HYBRIDITY

Limits,
Transformations,
Prospects

Anjali Prabhu
Hybridity
 SUNY series

EXPLORATIONS
in
POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Emmanuel C. Eze and Arif Dirlik, Editors

A complete listing of books in this series can be found

at the end of this volume.
 Hybridity

Limits, Transformations, Prospects

ANJALI PRABHU

S t at e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Yo r k P r e s s
 Published by
S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y OF N E W Y O R K P R E S S , A L BA N Y

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Prabhu, Anjali
Hybridity : limits, transformations, prospects / Anjali Prabhu.
p. cm. — (SUNY series, explorations in postcolonial studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7041-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7042-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Reunionese literature (French)—History and criticism. 2. Réunion—Civilization.
3. Mauritius—Civilization. 4. Racially mixed people in literature. 5. Racially mixed people—
Psychology. 6. Miscegenation. I. Title. II. Series.

PQ3988.5.R4P73 2007
840.9'96981—dc22
2006013431

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Keshav
This page intentionally left blank.
 Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xvii

Chapter One Introduction: Hybridity in Contemporary

Postcolonial Theory: Examining Agency 1

Chapter Two Hybridity in La Réunion: Monique Boyer’s Métisse

and the Nation as Necessity 19

Chapter Three Theorizing Hybridity: Colonial and Postcolonial

La Réunion 35

Chapter Four On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity:

Africanness in Mauritius 51

Chapter Five Ethnicity and the Fate of the Nation: Reading

Mauritius 85

Chapter Six Interrogating Hybridity: Subaltern Agency and

Totality through Edouard Glissant’s
Poétique de la Relation 105

Chapter Seven Narration in Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire masques

blancs: Some Reconsiderations for Hybridity 123

Afterword: Why Hybridity Now? 147

Notes 151

Works Cited 165

Index 175

SUNY series, Explorations in Postcolonial Studies 186

vii
[Der Mensch] ist ein freier und gesicherter Bürger der Erde,
denn er ist an eine Kette gelegt, die lang genug ist, um ihm
alle irdischen Räume frei zu geben, und doch nur so lang,
dass nichts ihn über die Grenzen der Erde reisen kann. Gle-
ichzeitig aber ist er auch ein freier und gesicherter Bürger
des Himmels, denn er ist auch an eine änlich berechnete
Himmelskette gelegt. Will er nun auf die Erde, drosselt ihn
das Halsband des Himmels, will er in der Himmel, jenes der
Erde. Und trotzdem hat er alle Möglichkeiten und fühlt es;
ja, er weigert sich sogar, das Ganze auf einen Fehler bei der
ersten Fesselung zurückzuführen.
—Franz Kafka (Das Paradies, 1947)

[Man] is a free citizen of the world, for he is fettered to a

chain which is long enough to give him the freedom of all
earthly space, and yet only so long that nothing can drag
him past the frontiers of the world. But simultaneously he
is a free and secure citizen of Heaven as well, for he is also
fettered by a similarly designed heavenly chain. So that if he
heads, say, for the earth, his heavenly collar throttles him,
and if he heads for Heaven, his earthly one does the same.
And yet all the possibilities are his, and he feels it; more, he
actually refuses to account for the deadlock by an error in
the original fettering.
 Preface

From the minute I set foot on Mauritian soil in August of 1997 to research
my dissertation, I was forced to reconsider my Indianness, and to do so repeat-
edly. At my preliminary exam before this, when Fredric Jameson asked me
how my Indianness was going to play out on my trip to Mauritius, I was puz-
zled—even vaguely annoyed. I arrived with my four-month old son in a car-
rier on my back, a huge suitcase full of baby things and a few changes of
clothes for myself, another full of books and papers, and all the enthusiasm of
discovering what one of my mentors called the “exceptionalism” of her native
Mauritius (Lionnet “Créolité in the Indian Ocean” 107).
Several people at the Seewoosagar Ramgoolam International airport
seemed curious about my arrival. Almost all the passengers waiting for their
luggage appeared to know each other. It was mostly (Mauritian) Indians who
started up conversation with me, asking where I was going, what I was doing,
but mostly where I was from. All were horrified that I was unaccompanied
except for my child, some disbelieving that I was not Mauritian and, there-
fore, even angry that I did not speak Creole, others nodding that I must be
from Réunion even though I said I was Indian and lived in the U.S. In the
midst of all this they watched censoriously as I hauled the heavy suitcases off
the ramp, declined help, hoisted the baby carrier onto my back, and made my
way out of the terminal. One driver, whom I later came to know as Mr.
Saubourah, literally ordered me into his cab as I made my way uncertainly
through the crowd of people outside. I remain grateful to him and Mme
Saubourah who, between them, became my babysitter, buffer, chaperone,
solver-of-problems. Although disapproving of many things I did and said, he
took me under his wing and saw me through various unusual and sometimes
startling situations I will not have the opportunity to recount here.
My Indianness became an issue for many Mauritian Indians I encoun-
tered: at the Mauritius archives, at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute, in inter-
acting with students at the university, when I wanted to rent an apartment, or
when people met me casually. I was chastised for wearing cotton saris (rather

ix
x Preface

than the synthetic ones judged to be fashionable), for wearing jeans, for not
having a clear Indian ethnicity and “mother-tongue” (Are you “tamoul”? Not
at all, then why do you speak Tamil? Only half Konkan? What is Konkan?
Malayali also? Grandmother speaking French?), for being married to a Ger-
man, for arriving without him. I was repeatedly told that India was full of
poverty and in Mauritius poverty did not exist. Nor did the diseases that India
was riddled with. Yet, the very obvious fascination with some “authentic” Indi-
anness that I could not uphold was brought home to me on these occasions.
People looked askance at me for speaking French and not Creole, for not hav-
ing a properly recognizable accent (to them) in French or English and thus
followed up any conversation with numerous questions to ascertain my iden-
tity. I was somewhat forgiven because I could speak, read, and write Tamil and
particularly Hindi. (It was the one time I was grateful to the Indian govern-
ment for having made Hindi a compulsory subject and the national language
despite the agitation from Tamil Nadu, where I am from, before and through
the time I worked my way through the Indian Certificate of Secondary Edu-
cation system.) Matters were somewhat toned down for the two weeks when
my “Indian” father, arrived to meet his grandson, much to the approval of the
same Mauritians I had met. He was respectably from India and clearly and
unambiguously Konkan to them (and himself!).
Mauritian Indians were consistently interested in knowing if I was
“Brahman,” some prefacing it with the fact that they were “practicing Brah-
mans.” They wanted to know how my parents had reacted to my marrying a
“white” man. On occasion, I wept angry tears after neighbors or even passers-
by stopped in or brought others to see my son—whom by now I saw con-
sciously as half-white, half-Indian—at odd times of day or night, when I was
just managing to sit down and catch up on my day’s notes or other chores
because he was asleep. I could not turn them away because they always prof-
fered some sort of “gift,” making sure to reiterate that they remained “Indian”
and remembered the “Indian way of hospitality.” While it is now more com-
mon to see new unions (as opposed to the colonially created “Anglo-Indian”
population) between whites and Indians in India, racial intermarriage is still
certainly an issue there as well, even if in a different way.
In retrospect, however, the source of my tears was less the obvious frus-
tration of being interrupted than the shattering of my utopian idea of what
hybridity might mean in the real world. No doubt, attitudes have changed
even since this recent sojourn in Mauritius, with even greater contact with
India and the presence of Indians working within the Mauritian economy.
Perhaps the presence of other whites, who become less connected to colonial
whiteness in Mauritius, also deflects some of the loaded meaning of being
 Preface xi

white there. And it is, undoubtedly, more common to see Mauritian Indians
linked to other groups in different ways. But the enduring nature of the cate-
gories that French and British colonialism used in administering this colony
becomes apparent in the ways in which people understand their interactions
with others in this postcolonial nation, even as it is “being hailed as a superb
example of successful mediations of the uncertain relationship between
nationhood and ethnic or cultural identity” (Lionnet “Créolité in the Indian
Ocean” 106). The relationship between Mauritian Indianness and Mauritian-
ness is a fascinating one that I encountered as an Indian visiting Mauritius. It
is recorded in very interesting ways in the public culture of this hybrid nation
and is explored in some detail in this book.
Hybridity is a seductive idea, which, it is claimed by prominent theories
in postcolonial studies, can lead us out of various constraints in conceiving
agency. In its most politically articulated guises, hybridity is believed to reveal,
or even provide, a politics of liberation for the subaltern constituencies in
whose name postcolonial studies as a discipline emerged. In this book, I test
these claims with reference to a set of theorists whose work forms the core
informing the renewed interest in hybridity in contemporary theory. But I also
conduct this investigation by way of a social frame of reference, which will be
the overtly “hybrid” and “postcolonial” societies of the Indian Ocean Creole
islands of Mauritius and La Réunion.
Mauritius and La Réunion, two small islands of the Indian Ocean, hav-
ing known, among others, both British and French colonialism, quite easily
speak to the theorists of the different theoretical derivatives of hybridity con-
sidered. These prominent theorists draw from both the generality of the post-
colonial as well as, in some cases, the realities particular to a Creole specificity.
Rather than setting up a relationship where society “answers” or even “ques-
tions” theory, my reading will privilege a range of texts of differing provenance
from these islands. These texts are seen as “theorizing” in situ what I identify
as the central question in theories on hybridity in recent postcolonial studies,
namely that of agency.
At the same time, let me state early on that this book is not an exhaus-
tive study “about” either or both of these islands. The complexity of focusing
on a relatively unknown area of Francophone culture might bring certain
expectations for the project, such as a copious introduction to the region,
demonstration of where the creativity of particular writers fits into the post-
colonial canon, and so forth. These might translate into a pressure, felt by the
author, to anthologize compulsively in order to show that there is a vast range
of texts that are not being referenced. It is a pressure that I resist actively.
Instead, each of the texts selected from these islands will be treated as the
xii Preface

eloquent, fully developed creations I judge them to be and for which, pre-
cisely, they have been chosen. What I hope emerges also is the richness of the
space that generated these texts and the significance of its particular engage-
ment with hybridity and postcoloniality. Readers are referred to pertinent
sources for more information on Indian Ocean literary creation, history, and
context. What I propose here is a consequential point from which a dialogue
can begin on the notion of hybridity as it has entered recent postcolonial
studies. And I am persuaded that this dialogue necessarily brings about a
restructuring of this notion, indicating a different derivative that I illustrate
specifically in the reframing suggested in the culminating chapters. In these
later chapters, I propose a different way of allying the thought of two
thinkers of global hybridity, Edouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, both of
whom happen to be from the Caribbean Creole context and who have
entered and occupied rather different spaces in postcolonial hybridity.
The hybrid is a colonial concept. This is not just to say that the term was
coined during the period of high colonialism, but that it served certain inter-
ests, which were central to the colonial enterprise. Hybridity, then, is first and
foremost a “racial” term. Hybrid individuals in the colonies testified to real
encounters between the white colonizer and the native (most often slave) and
subsequently required an active inscription in the laws and policies that man-
aged and oversaw colonial activity. The superiority of the white race was, of
course, a founding principle upon which colonialism was based—whether of
the French style of so-called assimilatory policies or of what is often consid-
ered the more distant British form of rule in the colonies. The presence of
hybrids directly called into question the clean division between these two
groups and required the colonists to engage with this mixed section of the
population with regard to inheritance, education, burials, marriage, and the
notion of citizenship. In a comparable manner, postcolonial hybridity inter-
venes in the form of a theoretical argument against the homogenizing ten-
dencies of global capitalism. It presents, one might say, the optimistic view of
the effects of capitalism.
The prominence of the notion of hybridity in postcolonial studies
should be reexamined with reference to two possible developments. Either the
colonial context in which it was conceived is ever as pertinent to the post-
colonial world, and therefore, the notion of hybridity retains its centrality in
the ongoing, if modified, tensions between white people and people of color;
or the radical changes that frame the interactions between these two groups
(also recognizable as ex-colonizer and ex-colonized), and the changes within
them have modified this notion of hybridity into something quite different
from what it was during colonialism.
 Preface xiii

An examination of prominent theoretical versions of postcolonial

hybridity will reveal that, more and more, the tendency in theory is to move
away from the original entanglement of this idea with the notion of race.
Instead questions of a hybrid culture, of hybridity in reading and in the very
notion of identity are shown to exist. These instances of hybridity, it is pro-
posed in these theories, should be recognized and promoted in a step that
enables subaltern agency. That is, postcolonial theories of hybridity do away
with the old dichotomy of colonizer/colonized, which is substituted by ideas
of multiplicity, plurality, and difference in a less specifiable way. We will see
that postcolonial texts of different kinds, which are closer to a “social ground,”
tend to take up and engage with this racial aspect much more explicitly as it
is entangled with specific historical circumstances of racial categories and
their changing significance associated with the history of that ground.
Postcolonial theories of hybridity can be seen to share some basic
Marxian preoccupations and impulses, which are explored in the next chap-
ter. Nevertheless, despite this and the fact that they all aim to privilege
agency in the struggle against assimilation or homogenization, we will see
that at the same time most of these recent theories work explicitly and
implicitly against some concepts that are central to a Marxian account of
agency. What then emerges, as I will show, is that an explosive theorist of
struggle against colonization such as Frantz Fanon, when read within the
framing of this version of postcolonial theoretical hybridity, has to be maneu-
vered into speaking a discourse that goes against the more basic ideas that
inform his entire work. The critique of a “postcolonial Fanon” itself has been
ongoing. Here, however, I take a new look at a part of Fanon’s text of Black
Skin, White Masks, which has been canonized within this prominent trend of
hybridity in postcolonial criticism. I will argue that it is not that Fanon’s
dialectic of white and black fails to acknowledge and exploit hybridity fully
by lapsing into universalism or humanism as Homi K. Bhabha has claimed,
but rather, that the definition and preoccupations of this new derivative of
hybridity are themselves at odds with what can be identified as hybridity in
Fanon. Fanon’s hybridity (particularly with reference to the notion of agency
within it) has greater credibility even as a theoretical construct not just
because it is anchored in a recognizable context but because it is tied to a pol-
itics of action of subaltern subjects. I will show that an idea of totality, which
Fanon’s work posits as essential for holding up agency, is lacking in the
prominent version of hybridity in postcolonial studies. This notion is, how-
ever, found as a necessity within the fully ripened conception of thinkers
whose intellectual processes and emotional impulses are conditioned by
hybridity and an essentially Marxian informed vision of agency.
xiv Preface

As in Fanon’s case, I will argue that Edouard Glissant’s conception of

Relation explicates such a notion of totality while also activating many
impulses central to Marxian thinking. Totality also emerges as a necessary
condition for radical politics in the hybrid societies from the postcolonial
world that are examined in this book. Derivatives of hybridity in postcolonial
theories tend to obscure the conflictual aspect in hybridity, which remains of
interest to a Marxian account of social change and is inscribed in societal
processes in postcolonial locations. Hybridity as it can be identified in Fanon
is tied to revolutionary social change, as we will see, while most postcolonial
theories of hybridity, in their wish to be revolutionary, tend to overstate the
ability of hybridity to dismantle power structures. Glissant’s hybridity brings
together reality and thought and challenges Marxian informed thinking to
engage more consequentially with the idea of “difference.” In this way, hybrid-
ity, as it can be gleaned from the thought of Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glis-
sant—particularly through close reading and a Marxian framing offered in the
chapters devoted to these two theorists—reconnects more credibly to the
impulse for the formation of postcolonial studies as a discipline. The last two
chapters provide a reading of each of these theorists in this particular way and
are informed by the analyses of postcolonial Mauritius and La Réunion in the
chapters preceding them.
Prominent theories of postcolonial hybridity recuperate the notion of
agency while somehow eliding the very conditions within which hybridity as
a concept emerged: the stunning inequality of two groups of people locked
into a relationship of domination that is upheld and perpetuated by a system
that operates in the sphere of the psychological and the symbolic as much as
in the economic and the structural. My contention is that it is questionable to
have recourse to such a disembodied notion of hybridity in an attempt to
resolve conflicting situations where the inequalities of the colonial period con-
tinue to play out, even if modified or radically transformed through newer
forces. The argument, then, is that if the overarching totality of colonialism,
which gave hybridity its meaning and necessity has not been dismantled but
rather reinvented, using hybridity to dismantle today’s inequalities is a ques-
tionable gesture unless it is sufficiently retooled and reinvented itself particu-
larly with regard to a new conception of totality in which struggle can be
inscribed. If inequalities are no longer so clearly identifiable between this and
that group, the area in which the hybrid is produced is still to be properly
accounted for in these new theories. Françoise Vergès, whose work on métis-
sage in La Réunion is a historically attentive one, has dry criticism for the pro-
liferation of overly positive and exuberant notions of the hybrid, where an
ideal has more currency than reality: “The idea of humanity is more appeal-
 Preface xv

ing than the actual ‘disappointing’ human beings. I prefer ‘disappointing

human beings and their demystifying acts’” (“Post-Scriptum” 357). In the new
theories of hybridity it becomes hard to accommodate the stark realities of
specific subaltern populations of the world and their versions of hybridity. My
critique of new theories of hybridity targets the way in which agency is privi-
leged in them without accounting for totality and contradiction. This critique
is implicit in the following analyses that focus on the contours and details of
hybridity as a social phenomenon as well as a complex political strategy in
Mauritius and La Réunion, and emerges more explicitly later when hybridity
in Fanon and Glissant is examined.
Tracking the notion of hybridity in the plural, multiracial societies of
Mauritius and La Réunion reveals from the outset that hybridity can only be
understood through a proper historical understanding of its connection to
colonial administration. Both the colonial and the postcolonial (here referring
quite simply to two eras in chronology) versions of hybridity in these islands
are dependent upon a particular totality within which hybridity as a concept
has been sustained. In the earlier version, colonial culture is instantiated in
every hybrid occurrence, while in postcolonial hybridity, it is the post-colony
as nation or possible nation (within a system of global capitalism) that informs
and even necessitates the claim to hybridity. The will to transcend the nation,
to make transnational connections, is in no way precluded as it will become
evident particularly in the study of Mauritian politics in chapter 4.
Taking stock of such a situation should not in any way be construed as
a defeatist or pessimistic view that foretells doom. That has not been the dri-
ving affect of this work. Instead, it is inspired by the place in both Fanon and
Glissant of utopia that is ever in the future and ever, necessarily, out of reach.
But in resolutely striving toward it, there is no room for complacency, no room
even for a lapse in energy. Garnering all the exuberance of contemporary post-
colonial theories of hybridity, I suggest that the energies contained within the
concept of hybridity and in every identifiable hybrid location be released
through an approach that can only be satisfied if its own movement joins up
explicitly with the agency of those who occupy these locations. To do so, as I
argue in this book, is to render indispensable the concepts of contradiction
and totality, the latter being creatively linked to utopia.
This page intentionally left blank.
 Acknowledgments

