LANGUAGE COMMUNITIES OF CULTURAL EMPIRES
CONFERENCE ORGANIZED BY UC BERKELEY, FEBRUARY 9-11, 2005
PAPER PRESENTED:
UNITED STATES OF FRANCOPHONIE: MYTH OR REALITY?
Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Stanford University
In today’s world, most of the time the discourse of globalization often
seems to be concentrated in the realm of the economy: that is to say where
public powers and agents of production seem to concentrate their discussions
and their preoccupations. The question of language and culture in the context
of globalization very often remains limited to the academic circles, or to
cultural institutions. In the globalization process, societies of the nonWestern world find themselves confronted with questions regarding their
presence and position in the global world, their relationship to local
phenomena, their interrogations and anxieties, as well as the construction of
new identities in a changing world.1 In this regard, Francophone literature,
like other postcolonial literatures, engages with social, historical and
mentality changes. It seeks a valorization of the local past, remaining
attentive to the present as well as to the surrounding world. Movements, such
as the Indigenist movement in Haiti of 1925, the subsequent currents of
Négritude, Antillanité and Créolité, the Québecois literature of the 1960's, all
convey the questionings of a specific period and constitute for their authors a
discourse of self-assertion and self-representation. These cultural and literary
currents find a common ground through the French language, at one time an
imperial language, having now become a factor of unity and solidarity upon
which Francophonie is based.
Praised by some as a sign of its involvement in the process of
globalization and as a model of the cross-cultural, the transcultural and the
transnational, Francophonie is also dismissed2 as a new form of French
cultural imperialism, or as France’s geo-political strategy to resist, contain
and counterbalance the expansion and the world dominance by the English
language. At the same time, Francophonie constitutes a challenge to both the
French Empire and its Others. Its denomination and project raise several
questions: How does contemporary France relate to her former Empire and
the former Empire to France? How do the different constituents of the
“Francophone family” relate to each other? These questions point to two
directions. First, to a vertical relation represented by a binary model, posing a
1
See Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi (ed.), Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures,
and the Challenge of Globalization. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. I would like to thank
Kenric Tsethlikai for his editorial assistance.
2
Guy Ossito Midiohouan, Du bon usage de la francophonie. Essai sur l’idéologie
francophone, Porto Novo: CNPMS, 1994 and “Savoir et aliénation en francophonie”, in
Mots Pluriels, 14, June 2000; Ambroise Kom, La Malédiction francophone. Défis culturels
et condition postcoloniale en Afrique. Hambourg/Yaoundé: Lit/CLE, 2000.
Center and a Periphery; second, to a horizontal relation that calls for a
comparative approach to the Francophone constituencies. In both directions,
the relation has been complexified by the conflation of several factors, among
which, the difference of the historical trajectory of each constituent, the
emergence of voices from the Empire, the political independence that
occurred in almost all the former colonies and, finally, an appropriation of the
French language by non French national writers. Those factors shape
Francophonie as a lieu of convergence and divergence, where the particular
and the global come together.
Historical conditions such as slavery, French colonization and its
politics of cultural assimilation, the division of the world between those who
own the means of production and those who only lend their force of
production might have condemned Francophonie to remain an ambiguous
adventure involving ambivalent subjects. On the one hand, the public
discourse on Francophonie emphasizes pluralism and diversity within the
family; on the other hand, the centrality of France is still visible in politics, in
economy and in culture3. I would like to suggest that this ambivalence and
ambiguity are not necessarily negative factors, but rather the real fabric of
3
Let’s just think of publishers: most of the Francophone literature is published in France,
and the writers who reach an international exposure or are recognized literary prizes
publish the ones in France. After almost half a century of African independence's, France
Francophonie, in other words, its conditions of possibility. It functions as a
palimpsest of history and testifies to a history of contact and relation.
The interrogative form of the title of my paper: the United States of
Francophonie: Myth or Reality? could, in actuality be an affirmation: The
United States of Francophonie: Myth AND Reality. Here are two anecdotes.
