Session 3: Politicizing the Francophone (3-5 p.m.)
Speakers:
Vanessa Agard-Jones (Yale University)
Justin Izzo (Brown University)
Régine Joseph (Queens College)
Miriam Ticktin (The New School for Social Research)
Moderator: Madeleine Dobie (Columbia University)
The Questions:
1) Critical debates in 'francophone' or 'francophone postcolonial' studies have often
revolved around a defense of the place of the 'aesthetic' in relation to political,
sociological and anthropological research. At the same time, however, issues of
representation and rhetoric have come to occupy an increasingly important place in the
human sciences. How do you situate your work in relation to these intra- and interdisciplinary cross-currents?
2) Historically speaking, a small set of issues has occupied the forefront of political
questioning in francophone/postcolonial studies. The politics of language, the
relationship between the francophone and the postcolonial, the hybridity of diasporic
identity, and the commensurability of aesthetics and politics come to mind. Currently,
however, new questions, some of which have taken shape in other disciplines and
geopolitical contexts, are emerging as important sites of reflection: issues such as trauma
and memory, humanitarianism and human rights, globalization and 'world literature' and
the formation and transgression of sexual identities are cases in point. How do you
perceive the political framing/reframing of the field, and how does your own work
participate in these shifts in focus or emphasis?
3) How do the political investments of your research in francophone/postcolonial studies
intersect with politics at the level of institutional and classroom experience?
Responses:
Justin Izzo (Brown University)
Critical debates in 'francophone' or 'francophone postcolonial' studies have often
revolved around a defense of the place of the 'aesthetic' in relation to political,
sociological and anthropological research. At the same time, however, issues of
representation and rhetoric have come to occupy an increasingly important place in the
human sciences. How do you situate your work in relation to these intra- and interdisciplinary cross-currents?
My recently completed first book, whose working title (and soon-to-be subtitle) is
Anthropology and the Hybridity of Genre in the French Atlantic world, is a study of how
colonial and postcolonial encounters in West Africa, the Caribbean, and metropolitan
France led to literary writers and anthropologists experimenting with ethnographic
fiction. I trace histories and theories of this transatlantic generic phenomenon, but I do
not do so in order to “defend” the aesthetic from the social sciences or to insist, like
anthropologists in the US did throughout the 1980s and 90s, that anthropological
narratives have “representative” logics. This project foregrounds generic combinatorics
and creativity as political, aesthetic, and social-scientific negotiations of (post)colonial
situations. Unclassifiable texts and texts that gesture provocatively beyond classificatory
schemes are symptomatic of (and responsive to) deep-seated anxieties and constraints
produced by colonial and postcolonial encounters. The relationship between
anthropology and fiction here speaks to textual negotiations of political and aesthetic
questions in which the imaginative and the documentary are mutually constitutive and
move beyond straightforward questions of representation.
Historically speaking, a small set of issues has occupied the forefront of political
questioning in francophone/postcolonial studies. The politics of language, the
relationship between the francophone and the postcolonial, the hybridity of diasporic
identity, and the commensurability of aesthetics and politics come to mind. Currently,
however, new questions, some of which have taken shape in other disciplines and
geopolitical contexts, are emerging as important sites of reflection: issues such as trauma
and memory, humanitarianism and human rights, globalization and 'world literature' and
the formation and transgression of sexual identities are cases in point. How do you
perceive the political framing/reframing of the field, and how does your own work
participate in these shifts in focus or emphasis?
In the case of Francophone literary studies, “memory studies” have been around for some
time and speak to works by Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Condé, Assia Djebar, among
many other figures. I’m not convinced that “memory” writ large has a major role to play
in the dynamic future of Francophone literary studies. For my part, I’m much more
interested in questions of genre and the hypercontemporary as a social-scientific and
aesthetic textual problem. The project I’m now working on deals with narratives of postmillennial modernity in Francophone Africa and approaches thematic problems that span
the analytic purview of anthropology and literary studies: these include neoliberalism and
emergent forms of unregulated capitalism, state corruption, popular culture and media,
and cinematic/documentary forms of visual culture. I’m particularly interested in how
novels, films, and other kinds of texts (graphic novels, for example) narrativize the
hypercontemporary and allow for anthropological theory to share common cause with
studies of imaginative textual production. Literary studies and anthropology, from this
point of view, both speak to the intersection of cultural production and political economy
and I think this conversation opens up new avenues for further research in Francophone
Studies.
How do the political investments of your research in francophone/postcolonial studies
intersect with politics at the level of institutional and classroom experience?