The intellectual and personal debts to be acknowledged by the author of this

book are too numerous to list. A look at the index and bibliography will tell
some of this story. Still, I am deeply grateful for encouragement and intellec-
tual stimulation at different points of time in my life from the following teach-
ers, mentors, friends, students, and colleagues: Elisabeth Mudimbé-Boyi,
Fredric Jameson, Linda Orr, Walter D. Mignolo, Françoise Lionnet, Ariel
Dorfman, Mireille Rosello, Dominic Thomas, H. Adlai Murdoch, Anne
Donadey, Ambroise Kom, V. Y. Mudimbé, the late Marcel Tétel, Jeanette
Beer, Floyd Merrell, Paul Benhamou, Erdmute White, Selvyn Jussy, Amitabh
Mattoo, Shubha Pandey, Sudha Ramachandran, Shibhesh Singh, Rakesh
Kumar, C. Jeewan, Rachna Negi, Neela Bhattacharjee, Nandini Sen, Zenobia
Irani, R.K. Singh, Aparajita Sagar, Dawn Fulton, Ifeoma Nwanko, Jon
Beasley-Murray, Geeta Paray-Clark, Danielle Marx-Scouras, Dorian Addi-
son, Joan McNay, John Erikson, Robert Damoiseau, YoonSun Lee, YuJin Ko,
Tim Watson, Sheela Nambiar, Priya Kurian, the late Lisa Mauney, Ayda
Sarikaya, Nandita Gulvady, Anujee Matthew, the late M. R. Prabhu, Ralf
Schlosser, Ato Quayson, Robert Young, David Washbrook, Rajeswari Sun-
derrajan, David Chioni Moore, Madhu Dubey, N.S. Yamuna, Nirmala Jairaj,
Achille Giacometti, Raphaël Confiant, Dev Virahsawmy, Vinesh Hookoom-
sing, Elizabeth Daniel, Colleen Murphy, Ashley Coale, and Jenifer Clapp. I
wish to thank my colleagues at the Wellesley College French Department in
whose company this book was completed.
I benefited from a Mellon Grant for work with the GEREC group in
Martinique. To Raphaël Confiant, in particular, I offer thanks for superb
company and great perspective. Thanks to the University of Oxford’s St.
Antony’s College for hosting me the year this book was written, African
Studies at the University of Cambridge for housing me several summers of
my research at the University Library, where I consulted the Royal Com-
monwealth Society Collections for historical documents on Mauritius as well
as the Parliamentary debates. Thanks to Rachel Rowe and her crew for their

xvii
xviii Acknowledgments

support and help. Other institutions that supported my research in various

ways are the University of Mauritius, Université de Paris VII, Duke Univer-
sity, and Wellesley College. I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to: Jane
Bunker, Larin McLaughlin, Diane Ganeles, and Anne Valentine, all at
SUNY Press, as well as the series editors and anonymous reviewers.
Elisabeth Boyi has been a mentor, friend, and supporter on so many lev-
els and with such good humor and balance, it would be impossible to describe.
N. S. Yamuna somehow inspires everything I do. Others whose friendship and
support I have relied upon are Linda Orr, Adlai Murdoch, Dominic Thomas,
Mireille Rosello, Jim Petterson, and Priya Kurian. Special thanks to Mary
Kate McGowan for friendship and frequent doses of sanity. For inimitable
friendship, fierce debate, and every conceivable type of support, I have turned
to Ato Quayson, who responded with the immense energy, enthusiasm, and
generosity of spirit that are only his.
To Kairav Tobias: the experience of your meteoric arrival and brilliant
energy continue to restore my sometimes-waning internal resources.
To Ralf: in admiration of the example of your work, in gratitude for
the unwaveringness of your presence, and in humility before the vastness of
your love.
This book is dedicated to Keshav Raphaël for roughing it out with me
on the many journeys it took to write this book, and for your stylish sporting
of hybridity: in wondrous anticipation of the unpredictable places to which
you will take it or where you will abandon it.
Part of chapter 4 was published in the International Journal of Francoph-
one Studies. I thank Intellect Publishers for granting copyright to use it here.
A different version of chapter 6 was published in Research in African Litera-
tures. Thanks to Indiana University Press for granting copyright to use it here.
A slightly different version of chapter 5 has appeared in Diacritics. Thanks to
Johns Hopkins University Press for granting permission to use it here.
 CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Hybridity in
Contemporary Postcolonial Theory

Examining Agency

This book represents an attempt to align more closely the notion of hybridity
in postcolonial studies with the exigencies that led to the founding of this aca-
demic discipline itself. Such exigencies arose from recognizing and studying
situations of stark inequalities, which were held in place and legitimated by
the various machinations of, or inherited from, colonialism. That is, in
unpacking and examining hybridity today in some of its theoretical versions
as well as specific societal configurations, this book attends to the ways in
which such inequalities might inform current derivatives of hybridity.
Hybridity is an enticing idea in current postcolonial studies.1 In its
dominant form, it is claimed that it can provide a way out of binary thinking,
allow the inscription of the agency of the subaltern, and even permit a restruc-
turing and destabilizing of power. These assertions need to be tested and this
is precisely what I propose to do in this book. This book evaluates central
claims regarding agency in postcolonial theories of hybridity and investigates
the avatars of hybridity to be found in the realities of the Indian Ocean “Cre-
ole” islands of La Réunion, which remains a French department, and Mauri-
tius, independent from Britain since 1968.
In theoretical discourse, hybridity has spawned a variegated vocabulary,
including terms such as diaspora, métissage, creolization, transculturation.
Although skeptical about the validity of an exuberant type of hybridity that, it
is claimed, poses an effective challenge to oppressive forces of the increasingly

1
2 Hybridity

globalized world, I am interested in exploring what, if any, benefice hybridity

holds for a radical conception of agency. The term “radical” means quite sim-
ply here that agency, in this conception, must be tied to social change in which
some inequality or injustice is addressed. I therefore think it important to pro-
visionally, but clearly, distinguish between hybridity as a theoretical concept
and a political stance that we can argue, and hybridity as a social reality with
historical specificity. The collusion of these two domains (of theory/politics
and social reality) with regard to the hybrid will become significant to the
analyses that follow. For me, the most productive theories of hybridity are those
that effectively balance the task of inscribing a functional-instrumental version
of the relation between culture and society with that of enabling the more
utopian/collective image of society. Privileging what is hybrid in today’s world
cannot, even parenthetically, leave out the moment of capitalism in which such
a view is offered—a moment that invites and, indeed, celebrates the hybrid
through heterogeneity, multiplicity, and difference. On this view, a critical
stance toward capitalism introduces skepticism into the idea that agency of the
subaltern is thriving. The critique of capitalism comes from recognizing the
unequal access to enabling processes, positions, and different kinds of capital
for larger portions of the world’s population.

Politics of Hybridity

I wish to suggest, at the outset, some simple reconsiderations to demonstrate the

importance of a more careful attention to the varied vocabulary that is employed
in referring to hybridity in contemporary theory. Throughout this book I will
work between vocabularies generated in the relationship of Francophone stud-
ies to the more general field of (anglophone) postcolonial studies. Part of the
reasoning for this is purely circumstantial in that my training has been in French
and Francophone literature and culture and French theories of culture especially
as they relate to postcolonial studies. Also, the rapid movement of French the-
ory into postcolonial studies has occurred in various ways, not insignificantly
and apart from the many translations, through more and more theorists who are
conversant in these two idioms and who activate these channels.
It is my contention that there has been, in the proliferation of recent and
disparate work on hybridity, a rather loose set of related terms that have not
been problematized. It is no longer clear what is being suggested when referring
to processes that are understood to be hybridizing. Some terms one frequently
encounters are, for example: diaspora, créolité, creolization, intercultural inter-
action, transculturation, métissage, or syncretism. I am not undertaking the task
 Introduction 3

of sorting through each and every one of these terms.2 Rather, I wish to demon-
strate by way of a brief investigation, the comparatively different politics that
specific versions of hybridity can presuppose and engender. Therefore, it follows
that it is important to be able to identify what politics are implicated by the use
of a specific term born within a particular theory, especially if a different term
carries with it an opposing signification. We should then reconsider using them
interchangeably as is often the case.
I show the significance of such a gesture by investigating two avatars of
hybridity under the provisional terminology of “diaspora” and “creolization”
(or postdiaspora hybridity).3 My choice of these two terms for the following
discussion is based on my reading of them as incarnating two salient and
opposed types of politics in the discourse of hybridity.
We can begin by deliberately separating these two terms for analytical
purposes even while considering the arguable usefulness of keeping them dis-
tinct. Of course, the difficulty of doing this does not just follow from the fact
that these terms are linked conceptually in fundamental ways and that they
perhaps even share common meanings—or at least connotations—but also
because they are entangled with a host of other terms such as those mentioned
above. Still, the merit of the following exercise will become evident: it is to
demonstrate first that in contemporary discourses of theoretical hybridity,
there are some shared politics that differ from those of a prior moment, which
I shall specify; also, while contemporary derivatives of hybridity seem to ally
quite easily with a version of Marxism in promoting the agency of subaltern
subjects, they are actually antagonistic to some basic Marxian notions, which
are central to a conception of agency.
Diaspora as an enterprise obviously has deeply political foundations.
Speaking of the African diaspora, we could agree that it became a project in
response to racist ideologies developed in tandem with colonial exploitation in
essentialist and biological terms. In this context, the idea of the African dias-
pora might be said to really take root at a particular historical moment: that
of Pan-Africanism of the nations of the African continent as well as of pan-
Africanism as the connection of all peoples of African descent, who were dis-
advantaged due to white supremacy, colonialism, slavery, and forced migra-
tion. Diasporic discourses, inasmuch as we are able to identify them today,
tend to continue to function in the same mode of solidarity as they grapple
with negative representations (and their very real consequences) of peoples
seen as African in origin, in considering this diaspora.4
However, positing the idea of an African diaspora in this manner has
been questioned because of a certain fixedness that it imposes, consequentially
aggravating the pigeonholing, in particular ways, of “Africans” in different
4 Hybridity

national and transnational contexts. The bases for solidarity within emancipa-
tory movements also proved to be skewed toward a particular male subjectiv-
ity.5 Creolization, then, as a theoretical stratagem was seen to release notions
of diaspora from this essentialist one. Stuart Hall explains the new vision of
diaspora, which I qualify here for clarity as creolization, implicitly opposing it
to the previous one: “[. . .] diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes
whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to
which they must at all cost return, even if it means pushing other people into
the sea” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 401). The most evident example of
the creolization versus diaspora dialogue in the Francophone context came
with the publication of Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant’s Eloge de la
Créolité, which took a quite specifically antagonistic stance toward négritude,
and Aimé Césaire in particular, despite problems within their own theory and
the homage paid to Césaire himself in this manifesto.6 Creolization, when
viewed as a theoretical formulation postdiaspora, is tuned in to the present of
diasporic populations away from the homeland. It addresses their concerns
about advancement without blind assimilation but rather by preserving dif-
ference, allying around particular causes, connecting with the motherland in a
way that is practical and practicable, and connecting with other diasporics.
Hall explicitly places himself as theorizing about this second moment, when
he explains that “[t]here are at least two different ways of thinking about ‘cul-
tural identity’” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 393). The first posits a one-
ness and shared culture, while the “second position recognises that, as well as
the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and signif-
icant difference . . .” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 394).
Viewed in this diachronic manner, we can identify in theoretical and
political discourses dealing with the idea of minority constituencies, various
changes that transform diaspora into creolization. This has to do with dias-
pora discourse having to encounter and accommodate itself to other experi-
ences of minority status or new immigrations. It has to do with different gen-
erations having to maneuver their desires within the framework of this
diaspora. It also has to do with the need for mobility in the new setting and
the opportunities that are not equally available across this population for
numerous reasons. The vigorous interest in this general concept of hybridity
in postcolonial studies cannot be explained away as just a trendy thing. The
fact that Bhabha’s hybridity has come to have such vast applicability can be
seen, in part, as fulfilling an urgent theoretical need. It is not the case that all
theoreticians investigating the broad question of hybridity as creolization,
intercultural interaction or any of its other forms, are necessarily creating
responses to the notion of diaspora as were the créolité critics against négri-
 Introduction 5

tude or in, say, the way Paul Gilroy does.7 But together they create an influ-
ential discourse (postdiaspora) that I have put under the umbrella term of cre-
olization for the moment.

Creolization Post Diaspora: A Marxian Take On Hybridity?

Theorists of hybridity such as Homi K. Bhabha, Françoise Lionnet, Paul

Gilroy, and Stuart Hall employ this discourse of creolization, with a very var-
ied vocabulary, as a way to combat the domination of one voice, one canon,
one mode of thought, singular identities, linear history, and so forth. This is
evident when Hall writes, regarding the new cinema, that it “allow[s] us to see
and recognise the different parts and histories of ourselves, to construct those
points of identification, those positionalities we call in retrospect our ‘cultural
identities.’” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 402). Lionnet also writes simi-
larly, for example: “The global mongrelization or métissage of cultural forms
creates complex identities and interrelated, if not overlapping, spaces” (Post-
colonial Representations 7).8 Further, hybridity, in whatever guise, is linked to
contingency and is time-bound. That is, the analysis of hybridity (and of spe-
cific instances of it) is obliged to account for a historicity, while at the same
time the impulses of this process are to valorize synchrony over diachrony. In
fact, the impulse of hybridity (as creolization as opposed to diaspora) has
much in common with the communist one. The analogy I shall proceed to
make between these two discourses is linked to a particular type of politics
that they seem to share and that I wish to privilege in reexamining our inter-
est in hybridity. The analogy also serves to bring into sharp focus the distinc-
tion between discourses of creolization and those of diaspora.
The Communist Manifesto claims that bourgeois society is dominated
by the past while in communist society the present dominates the past (Marx
and Engels 485). Similarly, a dialectic between diaspora and creolization is
identifiable with diasporic discourses relying on a past trauma that justifies a
present affiliation and solidarity, whereas creolizing discourses, even if not
concerned with an actual erasure of the past trauma, direct their energies
toward interaction and new connections in the present.9 Diaspora discourses
must distinguish, for example, between African or Indian or Chinese or even
Islamic diasporas. Discourses of creolization sound like this notorious procla-
mation: “Neither African, nor European, nor Asian, we proclaim ourselves
Créole” (Bernabé et al.).10 Therefore, just as the Manifesto claims that “Com-
munists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties
(483), the créolistes’ manifesto does not emphasize the different diasporic
6 Hybridity

affiliations. Just as the bourgeoisie, in the terms of the Manifesto, “produces its
own grave-diggers” (483), so too diaspora eventually saw creolization announce
its practical demise in giving up a “sacred homeland” (Hall “Cultural Identity
and Diaspora” 401). If “the essential condition for the existence, and for the
sway of the bourgeois class” (Marx and Engels 483) is the formation and aug-
mentation of capital, the essential formation of diaspora rests on the capital of
the idea of the mother country. If capital’s condition is wage labor and the com-
petition between laborers, then diaspora is also historically linked to quantifi-
able labor, where the competition or at least the comparison of, for example,
African slave labor versus Indian indentured labor, is identifiable.
I have used this analogy to show how in our own recent theoretical his-
tory in postcolonial studies from diaspora to creolization, we are inevitably
speaking of periodization. The idea of periodization in postcolonial studies is
linked to a critique of modernization and development within the colony-
metropolis relationship. Periodization is repudiated and hybridity intervenes
as a way out of this kind of sustained historicity because it privileges the here
and now. Such a political relationship to history, for Hall, is “[n]ot an essence,
but a positioning” (“Cultural identity and Diaspora” 395). Marxism, on the
contrary, ends up undervaluing much of the formerly colonized world in its
comparison to the “developed” world, comprised of the imperial nations. In
postcolonial hybridity, the long view of history is usually given up in favor of
focusing on a synchronic reality that can privilege the present engagement of
those who comprise these societies. Bhabha and Lionnet, who invokes
Bhabha, use hybridity as a way of valorizing the struggles of subaltern subjec-
tivities within History. In Lionnet’s reading of postcolonial women writers,
“[t]he postcolonial subject [. . .] becomes quite adept at braiding all the tradi-
tions at its disposal” (Postcolonial Representations 5). Bhabha’s “purpose in spec-
ifying the enunciative present in the articulation of culture is to provide a
process by which objectified others may be turned into subjects of their his-
tory and experience” (Location 178). Development, on an historical view,
emerges in terms of the technological advancement and modernization visible
in culture accomplished by the developed world and, not in small measure, we
might add, due to the latter’s long enterprise in the various colonies. Domi-
nation is seen as inevitable and all encompassing. These theorists suggest a
valuable reconsideration of such a unitary view of historical domination and
in this way join up with the essential raison d’être of anthropological dis-
course. As suggested by Marcus and Fischer, this view, in the twentieth cen-
tury, “has stood for the refusal to accept this conventional perception of
homogenization toward a dominant Western model” (1; see also 67). For these
latter, anthropology’s mission is to show how difference exists, to explicate this
 Introduction 7

difference, and then use this difference as a counter point to critique your own
culture (1 and 20, for example).11 In this way, as Bart Moore-Gilbert has
noted, evoking Tangiers in Barthes’ Pleasure of the Text and China in Julia
Kristeva’s work, while “the East may function as a means by which to decon-
struct the authority of the West [. . .] it is still being appropriated [. . .] as a
solution to ‘internal’ Western cultural problematics” (128). In these prominent
theories of hybridity, metropolitan marginalization or marginalized theoreti-
cal positioning within the academy provides much of the impulse to undo the
authority of assimilation. I am interested in bringing together hybridity that
derives from the metropolitan (epistemological) encounter of these theorists
with authoritative readings of culture (even when the matter these theorists
analyze is not necessarily canonical), and hybridity in postcolonial regions
(former colonial holdings where the political apparatus has been strongly
marked by their colonial history). I am also interested in testing the viability
of agency as it is conceived in these new theories of hybridity by examining
readable claims to agency in overtly “hybrid” postcolonial locations.
It is possible to trace among these theories (provisionally grouped under
creolization) an intellectual “solidarity,” to borrow a term from Ian Baucom’s
article on what he calls Frantz Fanon’s radio. In this more generous view, we
can follow Baucom’s explanation (where he is speaking specifically of the affil-
iation of Gilroy and Fanon) that:

. . . it is a form of solidarity which does not insist that Gilroy say again
what Fanon has said before. It is the discursive enactment of a solidarity
which does not imply that intellectual solidarity demands a community
of those who speak and think the ‘same.’ Rather, intellectual affiliation
here constitutes itself in much the same fashion that Fanon indicates a
subaltern collectivity produces itself—through listening and re-creating,
paying attention and remaking. Solidarity, thus understood, demands
both a ‘common’ narrative, canon of experience, or object of attachment
and a set of differentiated reproductions of that common thing; a com-
mon consent to listen and a collective dissent of interpretation; not so
much an identity in difference as a differencing in identity. To my mind,
this sort of performative solidarity provides a model (if an admittedly
paradoxical ‘model’) for the ways in which intellectual workers might
construct their critical ‘solidarity’ with one another. (p 35)

In privileging subaltern agency, these theories simultaneously suggest that

hybridity is a positive, resistive force to cultural hegemony. What is less obvi-
ous is the ways in which such cultural resistance is tied to other types of social
resistance to economic oppression. It is unclear as to how immediate opposi-
tion that can be identified in texts, art, and theory participates in restructuring
8 Hybridity

what supports and enables cultural hegemony. Also, the promotion of hybrid-
ity by capitalism’s bringing together different parts of the globe is not accom-
panied by a theoretical evaluation of this contradiction.

Hybridity in Theory

While sharing this concern for the agency of subaltern subjects, each of these
theories focuses on quite particular aspects of hybridity.12 Françoise Lionnet’s
métissage is presented as a methodology of intertextuality and interdiscipli-
narity in analyzing postcolonial realities. In citing Glissant’s writing, Lionnet
preserves the French term “métissage” rather than the preferred “creolization,”
employed by his translator Michael Dash in order to refer “to the racial con-
text” (Autobiographical Voices 4, note 6). However, the term métissage more
generally in her writing refers to an enabling “reading practice,” described as
follows:

Métissage is a form of bricolage, in the sense used by Claude Lévi-Strauss,

but as an aesthetic concept it encompasses far more: it brings together
biology and history, anthropology and philosophy, linguistics and litera-
ture. Above all it is a reading practice that allows me to bring out the
interreferential nature of a particular set of texts, which I believe to be of
fundamental importance for the understanding of many postcolonial cul-
tures. If, as Teresa de Lauretis has pointed out, identity is a strategy, then
métissage is the fertile ground of our heterogeneous and heteronomous
identities as postcolonial subjects. (Autobiographical Voices 8)13

Métissage is the way to “think otherwise” [italics in original], and is “a concept

and a practice: it is the site of indecidability and indeterminacy, where solidar-
ity becomes the fundamental principle of political action against hegemonic
languages” (Autobiographical Voices 6). This solid grounding in solidarity leads
to the conviction that in this practice, “[t]o establish nonhierarchical connec-
tions is to encourage lateral relations: instead of living within the bounds cre-
ated by a linear view of history and society, we become free to interact on an
equal footing with all the traditions that determine our present predicament”
(Autobiographical Voices 7). Such an ideal informs Lionnet’s method of métis-
sage and is the innovation of her first book where she “chooses[s] authors
across time and space and read[s] them together for new insights” (Autobio-
graphical Voices 7–8). My interest in pursuing hybridity is to pause further at the
way in which we can conceive how such innovation plays out in social locations
and how these nonhierarchical connections are attempted across recognizable
social groups and generalized from literary texts to other social texts.14 Lionnet
 Introduction 9

allies her work with poststructuralist epistemologies, stating that: “If métissage
and indeterminacy are indeed synonymous metaphors for our postmodern con-
dition, then the fundamental conservatism of those who fight against both
should be obvious” (Autobiographical Voices 17). To question the ways in which
reliance upon particular instances of indeterminacy and métissage might also
imply an acceptance of capitalism as a central structural feature of the current
world, which promotes these very aspects, need not necessarily be representa-
tive of any kind of “conservatism.” Neither does questioning the limits of cap-
italism in supporting the efforts of marginalized groups to eschew indetermi-
nacy and make claims for their constituents.15
When Stuart Hall uses the term “diasporization,” which he coins, it
actually encompasses the sense of creolization (as postdiaspora) we have been
discussing: the process he describes involves improvisation by black jazz musi-
cians, rappers, etc., and “the process of unsettling, recombination, hybridiza-
tion and ‘cut-and-mix’ arising out of ‘diaspora experience’” (Hall “Deviance”
293). He sees art as being able to constitute peoples as “new kinds of subjects”
(Hall “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 403). In both these descriptions, what
is emphasized is movement across boundaries in an aesthetic and/or theoret-
ical quest. Bhabha’s hybridity is more concerned with an assessment of the
unitariness of dominating discourses, which are then revealed to be fractured,
doubled, and unstable. But he also believes in the remedial power of a new
conception in which he makes a “shift from the cultural as an epistemological
object to culture as an enactive, enunciatory site” (Location 178). In this form,
culture is revealed to be hybrid, and this hybridity provides the space from
which subaltern agency can be enabled. Hybridity is generated by dominating
discourses:

If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production [emphasis in

original] of hybridization rather than the noisy command of colonialist
authority or the silent repression of native traditions, then an important
change of perspective occurs. It reveals the ambivalence at the source of tra-
ditional discourses on authority and enables a form of subversion founded
on that uncertainty, that turns the discursive conditions of dominance
into the grounds of intervention.” [my emphases] (Bhabha Location 173)

So, for Bhabha, even if the hybrid arises from contact, it is hybridity within
what was (seen to be) coherent and a unity that he calls up. In this way, his
version of hybridity gestures more directly to the unequal position of power
within which hybridity is created.
In the case of all the theorists mentioned, the material they consider, or
at least the lens that informs their analyses, is anchored in a moment or a
10 Hybridity

period that follows either colonial contact (Bhabha on India) or the shunting
of populations to new lands under colonialism (Gilroy and Lionnet) or immi-
gration to the metropolis (Hall or Bhabha). The analogy with communist dis-
course made earlier serves to foreground the positioning of this later discourse
of what I grouped as creolization against an earlier moment of diaspora by its
renouncing of the trauma that was central to diaspora. Instead these theories
focus on the notion of difference.16 The similarity with anthropological dis-
course brings into sharp focus the stake in hybridity and difference in an age
that has been increasingly, or at least more overtly, marked by economic and
cultural interconnectedness, most often on unequal terms.
In more specifically diasporic discourses, the bases of solidarity, as Ian
Baucom remarks with Freud, is trauma. Trauma is heard rather than seen, and
is that which was even “overheard.” If trauma is the “tradition” of diaspora,
then, we are tracking, with Freud, its transmission over generations. Diaspora
is thus held up by trauma. That is, it is the memory of shared trauma that
assures diasporic cohesion in the present.
If there is the possibility for diasporic discourses to inscribe a return—
even mythical—it is perhaps not so much to the mother country as to trauma
itself. The ground or space from which diaspora discourse transmits itself, the
space also that its listening communities occupy or create in this act of listen-
ing, is trauma. Discourses of creolization when theoretically positioned post-
diaspora renounce trauma as a space from which to speak. I want to clarify
that this move refers to theories growing out of what we call the New World
experience that is based on imported slave labor, as well as new immigrations
to various metropolises for their beginnings. In this way, it is evident that I am
placing Bhabha’s theory of hybridity as having its theoretical framework
develop from this history as much as, or even more than, simply from the his-
tory of the British in India. The already shaky, unseen space of the mother-
country can only be felt into being by passing through trauma for the dias-
poric imagination. This base is pulled from under the feet of diaspora to
project creolization into the ungrounded, unstable, and ambiguous terrain that
we chart through theorists such as Bhabha. My point, in having separated
these terms, is that the different politics implied by them, each of which
equally, but differentially, claims the hybrid is worth noting.
In reality, though, I want to suggest that if we might designate this the-
oretical distinction by relentlessly reinscribing time and space in order to dis-
tinguish between diaspora and creolization, most postcolonial discourses
have claims to both spaces. This is evident in Paul Gilroy’s efforts to extend
the notion of “diaspora” to the sense of creolization we have been discussing.
For him,
 Introduction 11

[t]he value of the term ‘diaspora’ increases as its essentially symbolic char-
acter is understood. It points emphatically to the fact that there can be no
pure, uncontaminated or essential blackness anchored in an unsullied
originary moment. It suggests that a myth of shared origins is neither a
talisman which can suspend political antagonisms nor a deity invoked to
cement a pastoral view of black life that can answer the multiple patholo-
gies of contemporary racism. (Small Acts 99)

Through his study of black music, Gilroy seeks to “comprehen[d] the lines
of affiliation and association which take the idea of diaspora beyond its
symbolic status as the fragmentary opposite of an imputed racial essence”
(Small Acts 141). Still, his writing is essentially concerned with “the dis-
continuous histories of black populations” (Small Acts 98) all over the world
or the exploration of what a “black aesthetic” might be (Small Acts 116)
rather than that of different populations within the same space. This ten-
sion shows the ways in which both tendencies are essential to forging an
effective discourse of postcolonial hybridity. It is therefore probably useful,
if we wish to preserve the distinctions that these terms allow, to employ
them as analytical tools that allow us to track these two opposite forces as
they speak through the same voice. One might even say that it is their
simultaneous but precarious presence within the same voice or narrative
that actually permits current postcolonial discourses to be that Third Space
celebrated by Homi Bhabha.
The significance of this terminology to our realities today is evident
when we consider, for example, R. Radhakrishnan’s recent book, entitled,
Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location. In this book, among other
things, he considers the delicate difference in the relationship to India
between two individuals (himself and his son) living away from India, but sep-
arated from each other by the relative histories of two different generations.
In his concluding chapter, entitled, “Is the Ethnic ‘Authentic’ in the Dias-
pora?” he asks: “If a minority group were left in peace with itself and not dom-
inated or forced into a relationship with the dominant world or national order,
would the group still find the term ‘authentic’ meaningful or necessary?”
(211). In my view, such a conception of a minority group without a specifiable
relationship in which it is a minority does not allow further theorization
regarding authenticity or anything else. It is the forging of a consciousness of
subalternity or minority status by means of a contradiction within an identi-
fiable totality that can make such a group recognizable. Totality becomes an
essential factor in thinking hybridity in this book.
We can identify, with regard to hybridity, the following three broad
positions:
12 Hybridity

1. Hybridity is everywhere. It represents in many instances the triumph of the

postcolonial or the subaltern over the hegemonic. The resistant always
appropriates the cultural onslaught and modifies its products or processes
for its own purposes. This position is most prominently associated with
Bhabha, but also held by Hall and Lionnet, for example.
2. Hybridity is not everywhere. It is only the elite who can afford to talk about
hybridity. For others, there is no investment in such a concept. It applies
more to metropolitan elite emigrés and far less to migrant diasporas and
even less to those who have “stayed behind” in the (ex)colony. This posi-
tion can be associated with critics of Bhabha’s textuality, such as Benita
Parry.
3. Hybridity, when carefully considered in its material reality, will reveal itself
to actually be a history of slavery, colonialism, and rape, inherited in terms
of race. It is a difficult and painful history of interracial identity. It joins up
with issues of choosing one’s affiliations or having one’s affiliations thrust
upon one. Today, any account of hybridity must contend with this history.
Vergès provides a powerful demonstration of this in Monsters and Revolu-
tionaries. My analyses of Indian Ocean discourses of hybridity suggest that
social engagement with hybridity calls up this signification.

Taking seriously a critic such as Françoise Vergès, I will activate Raymond

Williams’s notion of structure of feeling to validate the deep connections of
hybridity to culture and material history in chapter 2. In this way, hybridity is
intimately linked to the question of resistance to homogenization or assimila-
tion and it thus implies an engagement with what we might broadly call sub-
altern agency.17
It is suggestive, indeed, to show how postcolonial thought and creative
energies participate in and structure Modernity so as to prove that the “rest”
also has claims to what has been seen as the prerogative of the “West.”18 In
chapter 6, devoted to Edouard Glissant, I will be interested in a more direct
reading of Glissant through a Marxian lens. I am interested, eventually, in
reconnecting the thought of this influential thinker to the more explosive, and
more obviously Marxian, thought of his compatriot Frantz Fanon. When I
use the term Marxian, I refer directly to the ultimate desire underlying any
Marxian praxis, which is revolution for social change that collapses particular
inequalities. Therefore, the gesture in this book of allying more closely than
has been done before, the thought of Glissant and that of Fanon is less about
a categorization as Marxian or Caribbean and even less about a stake in
Modernity. Instead, it is linked to my belief that the affect and politics that
issue from the life and work of Fanon offers, more than any other strategy I
 Introduction 13

can identify, something to the urgency with which the differential inequalities
in what we call the “postcolonial world” demand to be addressed. A world, as
Achille Mbemebe has shown in the African context, bruised by colonialism,
ridden with contradiction from internal leadership, and, ultimately, savagely
undermined by capitalism.
Fairly recently, Fredric Jameson declared, in what has become a sentence
structure rather notoriously his own, that: “[a]ll cultural politics necessarily
confronts this rhetorical alternation between an overweening pride in the
affirmation of the cultural group’s strength, and a strategic demeaning of it:
and this for political reasons” (“Globalization and Political” 53).19 If “diaspora”
in the paradigm I specified makes a strategic return to trauma in petitioning
for Africans, for example, then creolization can be seen to display an over-
weening pride in hybrid agency. It is in negotiating the reality and myth of
victims and heroes that I want to propose the theories of Fanon and Glissant
as the most successful in making a bid for agency.
If, as we generally acknowledge, it is no longer tenable to consider areas
of postcoloniality in isolation, it logically follows that our theoretical engage-
ments that arise from the consideration of different zones of contact also
urgently demand not to be generated in isolation. Such isolation in the field
of theory can be seen despite the commonalities highlighted here within the
proliferation of writing on hybridity.20 I believe such isolation in fact puts us
further away from a postcolonial project of critical understanding and of
enabling the agency of less powerful constituencies. What follows in this book
can be seen as a first step in working to remedy it by carefully bringing into
dialogue hitherto separately developed versions of hybridity.
Within postcolonial studies, it is no longer clear what is being implied
with the use of terms such as diaspora (when Stuart Hall uses the term dias-
porization it is quite close to what Glissant might mean by creolization),
hybridity (when used by Bhabha has a variety of particular meanings that are
often not clearly specified in many critical appropriations of his work), métis-
sage (means entirely different things for Françoise Lionnet, Edouard Glissant,
and Françoise Vergès), intercultural interaction, or even multiculturalism.
As we have seen, creolization is closely concerned with a certain syn-
chronic consideration of a people, is forward-looking, and concerned with inter-
action, while diaspora is premised on a past (and shared) trauma that constitutes
and links the members of a group. I have suggested that these contrary impulses
should be analytically separable but that, in reality, most postcolonial discourses,
through historical and political necessity, engage in both stances within the
same narrative. It is when this negotiation is more successful that postcolonial
discourses (and here I include discourses from postcolonial locations as well as
14 Hybridity

those on them) are able to become an alternative and productive site for staging
or at least thinking resistance to hegemonic forces of colonial and other oppres-
sive provenance. When creolization, in the particular way I have described it for
analytical purposes, dominates, there is a disregard for history and a utopianism
that is, in the end, unrealizable within current realities; when diaspora domi-
nates, there is a tendency to fall into a discourse of victimhood and/or of narrow
ethnicities. Both impulses are, however, crucial to the forging of a discourse ade-
quate to the multiple tactics required for a successful postcolonial praxis. In
Jameson’s terms, the rhetorical alternation between heroism (in the first case)
and victimhood (in the latter) is one that takes center stage in constructing dis-
courses of hybridity in the postcolonial context.
It is the precariousness of balancing the two tendencies (within the same
voice, the same narrative, the same political intervention, the same discourse) that
gives much postcolonial discourse its productive tautness. I will show that it is by
concern with, and the urgency of, the double task of representation in the two
senses (darstellen and vertreten, to which Spivak attends in her engagement with
Marx’s German text) that these impulses are also driven. We will observe how an
anthropological account of hybridity requires closer attention to the political/his-
torical story of its manifestation in society. Further, how does one put forth a nar-
rative of one voice to incarnate desires that are in themselves hybrid, but that also
come from multiple sources. How can the speaking (unitary) subject convey and
perform the multiple, which can also include contraries? How, also, do we make
the moment of representation (of ) count—that is, how do we put it to work, and
in this sense enable it to intervene, thus calling up its second meaning (of repre-
sentation by)? These are some questions that emerge in postcolonial theories of
hybridity and to which I provide if not authoritative, then practical, answers
based on this critical study of hybridity: considering the various theories, the pol-
itics of their application, and an examination of the scope and limits of a practi-
cable discourse of hybridity in “real” hybrid locations.
All of reality is, and always has been, hybrid as most theories indicate.
For example: “It is only when we understand that all cultural statements and
systems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunci-
ation, that we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent
originality or ‘purity’ of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empir-
ical historical instances that demonstrate their [particular] hybridity” (Bhabha
Location 37). In this case, the usefulness of indicating hybridity in particular
instances must have some basis. It is thus a political gesture whose particular
political valence can only have an impact if we are willing to depart from, and
specify, these bases. In this way, we demarcate a particular framework or clos-
ing-off of an historical moment, action, or geographical space as hybrid by
 Introduction 15

also specifying the terms between or among which such hybridity occurs or is
called up. I will argue, following from this, that both history and a notion of
totality are essential to a coherent and politically viable conception of hybrid-
ity. It seems that this question of specification in the case of the hybrid
encounters an instinctive resistance from within the theoretical positioning of
hybridity in its various recent derivatives. The vexing complexity of this situ-
ation is that such specification is inherently contrary to sophisticated cultural
analyses, which rightly hesitate to impute political intent and explain aesthet-
ics as a critique of a corresponding outside reality opening up the whole ques-
tion of “engaged” criticism. My method, or the one I shall strive to achieve
here, is to test the suppleness of the derivatives of hybridity as a politics and a
mode of understanding in both the theoretical writing as well as other dis-
courses such as literary texts and political speeches.21 My aim is to not aban-
don aesthetics at the moment when it is required to “answer” reality, but rather
to valorize this moment as one from where the mode of such a relationship
between them is to be forged and understood.
While Vergès has shown what métissage meant for the Réunionese
anti-abolitionist movement (Monsters and Revolutionaries), I move to a more
contemporary assessment of the politics of métissage in La Réunion. Chapter
2 is a study of what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling” that is
traced outward from a contemporary autobiographical novel in late-twenti-
eth-century La Réunion. Organized around my reading of the Réunionese
author, Monique Boyer’s Métisse, chapter 2 indicates how the continued
importance of métissage for La Réunion is linked to its racial history and tied
to a feeling of nationalism that is inextricably linked to Creole language.
Totality emerges as a necessary element to conceive of agency against French
nationalism. Contradiction emerges as necessarily privileged in adopting the
particular version of hybridity that is Réunionese métissage.
Chapter 3 provides an historical reaching back by showing the origins of
métissage as a novelistic trope in Réunionese literature. Métissage in the colo-
nial novel exposes the intricate relationship of hybridity in culture to the colo-
nial enterprise. The jump from colonial hybridity to postcolonial hybridity in
examining métissage is seen historically and proves to be at odds with post-
colonial theories of hybridity. Chapters 2 and 3 are best read together and in
sequence. Chapter 4 moves from La Réunion to the neighboring island of
Mauritius. In studying the difficulty of articulating Africanness in Mauritius in
the public speeches of the first prime minister, this specific study of Mauritius
attends to the differences in the development of a discourse of hybridity in the
case of this proximate island. In this way, we are seeing how the use to which
hybridity is put makes of it a different derivative and it is for this reason that
16 Hybridity

my previous discussion of the implicit politics of different theories remains cru-

cial to a larger postcolonial context. It emerges that the concept of “ethnicity” in
its particular variation here is closely tied to any derivative of hybridity in the
Creole islands. It is also similarly linked to any articulation of hybridity related
to the political advancement of a group (be it for recognition, action, or politi-
cal representation). Multiculturalism (based on cultural difference or ethnicity)
has, in the second half of the twentieth century been the subject of various
debates around the world in different forms, from affirmative action in the
United States to “quotas” in India. Given that the discourse of difference has
shifted its vocabulary from that of “race” to “ethnicity,” I turn to the field in
which ethnicity is most coherently theorized, indeed from which it is generated.
In chapter 5, I evaluate the anthropological approach to ethnicity in a
region that has been held up as the exemplary, successful nation for multicul-
turalism. Mauritius offers, as seen in anthropology and even economics, a
model for multicultural efficaciousness. According to this literature, various
groups, bound by cultural ties that are signaled by religious or ethnic cate-
gories (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist, or Indian, Chinese, Creole,
and White) all live harmoniously and build a strong economy and a plural cul-
ture without bloody conflict. Although there have been, in the fairly recent
past, some incidents of violence in Mauritius, on the whole, its history has
been spared such happenings. I read the anthropologist Thomas Hylland
Eriksen’s authoritative study of ethnicity in Mauritius along with the obser-
vations of a British colonial administrator on the island regarding the catego-
rizing of the different populations who arrived in Mauritius. I show the ways
in which the colonial idiom of race/ethnicity was articulated by individuals
situated high within the colonial structure. Such vocabulary and conceptual-
ization were incumbent upon the conditions of settlement, slavery, and inden-
ture, as well as upon the position of this colony within the larger framework
of the colonial enterprise historically. Contemporary novels show how a pic-
ture of articulating difference in the hybrid nation must contend with differ-
ent aspects of history: immigration, colonialism, slavery, emancipation, inden-
ture, economic globalism, all of which inform the collective forging of a
functioning idiom that posits hybridity and upon which literary authors rely.
It is only when seen in such a complex manner that a more full meaning of
hybridity in its social occurrence and activation can be suggested.
In anthropology, ethnography as method functions to challenge the
notion of a successful homogenization operated by globalization. Through the
study of distinct cultures, even if they cannot be considered isolated today,
anthropology reveals how these cultures renew their own views of the world
or personhood, which are not commensurate with a rejuvenated and modified
 Introduction 17

universalizing discourse that accompanies globalization. Thus, if the globe is

hybrid rather than homogenous, hybridity challenges globalization. Yet, at the
same time, the argument turns out to suggest that the encounter of different
cultures does not mitigate difference even when there are unequal relations of
power in such an encounter. Rather, when properly observed, such encounters
can be seen to create a proliferation of difference through resistance or strate-
gic adaptation. In this case, hybridity relies upon globalization. In fact, like
globalization itself, the hybrid has developed with and in many aspects even
through colonialism and its official demise. For these reasons, I present in this
work views of the hybrid that call up different engagements with colonialism
and its ongoing legacies and with globalization itself.
La Réunion and Mauritius have not been central in an academic discus-
sion of postcoloniality, yet they are situated, geographically and theoretically, at
the crossroads of the most consequential ruminations in recent postcolonial
theory: they are crossed by the most vigorous sources of colonialism (French
and British), have known both slavery and indenture, between them imply
both a new nation as well as an overseas department, and have been marked by
their position on the trade routes, colonial maritime projects, as well as cold-
war strategy. I am concerned with the different ways in which the vocabularies
and concepts of hybridity have been generated and claimed in these spaces as
groups and individuals engage in self-definition and coexistence.
In chapter 6 on Edouard Glissant, I provide a Marxian reading of Glis-
sant’s notion of Relation. In showing his affinity for Marxian categories and
Marxian (Hegelian) impulses, I argue that Glissant’s derivative of hybridity
that is based on observation and connection to the Caribbean Creole reality
of his home, rectifies the two main problems in the aforementioned postcolo-
nial theories of hybridity, which inhere in misrecognition of the importance to
agency of totality and contradiction. Chapter 7 is a close reading of part of
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, a text that is read frequently in post-
colonial studies and eminently from within hybridity by Bhabha. In my read-
ing, Fanon emerges as providing some very important insights into hybridity
and confirms the importance of totality and contradiction to agency. These
two Caribbean theorists are brought together as sharing a common agenda in
the entanglement of their thought with both Marxism and hybridity.
A word about the study of literary texts is in order. Most prominently,
Aijaz Ahmad has argued in his In Theory against considering English-lan-
guage literature, in the anglophone context, as the “central documents” (76)
of the national context in question because this neglects those discourses
that stem from the true location of the people while privileging the position
of the national bourgeoisie, who, one is to understand, is already coöpted
18 Hybridity

from colonialist to capitalistic concerns. While sympathetic to the impulse

behind such a pronouncement, I believe it crucial to study the movement of
writing (and symbolic capital) from the hands of the colonizers to a new
group of French-educated mass in the Creole islands in question, a move-
ment that threatens the very act of writing and the tradition that writing in
French calls up. The engagement of writers with Creole spaces, with con-
cerns that have to do with monolingual Creole speakers, or with Creole cul-
ture that is at the center of their writing is of central interest in the follow-
ing chapters.
This study of hybridity in contemporary theory and specific societies is
linked to debates on globalization, multiculturalism, and ethnicity. In examin-
ing any of these terms the question of the hybrid becomes implicated. Con-
versely, the contemporary consideration of hybridity inevitably calls up glob-
alization (and its relation to colonialism/imperialism), multiculturalism (and
the older question of assimilation), as well as ethnicity (and the elision of
race). Each of the following chapters works through these contemporary
issues while investigating both their dominant form and hearing the echo of
what they often silence, provided here in parentheses. In this way, the two
aspects of diaspora and creolization are dialectically positioned and the pull
and push between them in the various theories and social contexts is explored.
 CHAPTER TWO

Hybridity in La Réunion

Monique Boyer’s MÉTISSE and the Nation as Necessity

Métisse (1992), written by the Réunionese Monique Boyer, tells of the com-
ing of age of a young girl on her native island. It is the story of Anne-Marie
who “realizes” that she is a mixed-blood or métisse when she is so categorized
by her teacher at school. This realization comes, significantly, at the moment
of her transition from the space of Creole language at home and outside the
school to the official system of colonial education and her encounter with
“French French.” Written in French with many Creole inflections this text
continually problematizes the many avatars of Frenchness in La Réunion: lan-
guage and culture, education, entry into middle-class Frenchness, and most
broadly, French citizenship. As Bourdieu puts it, “linguistic exchanges [] are
also relations of symbolic power in which the power relations between speak-
ers or their respective groups are actualized” (38). It is in this encounter with
colonial culture (incarnated by the French-trained teacher) in its reality in La
Réunion that an individual from a Creole space experientially knows early on
the structure of feeling of nationhood that we shall follow.