Last December, I was at the Montparnasse FNAC, one of the major
bookstores in Paris. As usual, I went to the book floors and looked at the
section called "Francophone", where I used to find books by African and
Caribbean writers. To my surprise, under Francophone literature were all the
works by French writers from France. After some searching, I found the
writers I was looking for under the rubric “littérature étrangère” [“foreign
literature”]. To this day I still do not understand what lead the FNAC to
exclude African and Caribbean writers from the Francophonie and relocate
them in the field of “littérature étrangère”. African scholars, even natives of
Francophone countries, are regularly denied entrance visas to France to
attend professional conferences. Among these scholars, one was the recipient
of the Palmes Académiques, a French honorific award bestowed by the
French government on writers and academics who would have distinguished
themselves in the promotion of the French language and culture. This scholar
still send " cooperants" in African countries whom sometimes call for France military
was granted an American visa and is settled today in the USA, an English
speaking country. Similarly, it is thanks to their insertion, not into the French
university, but into the American academic system, that writers such as
Maryse Conde, Assia Djebar, or Edouard Glissant have reached their status
of "stars" and recognized as major Francophone writers. Those stories might
be only anecdotes; yet, they are quite significant in translating the fluctuating
and sometimes evasive character of the term Francophonie, as well as the
uncertainties of its contours.
Indeed, Francophonie carries a multiplicity of references, with
variations according to contexts, subtexts and the sites of enunciation from
which discourses are produced in its name. There is a play of exclusion and
inclusion: the Hexagon sometimes included or excluded, the Hexagon and its
Others brought together, or its Others excluded, as displayed in the FNAC
bookstore. The same term also covers different spaces: geographical politicoeconomic and the everyday life space which refers to the spontaneous
introduction of French vocabulary in the local language by subjects who are
not fluent French speakers. Everyday Francophonie refers as well to the
different ways in which each of us relates to the French language and culture:
former colonized, French expatriates living in an English speaking country,
intervention.
or American citizens of French descent.4 Francophonie in everyday life is
also embedded in urban culture, for example, in music or in the language of
advertisement.5 Sometimes Francophonie designates the world outside of
France, as if France itself was not francophone. One such example could be
the denomination of some unversity Departments as Departments of French
and Francophone Studies. For some, this distinction between French and
Francophone is meant to indicate a hierarchical relation between the Hexagon
and the rest of the Francophone world. For others, the distinction, paradoxical
at the first glance, in actuality seeks to assert a non-marginal, autonomous
existence outside the Hexagon, to emphasize a difference from the Hexagon,
re and to. French resist the hierarchical relation between French and
Francophone. Implicitly, the defines what Francophonie ought to be and how
it ought to function as a unifying factor for sure, on the one hand, an
affirmation of diversity and pluralism, and on the other a recognition and
respect of difference.
See Thomas Spear (ed.), La Culture française vue d’ici et d’ailleurs. Paris, Karthala,
2002.
5
In a city like Kinshasa for example, the way French is used sometimes indicates a social
divide. More specifically, ads and publicity posters which target popular classes although
in French, erase any reference to the culture of the former metropole, while ads appearing
at places attended by the local elite and Western expatriates carry a direct reference to the
culture of the Metropole. On the one hand, denominations such as “la pharmacie de la
pitié”, “au restaurant vitamines ABC”, “Madame Toilette” attest an autonomous
expressivity of the popular culture. On the other hand, designations such as “Le
4
As a geographical and politico-economic space, Francophonie is also a
space where different individuals’ imaginary and creativity are displayed
through the commonality of a language. This brings me to Francophone
literature, which in its singular or plural form, refers to the particular or to the
more global. Instead of presenting each of the literatures in French produced
outside the Hexagon6, I will rather highlight convergence that brings them
together, in their diversity and their similarities.
Migration histories of today Francophone populations in the Americas
and their conditions of arrival to the American continent are quite different.
On the one hand, there is the Francophone North America, a society of
European descent whose members came freely to settle in America as colons,
or at least had decided of America as their destination. On the other hand, the
French Caribbean, composed of African ancestry populations forced to
Versailles”, “Le Chateaubriand” or “Le Beaulieu” reflect the academic culture of the local
elite. See Max Pierre,
6
For synthesis, see Régis Antoine, La Littérature franco-antillaise: Haïti, Guadeloupe et
Martinique, Paris, Karthala, 1992; Jack Corzani, La Littérature des Antilles-Guyane
françaises, Fort-de-France, Désormeaux, 1978, 6 vols; Ghislain Gouraige, Histoire de la
littérature haïtienne (de l’indépendance à nos jours), Port-au-Prince, Imprimerie des
Antilles, 1960; René Dionne, Histoire de la littérature franco-ontarienne des origines à
nos jours, Sudbury, Prise de parole, 1969, 4 tomes; René Dionne et Alii, Le Québecois et
sa littérature, Sherbooke Canada, Naaman/ACCT, 1984; Michel LeBel et Jean-Marcel
Paquette, Le Québec par ses textes littéraires 1534-1976, Montréal, France-Québec et
Fernand Nathan, 1979; Auguste Viatte, Histoire littéraire de l’Amérique française, Paris,
Presses Universitaires de France, 1954.