Teaching texts that are broadly related to this second project opens up opportunities for
political discussion in the classroom. This is partly for reasons that are “sciencefictional,” in the wry sense that sci-fi speaks to politics via cognitive estrangement and
Francophone African texts function similarly in the context of an American classroom.
My students have proved willing and excited to think critically about issues like
neoliberalism, social violence, and ideologies of humanitarianism because they approach
them in fictional and social-scientific contexts radically removed from their own. In a
recent course on war and violence in Africa, for example, students engaged in a
conversation about politics, humanitarianism, and transnational war in relation to three
texts: Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé (2000), a 2011 ethnography of young
men and violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and the viral Kony 2012 YouTube video.
This constellation of texts and contexts (as well as the varied disciplinary grammars
needed to tackle them) generated a semester-long discussion that students approached
more easily, I think, because of their contextual distance from the primary subject matter.
In this case, then, critical distancing was pedagogically productive.
Régine Joseph, Queens College
To frame “francophone studies” and “francophone postcolonial studies” as the opposition
between “a defense of the ‘aesthetic’ in relation to the political” or as the “political
questioning” of this defense is itself a political and politicizing debate about method, and
about what critical lenses should dictate our varying approaches to literature. It is one that
seems to depart from a subtext of historical attitudes, varying degrees of emphasis on
cultural processes, and competing ideas about the function of literature and the nature of
literary analysis. This debate is particularly fraught, it seems, when the texts in question are
concerned with or produced in regions of the world where French language is one medium
of creative expression among others. While this perennial debate has been generative, it
may also create a critical impasse. In my own work on Haiti, Marie Chauvet and the mid-20th
century Francophone world, I have found that – regardless of the camp within which one
falls – an insistence on keeping the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘political’ in binary opposition create
methodologies that can potentially produce incomplete or, worse, erroneous literary and
intellectual histories about how certain kinds of creative expressions emerge and develop
within particular national, transnational, linguistic, historical settings.
To this framing, Jorge Luis Borges offers a third possibility, which has guided my own
approach to Francophone Literature (no guillemets intended). Speaking about how political
crisis impacts literary practice, he once stated:
Often under dictatorships, it is only practitioners of such camouflaged
writing who have the slightest hope of surviving. However, for those who
wish for a more immediate, engaged role for the writer an excessive
concern with craft erodes the moral validity of literature in times of
political crisis.
What I retain, here, is how Borges is thinking about context and the ways in which it can
serve to create a dynamic relationship between an individual writer’s political project and
their aesthetic practice. To put it differently, rather than an either/or approach to the
aesthetic and the political, perhaps it would be helpful to consider what insights can be
gained about a writer’s formal and conceptual preoccupations, as we specify the operant
context(s) at work within our literary analysis. My own scholarship has been motivated by
two questions: How do we understand the literary production that develops within a
particular geographic entity – be it Senegal, Québec, Haiti as well as France? Secondly, what
can a robust understanding of a region’s literary history teach us about broader cultural,
historical and transnational literary processes?
To put this concretely, my first book project, which is entitled Culture and Duvalierism:
Narrative Experimentations in Mid-20th century Haiti is concerned with the first question of
the literary history of national literatures written in French. It asks how do aesthetic forms
develop under highly politicized contexts? I consider how writers, artists and intellectuals
grappled with the rising dictatorship of François Duvalier in the 1960s. And as I studied this
literary generation, I found that it was not enough to read these texts for their camouflaging
of social and political commentary. Rather, by attending to issues of aesthetic form one
could discern how this literature also contained a robust reassessment of the narrative
practices of earlier generations. Culture and Duvalierism privileges the aesthetic even as it
attends to the political in order to discuss, in specific terms, how this decade ushered in new
possibilities for the 21st-century Haitian novel.
The second project, Haiti’s Second Sex also focuses on the literary generation of 1960s Haiti,
but it does so by shifting from the nation-state context to transnational setting. Here, I look
at how these Haitian writers actively engaged the intellectual developments occurring
within and across the Atlantic. At the center of this project is the intellectual relationship
that developed via correspondence between Marie Chauvet and Simone de Beauvoir. The
first project addressed particular lacunae in the literary history of the Haitian novel; this
second project offers an intellectual history of a transnational cultural phenomenon.
Although these two projects are concerned with the same historical period and literary
generation, they each show how one can arrive at different critical insights about a literary
corpus, as we specify and change our understanding of their operant settings. And I think
that if we are to gain an intimate knowledge of the diversity of creative expressions that
circulate the French-Speaking world, then we need to fill in these gaps in our understanding
of local production even as we attend to their global and transnational resonances.