Réunion, Métissage, and Creole Nationalism

I will show how the idea of nationhood, which enters this text as what Ray-
mond Williams calls a structure of feeling, is the required overarching logic
within which the narrator’s agency is framed. Stated otherwise, Réunion’s
departmental status and dependency on France, following from colonialism,

19
20 Hybridity

forms the totality in which certain racist tendencies occur. The narrator’s
agency to struggle against these tendencies posits an alternative totality: the
utopian idea of Réunionese nationhood. It is also the totality in which hybrid-
ity is understood and, in the avatar of métissage, is transformed from a socially
accepted reality into a politics of resistance.
Boyer’s engagement with métissage involves tracing and confirming a
past of slavery, upon whose forgetting the Frenchness of La Réunion is pred-
icated. Simultaneously, it wrenches the protagonist’s status as a métisse out of
her assimilatory (white) possibilities especially through the agency of her
black, working-class father, thus allowing her character to affectively fore-
shadow a feeling that goes beyond the area of her class. This enlarged area is
one that in La Réunion is that of a language: Creole, for, “the area of a cul-
ture . . . is usually proportionate to the area of a language rather than to the
area of a class” (Williams Culture and Society 320). Réunionness as a structure
of feeling itself participates in validating a Réunionese Creole culture: “une cul-
ture métisse” [a hybrid culture]. But, in the context of La Réunion, even
though the value of education in Creole has been proven by the intellec-
tual/author/academic/activist, Axel Gauvin, its institution in the area
inevitably promotes a two-tier system, given the prestige and power that
French already enjoys and has historically done.1
What interests me is the original way in which this structure is
addressed in Boyer’s text: through métissage and critical history.2 These two
ways of reaching Réunionness become its substructure and are theoretical
consequences of each other. That is, a critical understanding of history leads
to a complex picture of creolization proceeding from métissage, while a radi-
cal inscription of métissage requires a critical historical method.
Nietzsche’s three types of history help in the analyses that follow. To
begin with:

A historical phenomenon, when purely and completely understood and

reduced to an intellectual phenomenon, is dead for anyone who under-
stands it, for in it he understands the delusion, the injustice, the blind
passion, and in general the whole darkened earthly horizon of that phe-
nomenon, and from this simultaneously its historical power. At this point
this power becomes powerless for him as someone who understands it,
but perhaps it is not yet powerless for him as someone who lives it.”
(Nietzsche 95)

One way of knowing oneself through history and history through one-
self is by weaving them together structurally, causally, thematically in the text
in a repetition of the textuality of the self, which becomes a process of under-
 Hybridity in La Réunion 21

standing through reliving. It is in the textualizing process of writing or rewrit-

ing/reading that conscious living and understanding can come together pro-
ductively. I show here only how this text, in the pictures it presents of history,
is a particular incarnation of a more general structure of feeling that can itself,
however, be verified outside of it in powerful forms with reference to late
twentieth-century promotion of Creole language, which lies at the heart of
this nationalism.

Métissage, Race, and Class

For this reading of Métisse, I isolate instances of what Nietzsche calls monu-
mental and antiquarian modes of history being constantly interrupted by the
critical mode. Anne-Marie, the narrator, presents the reader, early in her story,
with a photograph of her grandmother that has been preserved. The careful
description is suggestive of the antiquarian mode being operative:

[ma grand’mère] tient fièrement mon frère Henri sur ses jambes. Elle
porte une grande jupe sombre qui lui recouvre les genoux. Sa taille et ses
lunettes rondes au dessus desquelles son regard semble se perdre, lui
donnent un air digne. Presque d’intellectuelle. Et mon frère, on dirait
une grosse poupée, tant il est blanc et potelé. Derrière elle, un petit
rideau de dentelle. Un rayon de soleil entre dans la case. C’était sa case
à elle, toute petite, toute en bardeaux que mon père avait achetée à P’tit
Serré là-bas en haut, démontée et remontée de toutes pièces à Saint-
Pierre là-bas en bas. Au fond d’un grand jardin peuplé de perruches, de
poivriers, de jujubiers. (8)
[my grandmother] is proudly holding my brother Henri on her knees.
She is wearing a large dark colored skirt that covers her knees. Her
stature and her round glasses beyond which her gaze seems to disappear,
give her a solemn air. Almost that of an intellectual. And my brother,
one would say he was a big doll, he was so white and chubby. Behind her,
a small, lace curtain. A ray of sunlight enters the house. It was her small
house of shingles that my father had bought in P’tit Serre, there high up,
which he took down and put back up from scratch in Saint-Pierre, there
down below. Set back in a large garden full of parakeets, pear trees and
jujube trees.3

The photograph in all its precision captures the here and now by enumerat-
ing the cluster of acquired bourgeois signs (her dress, her glasses, her home,
and the garden). It is a synchronic, rather “flat,” and static view that is, in Niet-
zsche’s formulation, “antiquarian.”4 It is antiquarian because it seems to want
to preserve this beautiful memory: the grandmother who hardly resembles a
22 Hybridity

descendant of slaves and the white doll-like grandson. This excerpt is, how-
ever, sandwiched by two passages that rip the antiquarian mode out of its
complacency with the happy synthesis it conveys. It is preceded by: “Grand-
Mère Ba était une cafrine, Oh pas une vraie cafrine, une métisse fille de
métisse, et arrière petite-fille d’esclave. Mais elle était bien noire. Je n’ai d’elle
qu’un coquillage, le souvenir de sa mort—en 1960—et une seule photo prise
cinq ans avant: . . .” (8) [Grandmother Ba was a negress. Oh not a real negress,
a métisse[,] daughter of a métisse, and great granddaughter of a slave. But she
was clearly black. All I have left of her is a shell, the memory of her death—
in 1960—and one sole photograph taken five years before . . .] [my emphases].
Being and not-being a particular entity constantly interrupt each other in this
text. As seen here, the grandmother is first a “negress.” Immediately, however,
this is undone as the text proclaims that she was not a “real” one. Métissage
that denies one color and one origin seems to be presented as an escape from
blackness and also from slavery at the beginning of the quotation. But yet
again, the text goes on to assert that she was black as well as explicitly recalls
her ascendance from slavery.
The excerpt above describing the photograph suggested a “forgetting”
of this reality. The passage following it, which I shall quote, reestablishes it
with the violence of certitude. Vergès writes regarding this autobiographical
novel by Boyer that “[s]lavery has become a ‘tragic,’ traumatic event that it is
better to forget for the sake of reconciliation than to remember as a constitu-
tive reality. Slavery was the secret de famille. Amnesia was the operative word”
[all italics in original] (9). Yet, in telling this story of amnesia, the narrator pre-
vents the “flat” reading, suggested by Vergès, of her family’s history through a
naming that is at once, obviously “racial” (negress, métisse), as well as situa-
tional (great granddaughter of a slave), both aspects becoming pertinently his-
torical. Historical, in the sense that the explanation of her métissage as not
being truly a negress, requires an examination of this history. The specifics of
her “black” heritage are given through the explanation regarding her being the
great granddaughter of a slave. Slavery is reestablished through the ironical:
“Non personne ne pourrait dire, devant cette photo, que nos ancêtres étaient
des esclaves “ (8) [No, no one could say, faced with this photograph, that our
ancestors were slaves]. While a synchronic view, focusing on the state of
hybridity as synthesis (as opposed to its processual, diffracting quality that is
privileged in creolization) could “forget” this reality, the entire text works to
reconsider it. Even as the novel is an autobiographical reconstruction of the
past, there is a sense of recovering this past through a critical mode in order
to insert the character in the present of her society. This is accomplished by
her coming to terms with her present through a critical reconstruction of his-
 Hybridity in La Réunion 23

tory. In this way, Boyer’s text disallows a consideration of métissage outside of

the context of slavery for La Réunion, and in fact does remember it as a “con-
stitutive reality”: the character’s hybrid identity, and by extension all other such
instances, is necessarily tied, directly or indirectly, to the institution of slavery
under French colonialism. Such an intuiting awareness of the impossibility of
French citizenship renders impossible the amnesia that permitted La Réunion
to become a part of the French nation.
The narrator reveals the surprising union between the descendant of the
slave and the “real” Chinese merchant:

[. . .] Soixante ans après [l’abolition], Grand-Mère Na avait épousé un

vrai chinois de Chine.
Il avait débarqué seul sur ce lointain rocher du bout de la terre. Son
bateau était assez léger pour accoster à Saint-Pierre, un joli, un tout petit
port. [. . .] Et une fois que son pied eut foulé le quai, les grands champs
verts qu’il avait aperçus du large au pied des crêtes, et qui se courbaient
comme les vagues contre le vent, lui avaient déjà dit que cette terre
voudrait bien de lui. Que les chinois n’étaient plus des mondes étranges,
des contre-nations, des mal-fondés. Que son coco rasé ne ferait plus rire.
Que personne ne voudrait couper sa natte qui dirait son art inné: l’art du
commerce. (8–9)
[. . .] Sixty years after [Abolition], Grandmother Na had married a real
Chinese from China.
He had disembarked alone on this faraway rock at the end of the earth.
His boat was light enough to come up to Saint-Pierre, a beautiful little
port. [. . .] And once he had set foot on the quay, the large green fields
that he had seen from sea at the foot of the craters, and which curved like
waves against the wind, had already told him that this land welcomed
him. That the Chinese were no longer strange people, dissidents, rene-
gades. That his shaved coconut head wouldn’t provoke laughter. That no
one would try and cut off his braid that would tell of his innate art: the
art of commerce. [my emphases]

The narrator presents the coming together of her grandparents two genera-
tions before her own. If the grandmother was deceptively presented in the anti-
quarian mode of the photograph as not a “real” negress, as we saw, this is
undone textually by the interference of the critical mode. The grandfather’s
being a “real” “chinois” is asserted in a “monumental” evocation.5 In the passage
above, the struggle of the Chinese, who were seen as outsiders—their large-
scale immigration occurring after that of the whites, imported slaves, and then
indentured laborers from India—is suggested.6 The real Chinese grandfather is
presented as the inheritor of the fruits of the struggles of earlier immigrants
24 Hybridity

who, upon their arrival on the island, were seen as “strange people, dissidents,
renegades,” who had been mocked for their “shaved coconuthead[s],” and had
threats to have their braids chopped off. Chinese ethnicity is presented histor-
ically through the monumental image of the Chinese merchant, an image rec-
ognizable to anyone familiar with today’s “boutique chinoise” [the Chinese
store]. Yet, the monumental is rudely cut short—in this case by death. The
grandfather dies even before the birth of her father. I am tempted here to say
that the textual effort is to parry any kind of possible purity, even if this has to
be suggested through the available (and all pervasive) sign system of race. Still,
hybridity in Lucien, his son and the narrator’s father, as the ability to pass as
white (suggested by the description of the photograph,) is ruptured by an inter-
ruption of “blackness” that I shall shortly discuss.
There can be no doubt that in understanding her own “hybrid” identity,
Anne-Marie, as a narrator (as artist of history, in Nietzsche’s terms), is strong
enough (for Nietzche, historically developed enough) to deploy the critical
mode.7 In placing herself as a “mixed-blood” there is no hesitation to demys-
tify the whiteness that can be asserted and to understand racially named cat-
egories through their interactions with realities that have to do with class. It
is finally a matter of class that brings together Lucien, Grand-Mère Na’s son,
and Marcelle, the petite blanche [literally: “small” white] from the mountains.8
These are, of course, the narrator’s parents. Lucien was born after his Chinese
father left on a boat, never to return since he drowned on a cargo ship. While
people wanted to know “s’il [l’enfant] était jaune, s’il était noir [,] [l]e monde
vit qu’il était rose, Lucien, celui de Na et de Robert” (10) [if he [the child] was
yellow, if he was black[,] the world saw that he was pink, Na and Robert’s
Lucien”]. First, the element of the unexpected in métissage is thus invoked: he
was neither “black” nor “yellow.” However, “l’enfant rose, malgré ses pom-
mettes saillantes malgré ses yeux bridés et sa bouille ronde, devint il faut dire
noir” (11) [the pink child, despite his chubby cheeks, despite his “folded” eyes
and his round face, became, it has to be told, black”] [my emphases]. I read this
return of/to blackness in the body of the narrator’s father, which literally
enacts the differentiating, diffracting quality of creolization, to be emblematic
of the betrayal of whiteness (and consequently of “white” citizenship). This
move is significant to the problematizing of color and class pursued through
this character. Boyer shows how through a radical métissage it becomes emi-
nently clear that blackness functions as the corruption of whiteness, as a glar-
ing presence in whiteness, as, in the end, an impossibility of assimilation into
Frenchness.
Lucien and Marcelle would never have been married if it were not that
Augustine (Marcelle’s mother), however white she was, remained “une petite
 Hybridity in La Réunion 25

blanche” [my emphases] (11). This is important “car si elle avait été de la race
des gros blancs [. . .] jamais elle n’aurait laissé sa fille épouser mon père” (11)
[because if she had belonged to the race of the “great” whites, she would never
have allowed her daughter to marry my father]. While “petit” and “grand” are
indicators of class, like the “petite bourgeoisie” and “grande bourgeoisie,” the
suggestion of racial purity is also clearly evoked (“race des gros blancs”). This,
despite the more encompassing meaning of “race,” which can explicitly link
the term to a sociological understanding of lineage and community. White-
ness is clear and unambiguous in the beginning as the world “could see
[Lucien] was pink.” However, the subsequent ironic confession/concession
(“it has to be told”) following the repeated “despite” is telling: blackness has to
be admitted to. There is no escaping its facticity despite other signs of French-
ness. Lucien will go on to secure a place, however low, in the French admin-
istration—he will become a government servant (a fonctionnaire). But real
Frenchness, for which no apologies are required, can only be whiteness. Next,
the slightly accusatory “never would she have allowed . . .” indicates a clearly
critical stance toward the concession to her black father made by the impov-
erished whites of her mother’s family. Just as the larger society (le monde /the
world) is taken to task for buying into whiteness, so are poor whites, who,
despite whiteness, are excluded from participatory parity in white citizenship
and for whom blackness always remains a stumbling block.
Hybridity as a consequence of racial mixing is posited early in this text;
it is impossible to invoke this term in La Réunion (and elsewhere) without
also invoking what implicitly precedes this mixing. Yet, in a moment that is
subversive to the idea of thinking through racial categories, the class back-
ground of Marcelle, which permits the union between the narrator’s parents,
takes precedence in that it renders possible this métissage within the society.
Blackness (and slavery to which it is historically linked in this island’s story)
intrudes into any complacent bourgeois spaces offering a synthesis or melting
pot logic. Simultaneously, the narrator interrupts racial readings through an
analysis that requires an understanding through class, and thus to lived expe-
rience. Anne-Marie’s ability to summon the critical mode consists in her not
giving up the analysis at the point when her father is blackened. So, while
métissage is still read “racially,” its implementation as a process of creolization
can only be understood at the point where the concept of class intervenes.
At the same time, one can see the narrator undoing the type of analysis
Frantz Fanon makes of Mayotte Capécia’s autobiographical Je suis Martini-
quaise in his Black Skin, White Masks. This is done by pursuing an under-
standing of the gendering and racializing processes that underlie any kind of
advancement that can be accounted for economistically.9 Still, if Mayotte’s
26 Hybridity

desires are easily censured by Fanon, Marcelle’s attraction to Lucien in Métisse

is pushed further by pursuing her desires in their entirety, as they may be
known to the narrator (specifically Marcelle’s desire to escape poverty). If May-
otte is summarily dismissed by Fanon, Marcelle is also dismissed by the narra-
tor, but only after a consideration of her motives and desires, and their subse-
quent rejection as a viable strategy. Mayotte Capécia’s bourgeoisification comes
through a movement toward the white world by means of a fairly well-placed
white man (André), while Marcelle’s comes through a movement away from
the poor white world through an upwardly mobile black man (the narrator’s
father). What weakens Fanon’s analyses of Mayotte is his focus on part of
Mayotte’s desire instead of considering Mayotte and her white lover, André’s
interaction within colonial culture as the space within which their desires are
articulated. In his haste to dismiss Capécia, Fanon falls short of properly posit-
ing a totality in considering Mayotte’s actions. Such a totality is explicitly
reclaimed by him elsewhere in Black Skin, White Masks as we will see in chap-
ter 6. In Métisse, Marcelle’s desires are examined in their knotty engagement
with her husband’s position as a black man entering the middle class of a
fraught postcolonial society still negotiating many colonial structures.
To be sure, “sexual desire in colonial and postcolonial contexts has been
a crucial transfer point of power, tangled with racial exclusions in complicated
ways” (Stoler 190). The narrator of Métisse casts her unflinching gaze on this
point between her parents. It is clear that in presenting Lucien and Marcelle
as coming from socially quite distinct spaces, the common “brèdes” [leaf of a
vegetable plant] eaten during their childhood serves to register that the
impoverished whites of La Réunion experienced a similar everyday struggle to
that of many nonwhites. Therefore, the idea of contesting Frenchness and
what it has meant is, in Williams’s terms, thought as a feeling (or felt as a
thought) of a necessity by both groups. Williams chooses “feeling” to “empha-
size a distinction from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology’”
(Marxism 132). The progeny of these spatially differentiated but experientially
united groups must, in following the logic of Anne-Marie’s narrative, under-
stand their shared interest. This shared interest, rather than any primordial or
essential factor, when made visible, is the “oneness” that is required to think a
nation. The exclusion from what Frenchness has symbolized historically is
experienced by whites and nonwhites whose exclusion from this definition is
apprehended through an affective understanding of radical métissage as being
a rejection (in reciprocity) of Frenchness.
Understanding métissage diachronically—as opposed to a simple accep-
tance or even celebration of it synchronically—itself, in a sense, paves the way
to critical history; in other terms, critical history demands a closer scrutiny of
 Hybridity in La Réunion 27

métissage as an historical process. Such an understanding of hybridity disallows

the more disembodied derivatives in postcolonial theories examined in chapter
1. It brings métissage close to its more fixed social valence as well as its signifi-
cation as a liberating politics tied to creolization and language in the Réunionese
experience of race, slavery and indenture, labor, colonialism, and departmental-
ization. Here, métissage reclaims specificity, historicity, and an accounting of the
constitution in Réunionese society of race. Anne-Marie is able to deliver the cri-
teria Vergès considers essential to “[t]hinking métissage.” She brings us in this
text “the recognition of a past of rape, violence, slavery, and the recognition of
[her] own complicity with the wicked ways of the world” (Verges Monsters 11).
One might see Boyer’s entire text as an excavation and a searching critique of
the narrator’s possible complicity with white citizenship in French La Réunion.
As we have seen, in this historical venture, the narrator of Métisse provides mon-
umental and antiquarian images only to inexorably reject them in favor of a
stance for action that critical history makes imperative.
There can be no escaping the “fact” of blackness that Fanon so
poignantly describes (Black Skin). But in this story, if relative wealth has a “pou-
voir miraculeux, magique,” [a miraculous, magical power] and if to the impov-
erished whites of his wife’s family, Lucien “n’était plus noir. Depuis longtemps
il ne l’etait plus,” (72) [was no longer black. For a long time now, he had not
been black], his daughter dredges up this blackness with resolute and vivid bit-
terness. The following scene occurs after the divorce of the narrator’s parents:

Ma mère était venue rendre visite à sa sœur Iréna. Elle se retrouva

au moment de sortir face à mon père sur le pas de la porte. C’était la pre-
mière fois qu’ils se revoyaient.
Ma mère alors, fouillant au fond d’elle la plus dure, la plus insup-
portable des insultes, ma mère lui dit avec rage:
—“Espèce de cafre!”
Il s’engouffra dans la maison de ma tante Iréna, s’assit, prit sa tête
dans ses mains noires. Tout bruit avait cessé. [. . .]
Longtemps après il se leva, partit sans avoir ouvert la bouche, reti-
rant enfin sa tête de ses mains. Tandis qu’y résonnaient encore ces mots,
ces terribles mots. (128)
[My mother had come to visit her sister, Iréna. She found herself face to
face, at the door, with my father as she was leaving. It was the first time
they were seeing each other again.
Then, my mother, reaching deep within herself to find the most cruel and
unbearable of insults, my mother said to him with rage: “Bloody nigger.”
He rushed into my aunt’s house, sat down, took his head in his black
hands. Everything was quiet [. . .]
28 Hybridity

Much later he stood up, finally lifting his head up from his hands, and
left without having said a word. While those words, those horrible words,
continued to resound in the room.]

