theoretical and aesthetic preoccupations among scholars of marginalized literatures. By comparing and contrasting the three, I uncover the limitations of each and so point to the often-conflicting objectives and ideals of the writer and the theorist. This of course leads me to address the conundrum of how to approach the particular literary universe of the French-speaking Caribbean, a universe in which the writer and the theorist are often one and the same being  a universe in which individuals write books, and then write books about the books they write. I look, then, at inherently politicized critical practices  like defining or constructing a field of study through the establishment of parameters, categories, and frontiers  that, while helpful to the theorist, are not necessarily satisfying for the writer.

Putting the various socio-aesthetic perspectives in dialogue with one another ultimately highlights the ironies, self-contradictions, and blind spots in each one and brings me to pose a number of very basic, but very challenging questions. At what point must we move beyond the compulsion to brand art rather than engage with it directly, unbounded by labels or pre-existing constructs? How do we avoid allowing our analyses of post/colonial literary works to refer always  if oppositionally  back to a French-European center? As we gather in this conference to discuss the usefulness and relevance of a littérature-monde en français, effectively assessing our degree of comfort with this label and the language-based dividing lines it traces in our discourse as scholars, what might we make of writer Miguel Torga's very seductive claim  or wishful notion - that the universal is the local without walls?

It is with these questions in mind that I examine certain specific works of the post/colonial Americas and endeavor to determine the extent to which the concepts of francophonie, of regional transnationalism, and of a littérature-monde en français facilitate or impede critical reflections on actual texts - to determine how the politics of theory impact our appreciation of literary practice.