deportation and transplantation, not knowing whatsoever where the négriers
ships were taking them. Despite these differences, Quebecois writers such as
Gaston Miron, Paul Chamberlan or Pierre Vallières see in their history
cultural, political and economical conditions similar to those of the slaves or
of the colonized: dominated subjects, made invisible and marginalized,
submitted to linguistic and cultural assimilation by the dominant British
power. The British imperialist discourse inscribes itself in colonial discourse:
it reproduces the same motives and legitimating process in the name of a
civilizing mission. For the British power, “une race supérieure”, “a superior
race”, Francophone Canadians were “populations à civiliser”, “populations to
be civilized”. George Lambton, Earl of Durham, and General Governor of
North American provinces assert this in his 1839 Report on the Affairs of
British North America. He considered the populations of these “British North
America” as people without neither history nor literature.7
In her posthumous autobiography, La Détresse et l’enchantement,
where she speaks of the Francophone population of the Manitoba, Gabrielle
Roy reminds how, in front of the dominant culture, French was the “langue
proscrite”, the “prohibited language”, and English, la “langue imposée”, the
7
cité par Michel LeBel et Jean-Marcel Paquettte, Le Québec par ses textes littéraires 15341976, Montréal, France-Québec et Fernand Nathan, 1979, p. 69.
”imposed language”.8 This situation clearly reproduces the colonial model of
vertical relation between master and slave, colonizer and colonized and their
cultures. Michèle Lalonde shows the similarities in his ironic poem “Speak
white”: a reference to the USA context where Black English has been long
depreciated. The poem also recalls the linguistic context of the French
Caribbean, where for several generations, the Creole language was
stigmatized as a sign of illiteracy and inferiority, in relationship to French
conceived of as the correct normative language. “Hocquet”, a poem by the
Guyanese Léon Damas evokes with irony the ostracization of Creole among
the Antillan bourgeoisie:
Ma Mère voulant d’un fils mémorandum
[…]
Taisez-vous
Vous ai-je dit ou non qu’il vous fallait parler français
Le français de France
Le français du français
Le français français
[My Mother wanting a memorandum son
[…]
Shut up
Didn’ t I tell you that you have to speak French
French from France]
French of the French
French French (my translation)
8
Gabrielle Roy, La Détresse et l’enchantement, Montréal, Edition du Club Québec
Debates among intellectuals as well as the project of a valorization of
Creole and orality in the written work accomplish a metamorphosis. From
poor parents, Creole and forms of orally become for the Antillan writers an
expression of self-assertion and an affirmation of their own culture and its
difference from the dominant French language and culture. In Francophone
Northern America, the monologue play La Sagouine (1971), or the epic
novel Pélagie-la-Charette (1979), or Cent ans dans les bois (1981) by the
Franco- canadienne writer from Acadia, Antonine Maillet, represent a
project similar to the Antillan writers': produce a literature and literary forms
which are a celebration of the local oral history and folklore, considered as
the medium of transmission for the local collective memory. For some
writers, cultural and political subjugation goes hand in hand with economic
domination. The Quebecois Pierre Vallières illustrates this other domination
with a provocative work, Nègres blancs d’Amérique, autobiographie
précoce d’un “terroriste” québecois:
N’ont -ils pas, tout comme les Noirs américains, été importés
pour servir de main-d’oeuvre à bon marché dans le Nouveau
Monde? Ce qui les différencie: uniquement la couleur de leur
peau et le continent d’origine. Après trois siècles, leur condition
est demeurée la même.9
Loisirs, date?, p. 72.
9
Pierre Vallières, Nègres blancs d’Amérique, Québec, Editions Parti Pris, 1968, p. 37.
In a context of cultural and political hegemony in which they have to live,
African, Antillan, Québecois, Cajun, Acadian or Ontarian writers have in
common the use of literature as a vehicle for their revendication, their
resistance to cultural and political imperialism. Caribbean literary works
recall the history of deportation of Africans to the New World, the cultural
and psychological consequences of the transplantation. Similarly the
literature of Quebec of the 1960 brings the imprint of its political and
cultural history; Acadian, Cajun, Franco-Ontarian and Franco-American
literatures carry the traces of the “Grand Dérangement” of 1750: that is also
deportation. The crossing of the Atlantic for the Africans, as well as the
expulsion of the Acadians, lead to exile. Different kinds of exile, but both
created a “déchirure” ["a tear"], and left a “béance” [" a breach"], as
Edouard Glissant puts it. Historical experience has thus provided
Francophone writers from different regions problematic they actualize in
their work: the question of memory and cultural nomads, exile and search
for rootedness, the rewriting of history and the quest for a national culture:
all topics at the heart of the postcolonial in its theoretical conceptualization.