While the term cafre is not necessarily pejorative, the dimension becomes
horrific in the mouth of the speaker, given her identity and the circumstance
of the word’s enunciation. The narrator continues that “[p]endant 31 ans il
n’était donc resté qu’un cafre, aux yeux de celle qu’il avait sortie de la misère,
la mère de ses enfants” (128) [for 31 years he had thus remained nothing but
a nigger in the eyes of the one he had lifted out of poverty, the mother of his
children]. The violence of métissage Vergès invokes is recorded differently. It
delivers the pain of the interaction between two individuals, which cannot
occur outside that of the over-determined sphere of interracial relations
whose configurations are inherited from colonial practices; nor can it occur
outside the historical imbalance of power between the sexes. With astound-
ing lucidity, the narrator later understands that: “les mots durs que ma mère
humiliée, mortifiée par le départ de mon père, avait prononcés, fouillés tout
au fond d’elle, n’étaient pas siens: ils étaient ceux des femmes, des hommes, de tout
ce que notre terre avait porté” (130) ([. . .] the harsh words that my mother,
who was humiliated and mortified by my father’s leaving, had pronounced,
dug up from deep within herself, these were not her words: they were those of the
women and men, of all that our land had borne) [my emphases]. This under-
standing is remarkable in that it examines a clearly racist remark as a struc-
tural problem within La Réunion (our land), and, in so doing, it checks the
momentum of racializing, French colonial logic and undoes bourgeois indi-
vidual identity as authentic or even functional for the people of La Réunion.
It renders responsible (and victimized) “the (gendered) people” (the women,
the men) as well as the fabric (all) of the society—of the land. This feeling of
Réunionness is subtle in that the land itself—as an isolated island, with its
topography of highlands where marooned slaves escaped and poor whites
were pushed as wealthier immigrants arrived and took over the land, and
with its treacherous harbor where various other immigrant populations
arrived—is a participant in the creation of this unaccomplished “nation” from
métissage through (still from the above quotation) the “bearing” (carrying as
well as birthing) of this relation.
The narrator, Anne-Marie, understands in the negative epithet her
mother’s gendered claim to whiteness as the only space of rationality that the
narrative of (failed) interracial marriage in La Réunion allowed. She uncovers
how the colonial idiom and logic continue to have currency even as the hier-
archical legacy they left is slowly being undone generation by generation, in
 Hybridity in La Réunion 29

individual and collective actions. The epithet underlines the fact that “[t]he
specific class element, and the effects upon this of an insecure economy, are
parts of the personal choice [of marriage] which is after all a choice primarily
of a way to live, of an identity in the identification with this or that other per-
son” [emphasis in original] (Williams “Thomas Hardy” 138). Marcelle’s way
of entering the middle class through her black husband could not, in the end,
sustain her in the identification with a black man. This is because, for her, his
blackness consistently called up her fraudulence in this class due to the unspo-
ken structure in which her middle-class position sought its coherence: French
citizenship. Réunionness, here, is “at the very edge of semantic availability”
(Williams Marxism 134), and in fact not at all available to Marcelle. It
becomes the precocity of her daughter to unearth this structure in such a per-
sonal and painful space.
It is in this sense that we can note a shift in the totality that particular
acts posit. In the racialized language of the narrator’s parents, the French
nation is the totality that gives them coherence. Sensitive to what race signi-
fies and yet seeking a way out of it through class and nation, Anne-Marie’s
narrative accesses a new totality in the form of a structure of feeling.
The fact that the narrator’s mother could only wish to get out of the
oppressive and isolated space of the poor white community by marrying a
fonctionnaire is to be read through her gender; the fact that she could not get
herself a “good catch” in the white bourgeoisie is to be read through her class.
While these two facts are inseparable in the person of Marcelle, it is their par-
ticular combination that rendered Lucien not-black to her and her family.
Even instinctive proclivity or disinclination of individuals for each other takes
place in force fields of these interactions. Only a critical view of the history of
the specific interaction and its relation to History helps understand such
interactions without complete disingenuousness, or worse, indifference. If
Frenchness is always whiteness, then whiteness is not always Frenchness.
Therefore, it is evident that the feeling of un-Frenchness is the starting point
for the logic of rejecting Frenchness, an understanding that is accessed in Cre-
ole language. Métissage, when lived out as the diffractive process of produc-
tion of non-Frenchness (of differently inflected spaces of non-Frenchness)
then moves away from an investment in racial description and precision to
indicate a structure of feeling whose desire seeks an alternative, nonsynthe-
sized totality of Relation for its limits that the French nation cannot fulfill.10
Yet, métissage does not generate a simplistically utopian alternative to
departmental status related to French nationhood. From the perspective of
the Réunionnese “people,” the violent moment in Boyer’s text is a devastat-
ing reminder of the impossibility for difference to be equally different (and
30 Hybridity

different “equally”); that the famous idealistic cry that “Neither Europeans,
nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creole” (Bernabé, Chamoi-
seau, Confiant 75) from another French department is constantly rendered
impossible at the level of individual interactions, and therefore, of groups; that
the playing out of race is so intricately wound up with questions of gender and
class and so pervasive, as we have seen, that disentangling them in each
instance becomes a painful surgical process, where each extricated part always
connects up through the tissue to another, sometimes surprisingly distant one.
Anne-Marie’s father visits his daughter, the narrator, and her newly
born child. When some guests arrive, he leaves the house unnoticed. Later,
she speaks to him, upset that she was unable to introduce him to her guests,
as she wanted. At this time, his answer belies a shocking repetition of her
mother’s branding strategy. This strategy derives from a process that necessar-
ily leads to working through the ongoing history of colonialism in La Réu-
nion. He answers: “Je ne voulais pas te faire honte! Ne me fréquente plus, ne
me dis plus bonjour. Personne ne saura que ton père est un cafre!” (133) [I did
not want to humiliate you! Don’t socialize with me any more, don’t even greet
me. Then no one will know that your father is a nigger], thus reverting to the
same discourse that his wife uses, for the same historical reasons, only from a
differently inflected space within this society. It is such an understanding of
the symbolic power of discourse and its connections to points of enunciation
that enables their daughter to break out of this infernal inheritance by means
of a huge, courageous, and emotional effort of separation. She accomplishes
this through a critical historical understanding of her parents’ story as a cou-
ple, to feel her place within this nation (and to feel it into being) in a “rela-
tional” way that is impossible for them to do. Difference is thus held together,
fragmented and fragile, through a totality that the “Nation” (which is not
[yet?]) provides: “J’aime l’heure où le soleil s’éteint p’tits pas-p’tits pas, après
avoir tout le jour durant, arrosé de ses feux notre bout de terre de La Réunion”
(7) [“I love the hour when the sun disappears step by little step after having
watered all day, with its fires, our patch of land, La Réunion”] [my emphases]
are the opening lines of this “récit réunionnais.”

Beyond the Literary Text

If the word “bout” recalls the small size of the island, it also designates this
island as an appendage to (and an extremity of ) the hexagon politically and to
the continents (especially Africa and Asia) geographically. Retracing these
connections through a critical, rather than simply the monumental or the
antiquarian, mode of history rejects any celebration of a synthesized state (cre-
 Hybridity in La Réunion 31

oleness) like the photograph or the happily integrated Chinese merchant

evoked earlier. It renders impossible considering métissage at only a cultural
level, which does not account for race. It also brings skepticism regarding syn-
thesizing processes that can inscribe multiple and equal differences. If the lit-
erary text allows us to identify at the level of subjectivity inscriptions of Réu-
nion’s colonial history, it can not become a “substitute for any examination of
the broader material and cultural practices of empire building, or the after-
math of the political dissolution of empires” (Kaul 81). The close association
of Creole language and the culture of La Réunion as the basis from which the
non-French nation is experientially evoked, necessarily links up to the history
of the colonial educational system and the simultaneous denigration of Cre-
ole language. Quite simply, for Axel Gauvin, to deny the reality of Creole and
the reality of its speakers is to deny the reality of the “nation”: Les colonial-
istes nient donc la langue réunionnaise pour mieux nier l’existence de la nation
réunionnaise” [The colonialists thus deny the Réunionese language to better
deny the existence of the Réunionese nation] (Du créole opprimé 65).11
The narrator, Anne-Marie’s quest in Métisse, through a situated histor-
ical reading of La Réunion, curiously satisfies, or at least leads to, Said’s call to
“leave the modest refuge provided by subjectivity and resort instead to the
abstractions of mass politics” (“Exile” 359). Indeed, it goes further to show
how individual subjectivity cannot provide refuge in a situation where much
of what gives this subjectivity coherence actually works to denigrate it. In this
case, the narrator accesses her selfhood through Creole. Arriving at school, she
understands how she is perceived and “read” in the dominant language
(French). Much of what follows in this text is actually a reevaluation of her
selfhood through the dominant French model of citizenship that is given to
her and us in French.12 Her reflections are thus intimately tied to her native
Réunion’s recuperation and attaching of itself to the French nation. If we can
consider that this jump from the subjective to the collective is not to be read
as an allegory (without entering this debate), then at least it is a necessary the-
oretical move from the particular to the general. This move is enabled by the
text as a structure of feeling whose movement sweeps through and beyond the
particular subject position from where it is experienced.
For La Réunion, given that Creole is the mother tongue of the vast
majority of its people, one historical reality that has to be urgently and con-
sistently addressed is a persistent attitude that can be traced to a 1930 procla-
mation that, Creole

“[. . .] est la langue du peuple, la langue des serviteurs, des ouvriers,

et, malheureusement de presque tous les jeunes enfants; par l’influence
32 Hybridity

néfaste des bonnes qui les élèvent, une fois que les enfants ont adopté le
mauvais pli, il faut souvent combattre des années avant de réussir à extir-
per de leurs cervaux le vocable grossier qui doit faire place à la langue
française”! (Ithier 17)
[is the language of the people, the language of the servants, the
workers, and, unfortunately of all our young children; by the dangerous
influence of the nannies who bring them up, once the children have
adopted this bad habit, it is often the task of years of struggle before we
can manage to banish from their minds the vulgar expressions that must
give way to the French language].

Ithier’s book on the French literature of Mauritius was first published in 1930.
While La Réunion and Mauritius had already developed in different ways fol-
lowing the short period of common administration under French colonialism
in the early 1800s, this is only the beginning of the entry of “Oriental” lan-
guages into the school curriculum in Mauritius.13 Despite the presence of
Bhojpuri speakers in the vast Indian population that replaced slaves after
Abolition in Mauritius and the presence of Tamil speakers in La Réunion, the
relationship between Creole and French on the two islands was still quite
comparable in the public sphere.
As Bourdieu has pointed out:

The educational system [. . .] no doubt directly helped to devalue popular

modes of expression [. . .] and to impose recognition of the legitimate lan-
guage. But it was doubtless the dialectical relations between the school sys-
tem and the labour market—or more precisely, between the unification of
the educational (and linguistic) market, linked to the introduction of edu-
cational qualifications valid nation-wide, independent (at least officially) of
the social or regional characteristic of their bearers and the unification of
the labour market (including the development of the state administration
and the civil service)—which played the most decisive role in devaluing
dialects and establishing the new hierarchy of linguistic practices. (49)

In Métisse, the narrator experiences this precise imposition of the legitimate

language of French. It is also the relationship between educational qualifica-
tion and the development of the civil service that established not just a new
hierarchy of linguistic practices, but also, as in the case of the narrator’s father,
a new means of upward mobility. Through this new possibility, her father’s
blackness was mitigated up to a certain point in allowing the union of her
white mother with him, as we saw. In the end, however, his blackness became
a stumbling block where the problems of her parents came to reside.
In the silence following her father’s assuming of the identity of a “cafre,”
Anne-Marie writes a letter to her father. Finally, in the last chapter, entitled,
 Hybridity in La Réunion 33

“The Letter,” she fails to give it to him, and puts it back in her bag (Boyer
139). Instead, we are told, the letter becomes the narrative we read: “Alors
dans mon cœur sont venus les mots pour écrire ce livre: la lettre que n’avais pas
su donner” (140) [Then the words came to me (to my heart/spirit) for me to
write this book: the letter that I had not been able to give (him)]. This overt
invitation to proceed from, and even abandon, the personal subjective relation
between the daughter and her father in favor of an enlarged area of readership
is one we can not fail to accept. Monique Boyer’s Anne-Marie writes a letter
to her father but, in the end, delicately side-steps the authority of his response.
She understands her hybrid female position as it is generated and as she
claims it, giving her narrative, instead, to an audience that goes beyond her
gender, her class, and even her posited nation. If Mayotte Capécia wrote too
early before any kind of nationalism could welcome her voice in Martinique
that she was “Martinican,” (Je suis martiniquaise) Mariama Bâ wrote her “long
letter” post-Senegalese independence, forcing her to demasculinize crystal-
lized, nationalist discourse.14 It is to the well-timed credit of Monique Boyer
to have placed as the locus of a structure of feeling of her possible nation the
properly historical female “I.”
Whether Bâ’s Ramatoulaye, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, or Boyer’s Anne-
Marie, one finds repeatedly in postcolonial women’s writing a self-conscious
uneasiness in claiming entry and inscription into literary language. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak remarks following her discussion of Lucy: “Is this because
women, by historical definition, not essence, relate differently or obliquely to
the history of language, especially public language—published literature—
which is also singular and unverifiable?” (“Thinking Cultural” 353). In this
text, the revelation to the reader that s/he has been reading what was a private
letter from the narrator to her father comes at the end (as does the revelation
in Bâ’s and Kincaid’s texts). The reader is thus forced to look back and impute
a proper accounting of the specificity of this as a female narrative, which is
strengthened retroactively. One could claim that in these examples of women’s
writing, there is also a more definitive hybridizing attempt of the space of the
literary text itself. In fact, in the case of Boyer’s text we might understand how
Anne-Marie’s narrative is retroactively feminized by this act: while up to this
point, the narrative explicitly problematized the position of her black working
class father in Réunionese society, this act seizes the narrative out of any kind
of gender neutrality in then questioning the authority of the father from the
position of the hybridly situated daughter.
From the space of the personal, the question asked is: “Who are we,” a
question that Edouard Glissant considers urgent in the context of Martinique,
as opposed to what he terms “a question that from the outset is meaningless,”
34 Hybridity

that is, “Who am I?” (Caribbean Discourse 86).15 Métisse allows us to identify a
structure of feeling that goes beyond class, gender, and race, even while prop-
erly recognizing them. It asks Glissant’s question, “Who are we?” as the essen-
tial basis of its own raison d’être (“Who am I?”). And it shows that the answer,
“We are French,” is dismally inadequate.
What Métisse articulates here (and I mean very specifically in the late
twentieth century in La Réunion) is a conception of the “nation” as a structure
of feeling in the sense that Raymond Williams gives it, by tying it to a spe-
cific period within a context (Williams “Film . . .” 33). Williams chooses “feel-
ing” to “emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ or
‘ideology’” (Marxism 132). His preference for “feeling” over “experience” indi-
cates synchronicity with lived reality rather than the idea of the past that the
term experience conjures up. He is quick to indicate that it is “not feeling
against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought” (Marxism 132), in
this way breaking down the division between affect and intellect and also,
potentially, exploding boundaries that might make it the prerogative of a very
narrow part of the population. It is this development from métissage, then,
that is the carrier of the structure of feeling of Réunionness and that marks
the area of a shared culture, which is inextricably intertwined with Creole lan-
guage historically. These thoughts link métissage in La Réunion with the con-
cept of “creolization,” while the monumental images of the Chinese merchant
and the grandmother examined earlier link it explicitly with “diaspora” as
these terms were delimited in chapter 1 of this book. Here, we see the way in
which hybridity when examined in connection with an identifiable social
ground seeks out a totality and the movement toward such totality is thought
through contradiction. More on this follows in chapter 3, when hybridity as
presented by Métisse is reexamined upon looking at the colonial novel.
I propose for this structure of feeling (of the nation) an inherent hybrid-
ity in its being a precarious “sign,” still full of possibility for the generation of
“meaning,” rather than a “signal” as it has become in many new nations.16 If
the (Réunionese) nation has not been actualized through institutions, and that
it is “a cultural hypothesis” in Williams’s formulation (Marxism 132), it is thus
linked to utopia as envisioned by the narrator of this text. It provides the
framework in which much militancy for change has been conceived in La
Réunion.
 CHAPTER THREE

Theorizing Hybridity

Colonial and Postcolonial La Réunion

The fairly successful genre of the “roman colonial” [colonial novel], in which
colonialism itself becomes part of the aesthetic, implies recognition of the
notion of totality in upholding the genre as well as the social conditions of
possibility for its conception. At the same time, however, much like in newer
theories of hybridity, contradiction must be sidestepped in positing a utopian
vision of the mingling of races and cultures. In this way, the colonial context
is rendered superior to the original cultures—the lower African, Chinese, or
Indian cultures or even that of French culture that is impoverished in com-
parison to the enriched version of French colonial culture.