Vanessa Agard-Jones
Yale University
As I considered my response to the excellent questions posed to this panel, I was inspired to
offer a query of my own—one that I am keen to discuss with all of you: how do you
understand your relationship to this formation ("francophone/postcolonial studies") and the
intellectual/political/personal genealogies that brought you here?
There are many origin stories that I might tell for my own work in Martinique, but here is
one: it begins at 2001's UN World Conference Against Racism. I was part of a nonprofit
sector delegation to the meetings, charged with engaging in conversations about reparations
for the transatlantic slave trade. A seminal part of that experience was the breakdown in
political coalition between anglophone and francophone contingents in the African
Descendants' Caucus. A series of mistranslations, both literal and conceptual, almost
completely derailed our work together. While I did not fully understand our failures at
collective mobilization at the time, upon my return to the academy (as a master's student at
the Institute for Research in African American Studies, here at Columbia), I encountered
Brent Hayes Edwards' insightful thinking about décalage as a condition of diasporic
identification. It offered an important rubric through which I might, retroactively,
understand my UNWCAR experience. Inspired by these mistranslations to learn more, my
path to the Antilles was not routed via a personal/political nor intellectual engagement with
France nor with French Studies—that came much later—but rather via the work of Black
politics, and the discipline of Black Studies. And while my work no longer approaches "the
political" from the angle of the kinds of formal political interventions issued at the UN, I
remain centrally concerned with questions of justice, anti-black racisms, and reparation.
I'm currently writing a book called Body Burdens: Toxic Endurance and Decolonial Desire in the
French Atlantic. In it, I plumb the ways that Martinican bodies (particularly same-sex desiring
and gender-transgressing ones) are marked by enduring toxicities in contemporary colonial
time. Combining ethnographic research with archives drawn from a variety of other
inter/disciplines, the project foregrounds both aesthetics and materialities, drawing
inspiration not only from my interlocutors' experiences, but also from, for example: the
photography of Shirley Rufin, geological surveys of the island, the poetry of Claudia
Rankine, and the emergent work of epigenetics researchers.
“Body burden” is a term used for the past half century by (mostly anglophone) toxicologists
to describe the accumulated amount of harmful substances present in a human body. While
“body burden”’s original meaning draws from a scientific definition of contamination, in my
work I argue that body burdens are at once material and metaphysical, imagined and
embodied. I rework the concept to account for the ways that Black bodies remain
inextricably entangled with the forces of capital—disproportionately porous in the face of
exposure to and penetration by both toxic materials and toxic discourses.
Divided into three sections—Sand, Soil, and Sediment—one story that I tell is that of
chlordécone, a pesticide once used widely on Martinique’s banana plantations. Chlordécone
has been identified as the source of rising levels of estrogen-mimicking chemicals in the
environment, and consequently in people’s bodies. While environmental estrogens have
been linked scientifically to male infertility and to prostate cancer, on the island narratives
about the origins of gender transgression and same-sex desire now include suspicions about
their relationship to chemical contamination by this pesticide.
"Decolonial desire" functions on two registers here: first as a reflection upon the meaning of
decolonization in a context where political sovereignty is not the anticipated nor desired
outcome, and second, as a lens through which we might understand bitter contests over the
etiology of same-sex desire in the new world, often framed as colonial imposition. Revisiting
discourses about environmental determinism alongside emergent theories about
environmental interaction and heritable trauma, I ask how decolonization might be imagined
given the endurance of toxicities on the island's landscape and in its residents' bodies.
What does this mash-up of disciplinary objects, questions, and approaches have to do with
the shifting landscape of Francophone Studies? I’m still working my way toward that answer,
and am thrilled that we’ll be able to discuss this in real-time.
Miriam Ticktin, New School for Social Research
 My first book (Casualties of Care : Immigration and the Politics of
Humanitarianism in France) engaged with the way « les sans papiers »
worked to claim papers and basic rights, in their fight against discrimination
and exclusion. I explored the laws, the political struggles as well as
humanitarian exceptions to the laws ; however, as part of this, I was attentive
to the roles these sans papiers had to perform in front of NGOs, state doctors,
nurses and in the courtroom (to be « morally legitimate » victims – a
classification which is racialized and gendered, and embedded in colonial
histories). This required me to engage theories of performativity, how
compassion is encoded as part of larger historical narratives, as well as how
trauma narratives were translated into biologically based injury.