The development and the consolidation of Francophone literature has
recently led to several studies focusing on the relation between French and
Francophone, Francophone and the Postcolonial, or a rethinking of French
Studies traditional model.10 To avoid redundancy, I will rather put forward
several questions to be debated, among which: Has the institution of a
"language community" erased or changed significantly the relationship
between the Center and its Periphery, that is France and the non hexagonal
Francophonie? Does a more global, transcultural and transnational
Francophonie, as practiced in the academic space, allow the writers to
escape the prison-house of such dichotomies as Self and Other, Center and
Periphery? To what degree does popular culture in Africa, for example,
reveal awareness to these dichotomies and, what, in the writers' imaginary
translates a consciousness of belonging both to the global and the local? In a
world in which writers are forced to exile and settle on new shores, which
criteria define the concept of national literature today? To which national
literature do belong writers such as Emile Ollivier, Gérard Etienne, Joël
Desrosiers, Jean Metellus, Haitian exiled living and writing in Québec or in
Alec Hargreaves, “Ships Passing in the night? France, Postcolonialism and the
Globalization of Literature”, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1, 2, 2003: 64-69; Alec
Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (eds.), Post-Colonial Cultures in France. London/ New
York: Routledge, 1998; Françoise Lionnet and Dominic Thomas (eds.), “Francophone
Studies: New Landscapes”, Modern Language Note, 118, 4, September 2003; Tyler
Stovall and Georges van den Abbeele (eds.), French Civilization and Its Discontents.
Lanham: Lenxington Books, 2003; Farid Laroussi and Christopher Miller (eds.), “French
and Francophone: The Challenge of Expanding Horizons”, Yale French Studies, 103,
2003; Jean-Marc Moura, Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1999; Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (eds.), Francophone
Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction. Westminster CA: Arnold Publications,
2003.
10
Paris? Does Naim Kattan, a Jew from Irak settled in Québec and writing in
French belong to Québecois, Irakian or Jewish literature? Similar questions
apply to Assia Djebar, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Calixte Beyala and other
exiled Francophone writers, sometimes considered personae non gratae in
their own country of origin? What, in the writers' imaginary translates a
consciousness of belonging both to the global and the local?
If the constitution of a Francophone collective has somehow
modified the relation between a Center and a Periphery, real politik tends to
show that in the United States of Francophonie, the Center remains largely
the Center, and power relations are still unequal in the domains of economy,
politics and culture. How then does one answer the call of a globalization to
ensure one’s être–au-monde, [one's being-in-the world], and at the same
time, safeguard in it the presence of the local and the particular? In
Francophonie as a space of imaginary and creativity, how does the writer
live the myth and the reality of Francophonie?
In lieu of a conclusion, I will go back to what suggested at the
beginning of my paper. Francophonie is inscribed in an historical trajectory:
it bears the imprints of history, the epistemological and the ideological
marks of different periods and of changes in mentalities. In view of the
historical process, the ambiguities inherent in the concept of Francophonie
itself and its implementation meet, to some extent, the original project of
Présence Africaine: to be present in the larger world in one's terms, namely,
by bringing to this world the particularities of one’s specific culture. In
perhaps an optimist visions which I like to embrace it might be that
hybridize and Relation open up the road that brings myth and reality
together. For the Congolese writer Henri Lopes, a dual and opposing
genealogical reference presides over the ambiguous adventure which is
Francophonie. It is embodied for him in his Bantu grandmother, representing
the local, and his ancestors, the Gauls, who represent the outer, larger
world11. As for Edouard Glissant the Martinican, he is calling for a poetics
of Relation, stating that
Ce qui s’est passé dans la Caraïbe et que nous pourrions
résumer dans le mot créolisation donne une idée à peu près
complète du processus de la Relation: […], une dimension
inédite qui permet d’être là et ailleurs, enraciné et ouvert, perdu
dans la montagne et libre sur la mer, en accord et en exil.”.12
[What happened in the Caribbean and that we might summarize
with the word creolization, gives a quite complete idea of the
process of Relation: […] an unprecedented dimension that
allows one to be at the same time here and elsewhere, rooted
and open, lost in the mountain and free on the sea, integrated
and in exile.]
11
I take this from the title of his last book: Henri Lopes, Ma grand-mère bantoue et mes
ancêtres les Gaulois. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.
12
Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais, Paris: Seuil, 1981, p. 12.
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