Métissage: A Novelistic Trope

Miracle de la Race [Miracel of the Race] is a colonial novel written by Marius-

Ary Leblond, the pseudonym for the Réunionese cousins Georges Athéna
and Aimé Merlo. These colonial authors were prolific writers as well as liter-
ary critics. In this novel they go about proving the superiority of the white race
in what to them was an informed and sympathetic manner. Miracle de la Race
is set on île Bourbon, the island of La Réunion, in the late nineteenth century.
The authors represent the period following economic crisis due to the severe
competition faced by colonial cane sugar from foreign sugar and sugar from
beets (mid-century). This crisis questioned the wisdom of monoculture of
sugarcane, and encouraged other produce such as spices. In addition, with the

35
36 Hybridity

opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Réunion loses its former importance as
the first port for ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope heading from the
East Indies to metropolises mostly in Britain and France. This period is also
marked by the after effects of Abolition (1848) and massive importation of
labor from India. At first, the sources for labor were the French “comptoirs”
but later indenture on a massive scale was conducted from diverse parts of
India with the various agreements the French entered into with the British as
well as from China, Mozambique, the Comora islands, even Somalia, Yemen,
and Rodrigues (Chane-Kune Aux origines 168).
Balzamet, the white protagonist of the novel in question, who is an
orphan, experiences a nonvoluntary “déclassement” (demotion of class) due to
the loss of his uncle’s fortune. This inheritance, which was “rightfully” his,
goes to the uncle’s Creole mistress. From the prestigious “pension” run by
Mme Cébert, Alexis Balzamet goes to the “Ecole des Frères” reserved for all
nonwhites. The building itself is in the former palace of the “Compagnie des
Indes” (Leblond 35). France’s position on the Indian subcontinent by this
time is of negligible political importance and, hence, the building’s former
glory is lost while it is now peopled by children of Indian servants as well.
Mme Cébert admonishes Alexis’ two aunts who refuse to pay for him to con-
tinue at her exclusively white school because they are excluding him from the
“droit d’arriver un jour aux postes de considération qui sont destinés aux
enfants blancs” (33) [right to one day take up significant positions, which are
meant for white children]. In fact, she warns that, instead of the various posts
Alexis dreams of, he may end up becoming “un déclassé par [leur] faute, petit
comptable chez un boutiquier arabe ou commis de quincaillerie” (33) [a
“declassed” person because of them, an insignificant accountant in an Arab
shop or a clerk in a metal shop].1 This reiterates the process by which colonial
education clearly became the agent that formed the future élite. We have seen,
in chapter 2, how the father in Métisse enters the middle class through this
education. This enables him to become a civil servant, while his move is but-
tressed by his acquiring a white wife through his new currency.
Here, while Alexis suffers because, “il se retrouvait faible pour résister,
lui, tout seul, à descendre de plus en plus parmi les noirs” (104) [he was too
weak to resist, all by himself, from sinking lower and lower amongst the
blacks], his struggle is a process of reconsolidating his innate strength, which
he inherited from his whiteness.2 Frère Hyacinthe, of the Ecole des Frères,
understands his troubles and correctly guesses that Alexis’ fear is for his future
and not reflective of any hatred of other races: “Vous souffrez non point tant
dans le présent, que par l’appréhension de vous laisser peu à peu dégrader pour
l’avenir” (87) [Your suffering is not so much in the present, as it is brought on
 Theorizing Hybridity 37

by the thought of letting yourself be, little by little, degraded in the future]. As
the story progresses, others in the colonial administration nurture Alexis’
future, and his success is assured.
The genre of the colonial novel, developed by the authors of this text,
speaks to a metropolitan audience, which needs to be educated about the
colony of the Creoles (here this means the whites of the colony). This genre
tells of their struggles and innovation in adapting to conditions seen as very
difficult and different compared to those of the metropolis. The colonial
novel, quite simply, should exhibit the “miracle” of the white race in the
colony. The ambiguity of a certain “progressive” white colonial point of view
becomes clear in this text. The vague idea that it is structural privilege that
affords to the whites such “miraculous” stories as that of Balzamet informs
Father Hyacinthe’s view. Even in the more recent Métisse, as we have seen,
from early on one can trace certain “slippages,” where the white race (most
often essentialized in this earlier vocabulary as Creoles, who have acquired the
strength over centuries to maintain their purity, innate goodness, and superi-
ority) is seen as the white class. Here, too, for example, M. Izabel, a mulatto,
who has acquired through hard work and the generosity of some well-placed
whites a position in the colonial administration, takes on Balzamet to repay,
as it were, the generosity of those whites: “M. Izabel, avec la simplicité du
devoir, s’empressa d’acquitter sa dette de reconnaissance envers la classe blanche
qui l’avait aidé à se distinguer” (199) [M. Izabel, from a simple sense of duty,
was eager to repay his debt of gratitude toward the white class, which had
helped him to be successful [distinguish himself ][my emphases]. In a recip-
rocal moment, Alexis himself realizes his debt toward M. Izabel. In his terms,
Izabel “a fait pour moi plus qu’aucun de ceux de ma classe” (255) [did for me
more than anyone from my class] [my emphases].
This conflation of white class/race was at the time certainly the broad
reality. Its knowledge and implications imbue with ambiguity the so-called
progressive discourses arising from sources such as the anti-abolitionists. We
will trace some instances of this ambiguity here in this colonial novel.3 There
is a certain uneasiness that it is the structural position of these other groups
that renders the whites superior. This is reflected in an almost paranoid desire,
exhibited by Fragelle (who is Balzamet’s metropolitan friend), for pure white-
ness to be preserved: “Eh bien! ces populations arriérées n’admireront et ne
chercheront à assimiler nos meilleures qualités que dans la mesure où notre
société, quelque restreinte soit-elle pourra maintenir inaltérable le génie
européen que nous avons mission de représenter ici” (249) [Well! These back-
ward people will neither admire nor try to assimilate our best qualities unless
our society, despite all obstacles, maintains unchanged the European genius
38 Hybridity

that it is our mission to represent here]. So, while there is a suggestion else-
where in the novel that assimilation of good qualities is to occur on both sides,
whiteness itself (here in the guise of Europeanness) must be preserved intact
at all costs. M. Vertère, Alexis’ mentor, also concurs: “Voici ma formule: les
Français, nés ici, n’auront vraiment accompli le miracle de leur race que quand
ils se seront assimilé le génie de toutes celles qui peuplent la colonie” (301)
[Here is my formula: the French born here will not have truly accomplished
the miracle of their race until they have assimilated the genius of all the other
races that populate the colony].
If M. Vertère’s view mitigates Fragelle’s, it still operates under the
assumption that the “miracle” is reserved exclusively for the white race. While
in the first quotation European genius is to be absorbed by lower races, in the
second the French in the colony are to become superior to all other examples
of Frenchness by absorbing the best from the other races present in the colony.
The impossibility of true cross-cultural exchange and politics in the notion of
colonial hybridity resides in reliance upon the purity of the dominant race, as
in the first quote, or in the superiority of the culturally transformed but still
dominant race. It is the simultaneous desire for cross-cultural exchange and the
maintenance of this superiority that constitutes the ambiguity in the following
passages. Frère Hyacinthe explicates the superiority of the white Creoles, born
in the colony, to metropolitan whites. He remarks to Balzamet:

Ayez plus de confiance en votre race [. . .] elle est plus résistante que vous
ne croyez. Ah! si vous étiez un petit Français qui, récemment débarqué
d’Europe, venait s’égarer au milieu de nos élèves, peut-être risqueriez-
vous de compromettre à leur contact vos qualités natives! . . . [sic] Mais
vous êtes d’une souche d’émigrés qui, établie depuis deux siècles sous ce
climat, a déjà déployé une force considérable pour se conserver sans
altération au milieu d’une population arriérée—qu’elle était obligée d’ap-
procher et d’éduquer grossement dans son propre intérêt.” (Miracle 87)
Have more confidence in your race [. . .] it is more resistive than you
think. Ah! If you were a young French boy, who recently set sail from
Europe, and wandered amongst our pupils, upon contacting them, you
might have risked compromising your native qualities! . . . But you come
from a stock of immigrants who, having established themselves over two
centuries in this climate, have already deployed considerable strength to
conserve themselves unaltered in the midst of this backward popula-
tion—that they were obliged to approach and to educate in their own
interest.

However, holding up this hierarchy of the hardy Creole, created in the tropi-
cal climate of the colony over two centuries, also has to do with their building
 Theorizing Hybridity 39

up of a “resistance” to the degrading possibility through contact with the lower

races encountered in the colony.
When M. Vertère gives his idea of the accomplishment of the miracle
of the white race through the assimilation of the genius of each of the others,
he does not fail to add that Bourbon will make history (in, it is understood,
the “History of France”):

[s]i, nous autres, les blancs, savons du moins dans l’avenir rester leurs
supérieurs, tout en les aimant, selon la tradition de nos plus dignes
ancêtres. Ah! Dieu de mes pères! si le créole tentait un effort intellectuel
pour connaître la civilisation originale des populations qui l’entourent,
Indiens[,] Chinois, Malgaches, Africains, ces races que par préjugé et par
paresse il prétend à jamais inférieures . . . , quelle riche, quelle vaillante
expression d’humanité il représenterait! (301)
[I]f we others, the whites, know at least how to remain their superiors in
the future, even while loving them, according to the tradition of our most
admirable ancestors. Ah! God of my fathers, if the Creole [white born in
the colony] made an intellectual effort to understand the original civi-
lization of these populations that surround him, Indian, Chinese, Mala-
gasy, African, these races that he claims owing to prejudice and laziness
are forever inferior . . . , what a rich and valiant expression of humanity
he would represent! [my emphases both quotes]

Note that it is the Creole or the colonial-born white who will be the rich
valiant expression of humanity after having absorbed what is best from the
other races, and that, at the beginning of the quotation, the white must remain
superior. In another passage, Frère Hyacinthe tells Balzamet that he should
have faith in his race, in the colonial-born white. He goes on to suggest that
the blacks are equal to whites and even that “les noirs soint [sic] loin d’être ceux
à qui Dieu a départi le moins d’intelligence. Je vous dirai même que bien des
petits garçons de nos campagnes, en France, ne sont pas plus doués qu’eux: ils
sont en tout cas beaucoup moins désireux de s’élever par l’enseignement!”
[italics in original] (87) [the blacks are far from being those whom God made the
least intelligent. I will even tell you that many of the little boys of our villages,
in France, are not more gifted than them: they are in any case much less
desirous of raising themselves up through education!]. He even goes on to say
that there is an “égalité naturelle” [natural equality] between the blacks and
whites. He wants his school to be a space where children of different races will
be “brothers.” Still, Frère Hyacinthe sees Alexis as one of the early examples
of individuals of the “race des blancs les meilleurs, puisqu’ils auront été obligés
de bonne heure d’être des exemples des autres” (88) [best of the white race,
because they will have been obliged, early on, to be examples to others]. This
40 Hybridity

sentence debunks the rhetoric of brotherhood and equality because it stems

from a textually inscribed awareness that brotherhood would require a renun-
ciation of class privilege; that superiority is only maintained through this
structural fixing of the other “races.”
In 1908 the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris came up with a question-
naire, which included an entire section on the métis. This document was dis-
tributed to colonial administrators and functionaries of all kinds along with
instructions to only record observations and refrain from any interpretation
(Claude Blanckaert 43). These documents fueled many of the century’s posi-
tions on gens de couleur and their status with regard to citizenship, considering
them as quite a specific group within the colony. One of the presumptions of
this document was the unquestioned distance between the purely and clearly
different races (Blanckaert 42). Prior to this, racial classification of individu-
als was essential to various processes in the colonies. Adjustment was required
in the vocabulary in order to accommodate changes in colonial life. For
instance, after Abolition, the term “noir” replaces quite systematically the term
“nègre” in documents such as birth registers, marriage records, or death cer-
tificates. Laurent Dubois notes that in Guadeloupe, when a certain Cazimir
married Marie-Noël, with other soldiers as witnesses, all those present were
ex-slaves, but only Marie-Noël was marked racially as a “Citoyenne Noire.”
Male ex-slaves escaped a racial ascription due to privilege gained by military
service, thus highlighting the racial difference of some women (Dubois 99).
Dubois’s research suggests that plantation workers were consistently called
“noir” in these registers, while other male “new citizens” could escape being
categorized as “noirs” or “gens de couleur” by proving themselves of value
within the republican hierarchy (100).
As is well known, the concept of hybridity was indispensable to discus-
sions, dating from as early as the eighteenth century, of the unity of the human
species or its understanding as multiply constituted by mutually exclusive
groups. For the monogenists, on one hand, hybrid humans only served to reit-
erate the unity of the human family, using reproduction across groups that
produced the hybrids as part of a natural process. Differences among groups
within this family arose from environmental differences such as climate. For
the polygenists, on the other hand, the hybrids were of particular interest
because the observation of them over time would reveal the impossibility of
their propagation due to infertility, thus showing the monstrousness of
hybrids and reinforcing the argument that these different groups were natu-
rally incompatible owing to fundamental distinctions that would suggest the
division of the human species. Among the polygenists, notorious was, of
course, Robert Knox in whose 1850 Races of Men, the mulatto was a mon-
 Theorizing Hybridity 41

strosity. Paul Broca’s 1858 Mémoires sur l’hybridité presents a somewhat differ-
ent argument. Observations of the animal kingdom, he writes, showed that
distinct species could produce fecund new métis, and therefore, fecund métis
in humans did not automatically signal the unity of the human race. Other
polygenists of the era, such as Jean-Baptiste de Bory de Saint-Vincent or
Pierre-Nicolas Gerdy, argued that it was no longer possible to maintain the
purity of any one of the diverse racial groups in humans (Blanckaert 51–53).
Broca’s work reinforced the polygenist position but was explicitly positioned
against monogenists such as James Cowles Prichard and his followers for their
complete espousal of total hybridity. At the same time he also opposed fol-
lowers of Gobineau, who associated purity of race with a moral purity or lack
of this latter when race was corrupted.
The consequences of the “victory,” so to speak of the polygenists
resulted in many interesting maneuvers in science, culture, and politics in the
twentieth century. Even if Darwin’s research put forth the thesis of the unity
of the human species, nothing in it contradicted the prevalence of permanent
varieties. Knox would seize upon this point. Still, whether monogenist or
polygenist, whether the argument was used for or against slavery, race subor-
dination remained a constant across the different positions. To take a promi-
nent historical milestone, the Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris of
1931 (and the objections to it) is only one of the examples we can cite of
events that exemplified how the plurally inflected discourses on race came
together to reinstate the hierarchy long established through colonialism.
Although the main intent of the exposition was to celebrate Empire (and from
France’s dominance at this event, particularly the French Empire), it also
served to educate the French about the importance of their colonies and to
recruit French youth to participate more actively in the colonial venture. The
underlying logic of the exposition held up the long-established “superiority”
of French culture and civilization over those of France’s colonies and, implic-
itly, recalled the opposition to such an idea. In the following decades, this
opposition would lead to revolutionary change across the colonial world.
In thinking through hybridity from the colonial novel, it becomes evi-
dent that the racial articulation of hybridity that caused certain upsets in
maneuvering the clear superiority of the white race was elided in favor of con-
centrating on a cultural definition of it. Therefore, it is all the more important
to be able to properly and quite specifically articulate what is meant by total
cross-cultural interaction and transformation that postcolonial theories of
hybridity envisage. If, through colonial hybridity, racial hierarchies became
explicitly or implicitly reiterated, what are the terms in which postcolonial
hybridity escapes or at least deals with hierarchy in difference? As is evident
42 Hybridity

also from the above citations from the colonial novel, explicit engagement
with hybridity from what we might term a “progressive” colonialist perspec-
tive elides the question of racial hybridity and focuses on a cultural concept.
This adoption of cultural hybridity is also evident in postcolonial theories of
hybridity as noted in the introduction. In the first case, the conflictual situa-
tion in which racial métissage occurred is elided in the colonial novel, while in
postcolonial theories, along with this, the ways in which conflicts between the
groups among which hybridity is created become obscured in the wish for free
cultural exchange among them. The relationship of postcolonial hybridity to
colonial hybridity necessarily brings into the dialogue colonialism, slavery,
indenture, and other forms of labor under colonialism, racial métissage, immi-
gration, and the administration of colonial peoples. It links more consequen-
tially hybridity in the metropolises to hybridity in the ex-colonies with and
through global capitalism. In terms of the distinction made in the introduc-
tion, it brings to the forefront both diaspora and its connection to history,
homeland, and racial unity as well as creolization and its insistence on imme-
diacy and solidarity across boundaries.

Hybridity as Métissage in La Réunion

When read against the backdrop of this notion of cross-cultural interaction, it

is evident that cultural hybridity was promoted as a way in which the white
race would assimilate all the positive qualities of the other races to make the
white Creole (born in the colony) population superior not only to the various
immigrants that French colonialism brought to sustain its island colony, but
also to metropolitan Frenchmen in the colonial period. It is thus easy to see
why there has been, in progressive discourse in La Réunion, a much more con-
sequential anchoring of class and shared interests than we will find even in
neighboring Mauritius. The discourse of hybridity more particular to Mauri-
tius will be discussed in chapter 4. In colonial La Réunion, culture and other
traits historically seen to be intrinsic to specific groups of peoples only func-
tioned in colonial thinking as a way of funneling these aspects to a small group
of whites, who would lead and develop this colony. These observations help
identify the limits of French assimilation offered to “other” populations.
Vergès’ study of anticolonialist discourse and strategy in La Réunion
(Monsters and Revolutionaries) suggests that the notion of hybridity has often
worked to the detriment of those not privileged in La Réunion’s history: all
forms of labor brought in by the French colonial system. In chapter 2, follow-
ing the more contemporary Métisse, it became evident that in the narrator’s
analyses hybridity calls up the history of slavery, of the meeting of underpriv-
 Theorizing Hybridity 43

ileged units in La Réunion’s history, and a recognition that the differences

upon which La Réunion’s Frenchness was predicated have historically been of
no political value to those who are called on to bear these differences. As
cross-cultural encounter, hybridity could only speak through the voice of the
inherited racial and racist signs that, even as they are rethought, give credence
to the colonial idiom. The power of this idiom was demonstrated in the adop-
tion by both the narrator’s white mother and her black father of the degraded
version of blackness that was to be insulted and shunned.
Degradation of whiteness from contact that is suggested in the colonial
novel is reclaimed and rethought in the title of Métisse and takes the form of
its speaking subject itself. Métissage emerges as a form of politics enabled by
Creole language and which posits the nation. At this point I want to pause to
reconsider some of the theoretical underpinnings of hybridity, drawing from
chapter 1. On this reading, any theoretical account of the production of
hybridity becomes saturated with the conceptual and historical framework of
racially marked exploitation making it increasingly difficult to evoke the
hybrid as the ambiguous point, privileged in postcolonial theories, at which
we encounter hegemony, resistance, and agency. Bhabha’s attempt to do so
involves what Stuart Hall calls “intervening ideologically” (qtd. in Bhabha
Location 22). In arguing against the artificial separation between politics and
theory, Bhabha comments that a movement between them “is initiated if we
see that relation as determined by the rule of repeatable materiality, which
Foucault describes as the process by which statements from one institution
can be transcribed in the discourse of another” (Location 22). What he sees as
the movement of statements across this divide doing is that “any alteration of
its field of experience or verification, or indeed any difference in the problems
to be solved, can lead to the emergence of a new statement: the difference of
the same” (Location 22). So, it is in “hybrid forms” that Bhabha wants to artic-
ulate “a politics of the theoretical statement” (Location 22). In his terms, deriv-
ing from Foucault, “the theoretical enterprise has to represent the adversarial
authority (of power and / or knowledge), which in a doubly inscribed move, it
simultaneously seeks to subvert and replace” (Location 22). Following a semi-
otic mode (although he calls this “reading Mill against the grain”) Bhabha
states that “politics can only become representative, a truly public discourse,
through a splitting in the signification of the subject of representation;
through an ambivalence at the point of the enunciation of a politics” (24). But,
as we have seen, moving “hybridity” as a notion between two spaces is not such
an easy task. Here, we have seen the move from the colonial to the postcolo-
nial novel. In this case, the movement did not so easily “lead to the emergence
of a new statement.” What it necessitated is a move beyond the literary text
44 Hybridity

that the narrator explicitly suggests and that is evidenced in late twentieth
century Réunionese society in Creole nationalist politics. The difficulties of
making hybridity a politics from the concept and reality of colonial hybridity
was explored briefly in chapter 1.
It becomes evident, then, that it is not possible to evoke the hybrid out-
side of this racially charged or over-determined conceptual space. Here, it is
not in the “moment of enunciation” that in Bhabha’s terms, “objectified others
[are] turned into subjects of their history” (Location 178). Instead, it occurs
through the long view by which a “métisse” is able to become the enoncé in
her own énonciation. Such a reading questions, also, Bhabha’s insistence on
the divided will and the challenge it presents for representation in that it offers
that the differentially situated subjectivities and desires must all come to terms
with the objective reality of the colonial idiom within which their “selves” are
available. It is only a strategic unity of will, activated through some kind of
collective consciousness of shared interest or suffering, that a path can be
forged toward representation or action. The common experience incarnated in
the vegetable “brèdes” eaten by poor whites and blacks alike is, however, insuf-
ficient to forge the relationship between Anne-Marie’s white mother and
black father. Neither is able to come up with the ethical engagement at the
level of the individual that will be explored in discussing Glissant in chapter
6. Instead, they allow their experience to lapse into the idiom directly inher-
ited from colonialism. Difference is not supported within the objective struc-
ture of the department. From these remarks, it becomes clear that postcolo-
nial hybridity needs to account for the way in which such inheritance is
worked through. The movement we examined of the concept of hybridity
from the colonial to the postcolonial novel, which proposed a change in the
structure surrounding the enunciation, participates in the “perpetual cultural
revolution, [which] can be apprehended and read as the deeper and more per-
manent constitutive structure in which the empirical textual objects know
intelligibility” ( Jameson Political Unconscious 97).
Further, Métisse refuses Bhabha’s “Third Space” that “represents both
the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utter-
ance in a performative and institutional strategy,” because it disallows such a
split between the two. The term “cafre,” for example, brought together effec-
tively these two spaces by resolutely denying there was any understanding for
it as a general and then a particular. The only implication, its only coherence,
for both the white mother and the black father was the general signification of
the uncivilized negro, slave in history, who is culturally and developmentally
inferior to the French settler (Creole). Colonial hybridity, as the colonial novel
demonstrates, does not undo this hierarchy. If we were to ask for specifications
 Theorizing Hybridity 45

of the process of interpretation and signification, following from Bhabha’s ver-

sion of hybridity, we could say that the meaning of the utterance has to be
specified in a Réunionese idiom. In so doing, it is impossible, following this
text, to impute ambiguity to these particular usages of the term “cafre” as any-
thing other than a negative enunciation of “nègre.” The term does not give the
historically objectified black man agency in the moment of its utterance—nei-
ther by his wife, nor even by himself. Neither was able to implement a signif-
icant change to the colonial suggestions within this term, in a moment of eth-
ical agency.
For Jameson, the choice in artistic representation between victims and
heroes has to do with the strategy at work:

For such a politics can foreground the heroic, and embody forth stirring
images of the heroism of the subaltern—strong women, black heroes,
fanonian resistance of the colonized—in order to encourage the public in
question; or it can insist on that group’s miseries, the oppression of
women, or of black people, or the colonized.
These portrayals of suffering may be necessary—to arouse indignation, to
make the situation of the oppressed more widely known, even to convert
sections of the ruling class to their cause. But the risk is that the more you
insist on this misery and powerlessness, the more its subjects come to
seem like weak and passive victims, easily dominated, in what can then
be taken as offensive images that can even be said to disempower those
they concern. Both these strategies of representation are necessary in
political art, and they are not reconcilable. But it is impossible to resolve
this particular antimony of political correctness unless one thinks about
them in that political and strategic way. (“Globalization” 53–54)4