 I have turned increasingly to understanding the political through the
intersections of the aesthetic and the political, drawing on theorists like
Jacques Rancière. That is, in my work on the politics of migration and
containment, I have found that we need new grammars to make sense of
mobility and immobility ; we need to think through new concepts to
understand where and what the political is and how it might be disrupted. In
the words of Rancière, the aesthetic can provide a way to rethink partitions
of time and space, to make the invisible visible, and to make the noise of
suffering bodies into a discourse concerning the community or the commons.
To this end, I look at artists like Bouchra Khalili and her work on the circular
migrations/movements of people (using the drawing of their trajectories on
maps, which is then filmed – just a hand drawing on a map, with a voice
speaking), and her film and photography which rethinks political
geneaologies of postcolonial subjects in France, by going back to Algeria and
looking at connections to the Black Panthers, among others. I am working
with a small collaborative group of faculty and students to put together an
exhibit on the relationships between France, Cambodia and the US, using
curatorial methods in addition to ethnography (I just returned from trips to
Cambodia and France !), to render visible different relationships, histories
and futures.
2) Historically speaking, a small set of issues has occupied the forefront of political
questioning in francophone/postcolonial studies. The politics of language, the
relationship between the francophone and the postcolonial, the hybridity of diasporic
identity, and the commensurability of aesthetics and politics come to mind. Currently,
however, new questions, some of which have taken shape in other disciplines and
geopolitical contexts, are emerging as important sites of reflection: issues such as trauma
and memory, humanitarianism and human rights, globalization and 'world literature' and
the formation and transgression of sexual identities are cases in point. How do you
perceive the political framing/reframing of the field, and how does your own work
participate in these shifts in focus or emphasis?
 Humanitarianism as central to francophone/postcolonial studies : My
work has approached France and its immigrants through the lens of
humanitarian practices and exceptions, and their often unintended
consequences (i.e. I examined how care came to do the work of government).
Indeed, I don’t think it is too much of an exaggeration to say that we cannot
understand humanitarianism without looking at it through the lens of
francophone/postcolonial studies ; medical humanitarianism – particularly
the exemplary Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) – started in France, in the
heyday of 1968. But furthermore, MSF (and humanitarianism more broadly, I
dare say) really became what it is through its encounter with its colonial
others, and their process of decolonization ; its members’ initial commitment
to Third Worldism (tiermondisme) and anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist
revolution, was replaced by a defense of the principles of human rights, and
by a view which separated victims from perpetrators, heroes from villains, in
order to side with and defend the powerless, when they witnessed what was
going on with the Khmer Rouge in the former French protectorate of
Cambodia. In their work in refugee camps at the Thai border, they realized
that this was not the political revolution they had imagined ; former MSF
president Rony Brauman marks Cambodia in the late 1970s as the moment
that humanitarianism turned into a project that was grounded in
individualism, in life itself, one that no longer allowed for the possibility of
larger political change. That is, not only does French history in Africa
critically shape humanitarianism (it is still the place with the greatest
amount of intervention) ; but the larger French colonial project (in South
East Asia too) played a fundamental role in what humanitarianism is today,
and hence, it must play a role in understanding global politics (as
humanitarianism plays such a central role in what constitutes politics today).
 Politics of gender/sexuality/Islamophobia : while France is not the only
nation-state to ban the veil/burqa , it was the first in Europe, and it is now
successfully exporting these legal and social technologies to others in the
francophone realm – Québec and Belgium to name just two. Of course, the
United States and the UK used « women of the veil » as a reason to intervene
in Afghanistan and Iraq, so France/francophonie are not alone in using
gender and Islam as reasons for violence ; that said, France has pioneered
these specific laws, and the use of sexual violence as a way to patrol and
police its borders.
3) How do the political investments of your research in francophone/postcolonial studies
intersect with politics at the level of institutional and classroom experience?
Returning to what I mentioned in question #1, I teach a graduate class called « In
Search of the Political : Migrants, Refugees, Citizens » where, building on Etienne
Balibar’s statement that immigrants are “today’s proletarians,” we use the case of
immigrants and refugees to examine what “politics” and “the political” mean today.
We begin by discussing the more conventional categories of politics in today’s
world: from movements such as nationalism and humanitarianism to classic figures
such as citizens, refugees and immigrants. We then shift to new paradigms, starting
with mobility studies. We end by exploring emergent ideas of the political, enacted
through art, literature and other movements, asking if these open up new spaces
and create grammars by which to address inequalities and the quest for human
flourishing. Throughout the class, we are both exploring theories and movements,
and trying to create our own languages of the political. This course was part of a
larger pedagogical initiative, entitled “Cambodia-United States-France: Intersecting
Curatorial and Ethnographic Practices” which will culminate in an exhibit shown in
New York, Phnom Penh, and Paris.