In Métisse, the negative image of the father as a victim of racism—that

goes beyond his control, even beyond his understanding because he also shares
this negative perception of himself that his wife’s instinct belies—has a cor-
rective. Although this may arouse indignation for potential readers of the text,
it creates a moment of ethical possibility for his daughter within the text itself.
In Jameson’s terms, she does not try to reconcile this image of her father with
some monumental one she erects in its place nor does she buy into the vic-
timized interpretation. Instead, she activates her own agency in an act of dis-
tancing and autonomy whereby she does not seek her father’s validation for
her own purpose. Instead of giving him the letter, the narrator “leaves” the text
to coincide with the author and gives readership the opportunity to under-
stand what métissage has meant in La Réunion. In her terms, it has meant a
strong Creole consciousness through Creole language as a counter-hegemonic
force (against French departmentalization); it has meant demystification of
46 Hybridity

what aspirations to whiteness mean for La Réunion: her mother’s validation

as a legitimate white woman came from movement away from poverty and
into middle-class respectability. But as the narrator understands, such an
understanding of the move had to come at the cost of ignoring the common-
ality between whites and nonwhites that was evident before her move. The
irony, of course, is that this occurred even though her move was made with
and through her association with a black man. But this irony serves to high-
light even further the impossibility of believing in French middle-class iden-
tity and culture, in French departmentalization, in French citizenship.
This interaction between the narrator’s parents occurs, in Lacan’s terms,
in a “transindividual” space where the image of the slave remains in the uncon-
scious, as it were, and furnishes the violent scene between the parents as well
as the retreat of the father from his daughter’s life, based on this image of him-
self. The restructuring of the subject occurs in the teller of the story—the nar-
rator who witnessed the different enunciations of “cafre.” The only way that
there is any retroactive imputing of meaning to these prior events is through
a restructuring of the idea of hybridity and through a long view of history. The
meaning of “métissage” within the colonial novel and its support system of
colonialism cannot just be altered: from meaning, in the colonial novel, the
absorption of the positive traits of other races for the fortification and perfec-
tion of the white race to, in the more recent representative apparatus, a min-
gling of the positive traits within the entire culture. The only way that this
term can be rehabilitated is through a restructuring of the entire colonially
created and sustained system that gives it coherence, implicating an ethical
investment in its enunciation. In this way, Métisse demonstrates intuitively the
way in which a new totality must alter the terms of métissage through the
structure of feeling of nation.
If the Réunionese nation is a cultural hypothesis, as suggested in its
evocation as a structure of feeling, textually, it comes as a jouissance because it
is necessarily linked to a desire that opposes the Law—the law of French
nationhood. The idea of interdiction is textually articulated in the constant
presence, even threat, of Creole in the French text. The fact that Creole lan-
guage is linked to Réunionese nationhood, as we have seen, makes of it a for-
bidden idiom whose appearance records this desire that opposes the French
status of La Réunion. In the history of La Réunion, the strong desire for oth-
erness is what métissage testifies to (as the product of this attraction) at the
most obvious, yet available and readable, level of racial identification. One
might then say, following from this, that focusing on a legitimate position for
the métis(se) and a legitimization of the discourse of métissage in the narra-
tor’s story in her relationship with her parents is the sublimation of this
 Theorizing Hybridity 47

desire. The urgency for sublimating this desire for otherness can be
explained, at least in part, by the fact that the terms in which otherness is
available in departmental La Réunion are only the grotesque racialist colonial
terms that render the narrator’s father a nigger. Paradoxically, the naturaliza-
tion of this negative image of the father through the historical process of col-
onization also becomes the Law of the Father, which the narrator explicitly
rejects. Recognition of this coincidence of the Law with that of the Other
(her parents)—even as this Law is what renders a mutual satisfaction of her
parents’ desire impossible—makes the narrator’s ethical intervention into the
Real or History radical. Postcolonial theories of hybridity seem to jump
quickly from one stage to the other without any evidence of the intellectual
and practical effort required to enable the new meaning they wish to attribute
to hybridity.
Bhabha asks from within his conception of hybridity: “[. . .] [H]ow do
we fix the counter-image of socialist hegemony to reflect the divided will, the
fragmented population? [. . .] [H]ow does the collective will stabilize and
unify its address as an agency of representation, as representative of a people?”
(Location 30). These texts, when read to shed light on the postcolonial, show
that language is an important place to begin such a representation—not just
as the actual language in which this will is to be represented, but as the place
where histories and agency can be understood and thought through by a peo-
ple. In the quotation above, it is implicit that it is easier to succumb to a sin-
gular voice that does not succeed in representing all its constituencies. While
such a risk is run in any type of real world situation involving plural spaces,
building of a strategic unity of will does not mean to lapse into simplistic con-
sensus; rather a strategic unity of will presupposes dialogue, thought, ethical
decisions, and intelligent creative process in provisional collectivities. Such
collectivity must be forged in engaging with the “social ground” in question.
Hybridity, then, demands perhaps more than any other concept specifications
in its use, because engaging it as a politics can have very different conse-
quences and presuppositions in each instance. In La Réunion, it is more use-
ful to think in terms of language rather than a language metaphor for the pur-
poses of using hybridity as an emancipatory concept.
In the early 1960s some Réunionese students of the AGERF (Asocia-
tion générale des étudiants réunionnais en France) refused to join the general
outcry against French aggression in Algeria. This prompted a split and the
formation of the UGECR (Union générale des étudiants créoles en France),
which for its part openly affirmed its desire to emancipate the island from
French colonialism (see Armand and Chopinet 150). Although their journal
Rideau de cannes had a short life (1961–63), several of the members continued
48 Hybridity

the cause in France and upon their return to La Réunion (for example Axel
Gauvin and Roger Théodora).
The 1970s are characterized by the discernable split between the créolie
and créolité movements. The former, with Jean-François Samlong, Jean-
Claude Thing Leoh, and some of Jean Albany’s writing define themselves as
“apolitical.” Their insouciance when it comes to the necessity to standardize
in any way written Creole, and their admission and acceptance of the minor-
ity position of Creole characterize this trend. Creole is used as the language of
intimacy, familiarity, love, and family, and is not seen in a conflictual relation-
ship with French, which is naturally viewed as the language of logic and rea-
son. Most of these writers produce their major creation in French and their
use of Creole was more a capitulation to what they saw as a “trend” (Armand
and Chopinet 291). The Mauritian critic, Jean-Georges Prosper, in what I see
as a problematic article in the special issue of the journal Notre Librairie, tries
to situate Mauritius with regard to the créolie of the Indian Ocean. One must
first question why he chooses the term “créolie” and not “créolité” for the title,
but this is not the place to explore that. In this same article, he claims that “la
créolie [est un] synonyme de réunionnité” (“La place” 83) [créolie (is a) syn-
onym for reunionness], thus either conflating the two movements of créolie
(described above) and créolité, or totally disregarding the more militant,
nationalist movement in favor of the bland, apolitical one that is rather con-
descending to Creole language.
Armand and Chopinet note that despite the boom in the construction
of schools on the island, the results were catastrophic and showed no promise
of improvement (229). Axel Gauvin’s Du créole opprimé au créole libéré presents
the problematic of Creole as first an issue of literacy. His work with teaching
adults a Creole script (there are eight recognized graphic systems proposed on
La Réunion) for the language they already speak with fluency leads him to
conclude that it would be an easy task to make a vast majority of so-called
illiterates literate. To defend this project in a Francophone context, he shows
how, through various examples, Creole speakers do not understand French,
even if they seem to on the surface. In fact, this situation is even worse than
the one Bourdieu proposes where, due to the educational system, “social
mechanisms of cultural transmission tend to reproduce the structural dispar-
ity between the very unequal knowledge of the legitimate language and the
much more uniform recognition of this language” [emphases in the original]
(62). The constant misunderstandings in the educational context, and the
simultaneous outlawing of Creole in the classroom, result in an educational
system, which produces students who can not function in French. Gauvin
cites a student who sums up the result:
 Theorizing Hybridity 49

—si ou-i koz an kréol i bous a-ou

—si ou-i koz an franssé ou-i fé fo’t sï fo’t, i ri d-ou
—si ou-i koz pas, i di ou lé timid, sinon sa ou-i rèv, daouar
ou-i anfou d-lékol, i fé in don’t èk sa pou fé mon’t a-ou d’kla’s. (Du créole
opprimé 10)
If you speak in Creole, they tell you to be quiet. If you speak in French,
you make mistakes one after the other, they laugh at you. If you don’t
speak, they say you are timid, that you are dreaming, that you probably
don’t care about school, and they keep track of that for promotion to the
next class.

In fact, he gives various examples of how in the classroom as well as outside

it, simple information is not understood when communicated in French (see
for example 89), thus questioning even the recognition of French. However,
clearly, for Gauvin as for many other members of the créolité movement, the
status of Creole language is related to the status of the people of La Réunion.
Showing where (with respect to classes and strata) in Réunionese society
(bilingual and sometimes) monolingual Creole speakers and those who speak
[“possèdent”] (Du créole opprimé 68) French and thus consolidate “linguistic
capital” (see Bourdieu 51) are located, he remarks that the latter group is made
up of “les classes et couches sociales favorisées par le système colonial” (68)
[the classes and strata favored by the colonial system].6
In chapter 4 on the neighboring island of Mauritius we will see a very
different articulation of hybridity in the context of the official political and
nationalist discourse close to the time of Mauritian independence.
This page intentionally left blank.
 CHAPTER FOUR

On the Difficulty of
Articulating Hybridity

Africanness in Mauritius

[Mauritius] has succeeded to a remarkable degree in evolving a

distinct Mauritian way of life. The visitor to Mauritius is
impressed by the fact that on the whole, Mauritians have more in
common with each other than with the native inhabitants of the
lands of their [forefathers].
—Seewoosagar Ramgoolam, First Mauritian
Prime Minister in a speech at the United Nations

In the previous chapters, it became evident that in La Réunion, the concept of

mixedness has been employed to call up the not-yet accomplished nation.
While hybridity and ambiguity were acknowledged, there was a certain under-
lying strategy that reactivated the racial meaning of the French term métissage
in its historical specificity of the encounter of racially marked bodies after the
advent of colonialism. The racial component being reactivated, the colonial
history of this French department was reconsidered along with a simultaneous
rejection of Frenchness. This can be identified in a “feeling” of Réunionese
nationhood as against the imposed French nation. The referent of the term
“métisse,” in the novel we considered located the protagonist while the play of
this vocabulary of race with that of class and gender became significant in the
observations the narrator made of her parents and their history on the island
of La Réunion as traced through their ancestors. If these observations about

51
52 Hybridity

the collusion of race, class, and gender have become commonplace, and even
come back as a kind of litany in postcolonial studies, their intersections with
regard to hybridity have not always been so evident.
In this chapter, the term Creole will become significant to the recent
history of Mauritius, an explicitly hybrid nation, where articulating the hybrid
moment becomes complicated. The idea of a dominant culture shifts in this
consideration from a postcolony—metropolitan dialectic to one that has to do
with an internal relation of the specifically ethnic to a national context. Here,
in trying to privilege culture as enunciation, in Bhabha’s terms, it becomes
necessary to then examine the impossibility of other enunciations: in this case,
the impossibility for Africanness to appear in Mauritian society. Specifically,
in this chapter I am considering public discourse from the period immediately
preceding to the several decades following Mauritian independence as I exam-
ine parts of speeches made by the (now deceased) first Mauritian prime min-
ister, Sir Seewoosagar Ramgoolam. The second part of the chapter focuses on
contemporary Mauritian politics.
Hybridity here involves troubled and difficult mythical as well as con-
crete ties to the lands seen as the “origin” of various groups, thus drawing
attention to what I referred to as diasporic positioning in chapter 1. In addi-
tion, relationality refers to the positioning of these groups vis-à-vis other
groups within the Mauritian national space, opening our discussion to pre-
occupations central to the notion identified as creolization. In this chapter I
will consider social antagonism through language as a crucial element of cul-
ture itself. Cultural difference becomes an event that is actualized through
language and in speech. I wish to show how politics, viewed here primarily
through the symbolic use of language, eschews the articulation in what is
“distinctly Mauritian” (see Ramgoolam’s quotation above) of anything
“African.” I argue that the prime minister’s discourse is emblematic of the
inability of Mauritian society to come to terms with the issue of slavery and
with its historical ties to the African continent and Madagascar. If Vergès has
pointed out how, for the French department of La Réunion, any talk of
métissage should in fact lead to a history of slavery, this kind of discourse has
proven even more difficult in Mauritius, an independent nation. While in
chapter 3, the salient term from which hybridity was considered was “métis,”
here, the term “Creole” will become our focus.1 I discuss language as an eth-
nic marker that disallows a legitimate configuration of Africanness and/
blackness, resulting in an eternal elision of this “part” of the Mauritian
“mosaic.” All future references to “Africanness” in this chapter point to qual-
ities or aspects that might be associated with both the African continent and
Madagascar.
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 53

Historical Considerations

Mauritius is 550 miles east of Madagascar and about 2,300 miles from the
Cape of Good Hope. It is a small island that measures thirty-six miles in
length and twenty-three miles in width. The Arabs are considered the ear-
liest visitors to the area, which was never known to have been populated by
indigenous people. The Portuguese were the next to arrive (Vasco da Gama
rounded the Cape in 1498; Goa was captured in 1510, Malacca in 1511) as
they pushed eastward toward the Malabar (western) coast of India. Neither
the Arabs nor the Portuguese used these islands as anything more than cru-
cial docking and resting places in their commercial ventures. Soon the
Dutch and English were to follow and the East India Companies were
established.
The Dutch took possession of Mauritius in 1598, naming it after
Prince Maurice of Nassau. No attempt was made to settle or colonize the
island at this time. English, French, and Dutch ships used the island as a
halt on their way toward India. Although the English, French, and Por-
tuguese were driven out of Java in 1619 when it was taken over by the
Dutch (who were later defeated in India in the Anglo-Dutch war
1665–67), they all continued to trade simultaneously in India. The inner
route, through the Moçambique channel, was used onward to Bombay,
Goa, Cochin, or Ceylon. The outer route, East of Madagascar via the Mas-
carenes, usually led to Madras, Pondichéry, or Calcutta. The subsequent
settlement and establishment of full-fledged colonies on the island, and the
latter’s destiny were closely tied to the expansion of the French and British
Empires in India. The area was also affected in various ways by the devel-
opments and changes occurring at the Cape of Good Hope, which was a
source of supply to the French bases of Bourbon (La Réunion) and Ile de
France (Mauritius) since the early 1780s, and considered the “Gibralter of
India” (Graham 25).
Gradually, though, the British preferred the safer harbour of Mauritius
as compared to the “vicious currents [. . .] and the violent winter storms”
around the Cape (see Graham 50). In 1810, Bourbon ( July) and subsequently
Ile de France (December) were taken from the French by the British. The
strategic importance of Mauritius for the British Empire in India is evident.
The British Quarterly Review reported that “were we, by any unforseen event,
compelled to abandon the peninsula of India, we verily believe that no power
on earth would hold it to any advantage, or in any state of tranquillity while
the Cape of Good Hope, the Mauritius, and Ceylon remained in our posses-
sion” (qtd. in Graham 52). In fact, the Mauritian author Loys Masson
54 Hybridity

reminds us of her ensign “stella clavisque maris indici,” in his novel Etoile et la
clef (1941). In 1869, the opening of the Suez, of course, changed this status of
the “star and key” of the Indian Ocean. The significance of Mauritius is linked
to the struggle between the French and British in India that culminated in the
seven years war (1756–63). The key to the control of the Bay of Bengal
depended on the strip of the Coromandel coast near Madras. Consequently,
the nearest French base to this east coast of India was Mauritius. Following
the impossibility of a French India, Bourbon and Ile de France gained eco-
nomic attention: populations doubled, agriculture and the harbors were devel-
oped. Mauritius became a British possession in 1810.
The Emancipation Act was passed in 1833 and the official abolition of
slavery in Mauritius is dated at 1835. Owners received a grant of 2 million
pounds as compensation for the freed slaves (see Graham 71). Patrick
Beaton, the minister of St. Andrew’s Church and secretary of the Bible soci-
ety of Mauritius writes that “[i]t was a master-stroke of Mauritius genius,
still looked back to with unqualified admiration, first to introduce some
15,000 slaves in defiance of the laws of Great Britain, and then to make
Great Britain pay half-a-million of a compensation for the slaves thus ille-
gally introduced” (65). It was at this time that the introduction of “coolie”
labor from India was made large scale. Chinese merchants migrated to the
area in the late nineteenth century, although a very small number of the
engagés laborers from the earlier period were also Chinese. It was around the
same time (1860s) that Muslim merchants, primarily from Gujarat in India,
also came to Mauritius and on to La Réunion. These last two groups were
completely outside of the experience of labor in the cane fields (see Chane-
Kune Aux origines).2
The political becomes a site where these multiple, contesting histories
play out in interesting and sometimes unexpected ways. Discourses around
the language question have always been highly charged in the Mauritian
context. There have been great efforts, with renewed vigor since indepen-
dence, to include ancestral languages in the curriculum. While the various
Indian languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu, and
Gujarati as well as Chinese are represented in the educational system, no
African language enjoys this status.3 There are no imprints of African lan-
guages in the way Indian languages and Chinese as well as the more presti-
gious French and English are inscribed. Creole, the language whose origins
can be traced to the interaction of Europeans and African slaves, while
clearly implicated in everyday life for all groups of Mauritians, often has a
discordant relationship to other languages. This position of Creole language
will be explored further.4
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 55

A Prime Minister Speaks

On 7 December 1943, Sir Seewoosagar Ramgoolam, then a nominated mem-

ber of the Legislative Council and who was later to become the first Prime
Minister of the Republic of Mauritius, spoke thus regarding Indian languages:

My section of the community wishes to see that Indian languages such as

Hindi, Urdu and Tamil are taught to our children as a matter of right.
Any change that will bring about the suppression of one language or
another is undesirable and will have a detrimental effect on that section of
the community.
I do not see why. . . . Hindi or Urdu or Tamil should not be made optional
for Indian students. By that I do not mean that they should take either
French or one Indian language. I think they should have the option to
take both of them, as is done in other parts of the world, like India. [my
emphases] (101)

Here, Ramgoolam does several things. First, he clearly allies himself with the
general Indian community (“my section of the community”)—racially or cul-
turally, as one would have it—and, in his role as representative, speaks for
them. Second, he divides the community along linguistic or ethnic lines, and
makes specific languages the “property” of particular sections (“. . . that sec-
tion . . .”). It is significant that Indian languages become the property of Indi-
ans, even if they don’t (yet/anymore) speak them. It seems inconceivable that
there may be other links, apart from the “ancestral,” to Indian languages and
therefore, according to his speech, that, for example, non-Indian Mauritian
children should want to learn Indian languages. Ramgoolam also holds up his
ancestral country (not-yet-independent India) as the example. Following
Mauritian independence and the clear Indian majority for the electorate, the
Indianness of Mauritius has been exalted and celebrated to an even greater
degree.
Although the presence of various languages in Mauritius is indubitable,
their actual use and the competence of their speakers can be examined. The one
language that is understood and spoken quasi universally, with perhaps differ-
ent degrees of frequency, is unquestionably Creole. Yet Creole is the only lan-
guage that no constituent wants to claim. I shall briefly explain what I mean by
“claim.” In Mauritius, especially after the institutionalization of statistical sur-
veys from the 1930s onward as well as the subsequent inclusion of “Oriental
Languages” in the curriculum, the language/ethnic marker has greater reality.5
British records of Indians arriving in Mauritius categorized them according to
their ethnic belonging, which inscribed what would generations later be
56 Hybridity

claimed as language affiliation. Even if newly formed families were not able to
sustain the language brought from India (except notably Bhojpuri), China, the
African continent, or Madagascar, Indian languages and Chinese later entered
the Mauritian linguistic scene through the educational system. In this way,
links with the land seen as the origin of the various groups were reaffirmed.
Government census questions included “what is your mother tongue?” which
was later changed to “what is your ancestral language?” This change registers
the functioning of languages more as markers of claimed identity and supposed
cultural affiliation than as the competence of one’s means of expression. To
mark on the census form as one’s ancestral language, say, Tamil, Telegu or Chi-
nese is not necessarily to say one speaks it, but rather to affirm that one iden-
tifies with that community.
Yet, as Robillard has noted, studies show how the government has con-
sistently avoided making any statement regarding Creole, notwithstanding its
recognized use even in the Supreme Court. In fact, here, interpreters are avail-
able for almost any other language except Creole, implicitly pointing to its
universality in Mauritius. In addition, it is stipulated that if a language other
than English is spoken by all parties concerned, it may be used in the case in
question as the language of communication. This “other language,” likely to be
spoken by all parties, is Creole; still, it is not indicated by name (Robillard
124). Despite tacit recognition of the reality of Creole and its universality on
the island, no official position exists on its usage.
Another important point involves the introduction of “Oriental lan-
guages” in the school curriculum and its instigation of further competition
among groups (and classes). English has been accepted as the official lan-
guage, yet there is no particular group that comes together around this lan-
guage in the manner in which it has occurred with, say, Bhojpuri or Chinese.
One might suggest that the Indian population’s preference for English be seen
in the light of its use in India and in the light of the possibilities for educa-
tional as well as other exchanges through this language. These possibilities
include going to the U.K. and India for education, and also to the more recent
mecca of education, the U.S.A. The preference of many Indo-Mauritians for
English can also be read as a move to counteract the hegemony of the “white”
French population and the “Creoles” who have historically allied with them,
an important uniting factor between these latter two groups being identifica-
tion through, and the use and/or command of, French.
The term “Creole” is loosely used to indicate those in the so-called
“General Population,” who are “not white.” The term “mulâtres” colloquially
specifies those in this population with perceived lighter skin color, thereby
capacitating the complete avoidance of the use of the term “black” or even
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 57

“African.” Although this might not necessarily be significant in itself, it

becomes so, given the widely used terminology that specifies individuals as
“Indo-Mauritian” or “Sino-Mauritian,” or even quite simply as “indien” or
“chinois.”
The argument against introducing Indian languages into the curriculum
was based on the “threat” (“menace”) that it presented to French (see Rughoo-
nundun “Créolophonie”). Lionnet also notes an interesting point regarding
the promotion of English from an unlikely quarter.

Mauritians want to hold on to English as their official language

because of its economic and international usefulness; the French-speak-
ing minority, who tended to defend French against the British adminis-
tration during the colonial period, is now in favor of the linguistic status
quo because they feel that Hindi—the most widely spoken language of
the Indian majority—would most probably become the ‘official’ language
should English be abandoned. (Lionnet “Créolité” 105)

One might consider the entry of English—which, while being a lan-

guage of power, is also “neutral’ with respect to the language-ethnic relation-
ship in Mauritius—as the medium of education to have moved French from
being the official and “legitimate” language in the direction of becoming one
of the “ethnic” signifiers, just as Indian languages and Chinese have histori-
cally been. Evidently, though, in the case of French, its prestige remains intact
as its legitimate speakers include the most financially and symbolically pow-
erful group: the former colonizers, sugar-barons, and, often, controllers of
major financial institutions and capital.
Historically, the arrival of each (immigrant) group on this island was
tied to a function the group would fulfill. The French arrived and established
a colony, once authorization from the King was received. British administra-
tors were not numerous following the British takeover of Mauritius. Also,
Britain’s colonial interest in Mauritius being strategic rather than anything
else, there is no statistically significant British population that is traced over
generations in Mauritius. According to the reverend Patrick Beaton’s account,
which was written in the middle of the nineteenth century, “apart from the
military, not more than a thousand of the two hundred and thirty thousand
inhabitants can speak English or identify themselves with England as their
mother country” (24). He writes regarding the English who came to Mauri-
tius seeking a fortune, that “their object is to make a certain sum of money,
and when that object is attained, they betake themselves to other lands, where
money is more valuable and life more enjoyable than in Mauritius” (26). The
African and Malagasy slaves were imported to plant and harvest the cane as
58 Hybridity

well as provide domestic labor to the colonists. Early Indian immigration was
for the purpose of providing skilled labor and household labor, while massive
Indian immigration was deployed to continue sugarcane cultivation and sugar
manufacture after the abolition of slavery. Early Chinese immigration is linked
to labor, while later, Indian and Chinese merchants were primarily associated
with trade. To be sure, other groups can be conceived, and members of the
groups that have been named above operated outside these prescribed func-
tions, for example, Indian slaves prior to the massive Indian immigration post-
slavery.6 Yet, in the Mauritian context, one can speak of the Indian indentured
laborers or the Chinese merchants, for example, and appeal to a set of common
images, even if the attitudes and emotions in recalling these images vary widely.
What I am trying to establish here is that the Indian laborer, as well as the
white colonist, are emblematic figures in the national memory. One can speak
of common memories (in terms of content), even if the attitude or sentiment
(recalling Ernest Gellner’s terminology) toward them is vastly different,
depending on the situation of the person(s) “remembering.”
The rigidity of these groups and a lack of a proper class-consciousness
based on the experience of exploitation make other forms of alliances very dif-
ficult to accomplish. In the Mauritian novelist Marie-Thérèse Humbert’s A
L’autre bout de moi, the metropolitan French visitor, Paul Roux, remarks: “Ici
la classe sociale n’existe pas, on peut être pauvre comme Job, si on a la peau
claire, on se sent solidaire des Blancs riches, on vote avec eux en croyant de
bonne foi défendre ses propres intérêts . . . La richesse ou la pauvreté du
Mauricien, c’est la couleur de sa peau, voilà le mensonge qu’il faut démasquer”
(242–43). [Here social class does not exist, one can be as poor as Job, if one is
light-skinned, one feels a solidarity with the wealthy whites, one votes with
them and truly believes to be defending one’s interests. Richness and poverty
in Mauritius are measured by the color of one’s skin, this is what has to be
revealed]. Colonial and even postindependence statistics group under “general
population” whites and Creoles, that is, all parts of the population except Indi-
ans and Chinese. It goes without saying that such a strategy has traditionally
found these groups voting along the same lines, despite what are quite obvi-
ously different interests. Boisson and Louit, in their study of the 1976 legisla-
tive elections on Mauritius write about this “general population”:

L’hétérogénéité se trouve surtout dans les statuts socio-économiques

puisqu’on y trouve aussi bien le sommet de l’économie sucrière, encore
solidement tenu par les franco-mauriciens, que les catégories socio-
économiques les plus modestes: pêcheurs, manœuvres et dockers
“créoles.” Entre les deux extrêmes s’étend une succession quasi-continue
de statuts sociaux, avec cependant une partie importante, proportion-
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 59

nellement, de membres de la fonction publique, à tous les échelons et en

concurrence assez directe avec les membres de la communauté hindoue,
plus rarement jusqu’ici, de la communauté musulmane. La population
générale fournit le gros de l’électorat du Parti mauricien. L’évolution
économique, l’hétérogénéité des statuts économiques remettent en cause cepen-
dant cette orientation assez conservatrice. [my emphases] (17)
[Heterogeneity is found in socioeconomic status because one finds the
height of the sugar economy still firmly in the hands of the Franco-Mau-
ritians, than in the more modest socioeconomic categories: Creole fish-
ermen, laborers, and dockers. Between these extremes there is an almost
continuous succession of social statuses, albeit with an important part,
proportionally, of members of the public service, at all levels and in direct
correlation with members of the Hindu community, and more rarely until
now, with the Muslim community. The general population provides the
majority of the electorate of the Parti mauricien. Economic development,
the heterogeneity of economic standing, however, does question this rather con-
servative orientation].

For Etienne Balibar “[t]he category of immigration structures discourses and

behaviours, but also, and this is no less important, it provides the racist—the
individual and the group as racist—with the illusion of a style of thinking, an
“object” that is to be known and explored, which is a fundamental factor of ‘self-
consciousness’” [emphasis in original] (221). While Balibar is referring to
hexagonal France, I extend this point to the group identities, which are
formed alongside categories generated by immigration controls by the colo-
nial administration in Mauritius. Arriving immigrants were constantly cate-
gorized based on origin. Subsequently, colonial and then postcolonial gov-
ernment statistics generated adhesion along these lines in postindependent
Mauritius. Political representation continues to be viewed through such cat-
egories (Indian, Hindu/Muslim, White or French allies under General Pop-
ulation, and Chinese). A “racist” approach pervades the very thought about
identity: by providing, in Balibar’s terms, certain “objects” such as Chinese,
Indian, etc., to be “known and explored” especially during colonialism—and
later reclaimed by groups and individuals themselves. Balibar continues to
note, however, that an ambiguity arises because “what we have here is not the
illusion of thinking, but rather effective thinking upon an illusory object.
Whoever classifies thinks, and whoever thinks exists. As it happens here,
whoever classifies exists collectively. Or rather—and here again we must
make a correction—causes to exist in practice that illusion that is collectivity
based on the similitude of its members” [emphasis in original] (Balibar 221).
The various colonial, and then national, ethnic and racial categorisa-
tions generated—or at least participated in the generation of—these groups,
60 Hybridity

which have an effective presence today. The “illusion” of ethnic collectivities

was enabled by well over a century’s worth of constant classification and lived
on in quotas in the representational system of government. How can one
begin to articulate a vocabulary of radical hybridity when the entire society is
pervaded with one that is structured and universally understood along racial
lines? Such an understanding is a legacy of the colonial history of the region.
Note, for example, a 1929 University of Paris doctoral dissertation by a Réu-
nionese student:

Les Africains sont très robustes, mais livrés à eux-mêmes, ils ne rendent
pas les services qu’on pouvait attendre [. . .] [ils] se mêlent volontiers à la
population du pays [. . .]
Les Indiens constituent une bonne main-d’œuvre; souples et plus intelli-
gents que les nègres [. . .], mais ils n’ont pas la force de l’Africain; [ils] ne
se mêlent qu’au bout d’un certain nombre d’années à la population.
Les Chinois [. . .], ont un tempérament essentiellement mercantile, ils
s’adonnent plutôt au commerce de détail; les Malgaches eux, font preuve
avant tout d’un grand esprit d’indépendance. (Champdemerle 39–40)

The Africans are very robust, but left to themselves, they don’t carry out
the services that one could expect [. . .] [they] mingle freely with the pop-
ulation of the country [. . .]
The Indians constitute a good labor power; they are supple and more
intelligent than the Negroes [. . .], but they don’t have the strength of the
African; [they] only mingle with the population after a certain number of
years.
The Chinese [. . .] have an essentially mercantile temperament, they
devote themselves to small business; as for the Malagasies, they display a
strong spirit of independence.

Speakers of French endowed with legitimacy are those who can also
claim “whiteness.” At the same time Creole language became symbolically
linked on the scene of Mauritian politics to the so-called Creole population,
that is, those who can be “racially” traced to African origins, in some “blood
ratio,” however small. Although this is the description of the “Creole” group
derived by elimination within the General Population as defined officially, it
should be remembered that early Indian immigrants (especially Tamils) also
sometimes form part of this group. The amorphous “Creole” group, however,
has historically rejected this link and allied with the French cause. Likewise
the Indian population constantly seeks to distinguish itself from and posit
itself as superior to Creoles. The Creole population is less likely to reclaim
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 61

Creole (language), preferring to use French as its language of identity, while

in general considering itself superior to Indians. The actual use of Creole,
paradoxically, has little to do with these language/identity “claims.”
In Carl de Souza’s novel La Maison qui marchait vers le large, which tack-
les the interactions of the various groups in Mauritius with humor, warmth,
and severity at once, Mme Céline, one of the elderly M. Daronville’s early
Creole maids who could not put up with him (and eventually quits) explains:
“En plus d’être un malade anormalement exigeant, il la chargeait de tâches
humiliantes ‘qu‘une Indienne refuserait de faire’” (37) [my emphases]. [On top
of being an extraordinarily demanding invalid, he gave her humiliating tasks
that even an Indian (maid) would refuse to do]. First, this puts Indians below
Creoles in the hierarchy; but more importantly, it excludes Indians from the
Creole population. This is how things function for the most part, by a dis-
avowal (from both the Creole and the Indian sides) of any possible overlap,
real or symbolic, between these groups. All this while there is a simultaneous
denial of the real existence of the Creole group itself; their distinction from
Indians (and Chinese) is suggestive of an inclusion with the “French”—or, at
least a desire for it. The relationship of those of identifiable mixed-blood with
the whites has evolved since the time of Patrick Beaton, who was mentioned
earlier. This man of the church, who was stationed in Mauritius for five years
under the British government, notes the animosity between Creoles and
whites. According to him, the local government and the press constantly exac-
erbated the poor relations between them. His remark that “the coloured pop-
ulation are far more ambitious of social than of political equality” (see 99)
uncannily echoes the study, about a century later, by Boisson and Louit, as we
have seen earlier, who come to the conclusion that Creoles align themselves
to the voting patterns of whites (that they aspire to be) rather than the major-
ity of Indians (with whom they share real interests).
Telling the story of early Indian immigration to Mauritius, K. Haza-
reesingh, director of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute (MGI), longtime promi-
nent member of the influential Indian Cultural Association, as well as an
active member of Ramgoolam’s government of the newly independent Mau-
ritius during his lifetime, writes: “Labourdonnais [the Governer of Mauritius
1735–47] imported slaves from Madagascar for agricultural work, but they
proved to be temperamentally unsuited to it, and he looked to India [. . .].”
The Indian artisans are described by Baron Grant, and cited by Hazareesingh,
as having “features of Europeans” (Hazareesingh 2). Even though this is a
citation (of Grant) by Hazareesingh, the statement about the closeness of
Indians to Europeans juxtaposed with the one regarding the unsuitability of
Malagasy slaves, clearly attempts to set the Indian community in a superior
62 Hybridity

position in comparison with the Malagasies. This functions in the same way as
Nathalie Melas’ description, in her discussion of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin,
White Masks, of how identity in nationalist discourse is often presented as a “dif-
ference from difference”: a distancing from the rest in the space of the nation,
through a closer resemblance to the colonial ideal.7 Here, Indians are different
from what is different from the white/French (i.e., here, Malagasies)—they are
thus closer to the white/French. This general preoccupation with comparative
superiority between groups is also noted, in a rather harsh moment, by the Mau-
ritian literary critic, Jean-Georges Prosper, who characterizes the Mauritian as
being more interested in appearances than in being (see Histoire 11).
Admiration for the African slave “as ancestor” becomes impossible in
any kind of official discourse. Mauritius became an independent nation in
1968. Now the prime minister of independent Mauritius, Sir Seewoosagar
Ramgoolam, speaking on this historic occasion of independence, pronounced:

As we open a new chapter of our history we shall always remember that

we are the inheritors of a great tradition which is vested in the very his-
tory of our land. The daring and valour of our seamen, the creative imag-
ination of the early colonisers, who included men and women from all
continents, the hardy patience of those legions of workers whose efforts
have enabled us to reach our present position, the respect which we have
always shown for democratic principles, our love for justice and liberty,
these will be the guiding lights of our national policy. (129)

In this quotation, he is at pains to give recognition to the different groups on

the island and suggests their harmonious implication in the new nation
through shared ideals (democracy, justice, and liberty). In presenting the new
nation as the canvas on which different histories have been drawn, the prime
minister evokes the workers (the image in Mauritius becomes, indisputably,
that of the quintessential Indian), the seamen (a rather vague idea that could
suggest the precolonial European traders, or even those Arabs who passed by
before settlement and colony had been established), and he even includes the
“creative imagination of the early colonisers.” Silenced here are clearly the later
colonizers under whom full-fledged slavery became an institution, and the
slaves themselves. Talk of slavery is repressed as far as possible on this island,
where the current majority of the population is the far from homogenous
group of Indian origin (well over 60 percent) from where various strategically
positioned claims of Indianness have come.
The figure of the Indian worker as the ideal symbol for “Mauritianism”
slips very easily into political rhetoric. In 1970, Indira Gandhi (then Prime
Minister of India) laid the foundation stone for the Mahatma Gandhi Insti-
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 63

tute in Moka, Mauritius. This institute received funds from India, and Indira
Gandhi returned in 1976 to inaugurate its opening. Mahatma Gandhi him-
self becomes the perfect symbol in the Indo-Mauritian prime minister’s polit-
ical rhetoric, for he is seen, in the manner of this new nation itself, as the link
between Africa and Asia. Like the Indian, Gandhi, Ramgoolam would have
us believe, Mauritian Indianness is truly a “thatness,” which can encompass all
oppressed sections of the society:

It is a historical fact that the foundations of Gandhiji’s work were laid in

Africa when he took up the cause not only of overseas Indians but of all
who suffered the indignities of oppression and servitude. It is pleasant to
be able to recall this morning that in his first and perhaps greatest cam-
paign of Satyagraha in South Africa, Gandhiji was supported by many of
our own people who had gone to South Africa from Mauritius. It was
surely in keeping with his universal outlook of brotherhood that he
received the cooperation of Africans, Chinese and Europeans. Satyagraha
was made possible by the efforts and collaboration of people of several
different races, all of them represented so harmoniously in our island
society.
The philosophy Gandhiji took back to India was enriched by the experi-
ence he had of suffering and hardship in the pursuit of truth. He came to
represent not only his fellow Indians but all those who laboured under
the yoke of oppression and injustice. . . . (123–24)

In this way, it seems that, in keeping with other types of visible nationalist dis-
courses from Mauritius, the prime minister’s speech makes a comparison
between the new Mauritian nation and that most recognizable emblematic
Indian freedom fighter. Like Gandhi, Ramgoolam suggests, Mauritius draws
together Africa and Asia; like Gandhi, the Indian symbol truly embodies the
efforts of struggle for independence carried out by the different peoples of
Mauritius.
Yet, it would be unfair to say that the prime minister completely
neglects Africa as an entity. He clearly understood the importance of the
African continent and the implication of Mauritius as one of the new nations
in the region (he even served as president of the Organisation of African
Unity). At the ceremony to lay the foundation stone of the School for Mau-
ritian, African and Asian Studies, which is part of the Mahatma Gandhi
Institute, he is at pains to emphasize this task:

In our quest for the discovery of Africa we will have no preconceived

ideas and our object will be to find the basic values, the glorious achieve-
ments of the newly independent states. We are interested in the past as
64 Hybridity

well as the present. We wish to know all that has gone into the making
of their great civilizations. We wish to know what ancient Egypt and
ancient Ghana and other civilisations of Africa have given to the world
in the development of astronomy. The arts and the skills of social organ-
isation. Also we wish to discover contemporary Africa, virile and ready to
embark upon new programmes of economic expansion and of experiment
in new forms of government and new forms of artistic expression. (120)

Still, delving into an African past would thus involve, as we see from the
above quotation, learning about the civilizations of Africa’s past much more
than a retracing of the path that brought Africans to Mauritius and thus an
examination of this aspect of Mauritius’s past. There is scant place for an
articulation of slavery in most discourses that engage the question of a
“Mauritianism.”
In 1965, shortly before independence, the Mauritian writer, Marcel
Cabon published a short novel entitled Namasté. The title, which is a dis-
cernibly Indian salutation, and the name of the protagonist, Ram, conjure
up Indianness with unsurpassable authority. The novel, among other
things, describes the daily life of a primarily “Indian” Mauritian village.
Indianness, invoked as we saw by Ramgoolam through the figure of the
Mahatma (who, incidentally, visited Mauritius in 1901), also figures promi-
nently in the presentation of this text by a visibly Creole author, whose
engagement with Indians goes beyond an interest in the “people.” Marcel
Cabon, according to Aslakha Callikan-Proag, a researcher at the Mahatma
Gandhi institute who wrote the preface to the 1981 edition of his book,
was “un des pionniers d’un mauricianisme authentique” [one of the pio-
neers of an authentic Mauritianism]. His work, she continues, “indique la
voie à suivre pour sortir des sentiers battus et atteindre le but suprême: une
Entité Mauricienne” [shows the path to be followed if we want to escape
from the beaten track and attain the supreme goal: a Mauritian Entity].
This follows from the possibility for Indians, or Indianness, to somehow
convey Mauritianness. However, Callikan-Proag does concede that spaces
assumed to be “Indian” often include other groups: “Le potentiel de poésie
que renferment ces villages mauriciens—dits “indiens” mais où se côtoient
malgré tout différentes communautés—va de pair avec la dure réalité de
leurs souffrances” (1) [The poetic potential contained in these Mauritian
villages—that are termed “Indian,” but where, in reality, all the different
communities rub shoulders—is inseparable from the stark reality of their
suffering].
In a move that is strikingly similar to the prime minister’s comparison
of Gandhi and Mauritius itself, the author of the preface likens this author of
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 65

Namasté, Marcel Cabon (of Malagasy origin), to Abhimanyu Unnuth, the

contemporary and recognizably Indo-Mauritian author who has published in
Hindi and who has been edited with success in India:
Dans la même lignée se présente à notre esprit un autre écrivain
mauricien au plein sens du terme: Abhimanyu Unnuth. D’expression
hindi, lui aussi vit les problèmes qu’il pose dans son œuvre; il les vit même
plus intensément que Cabon en ce qui concerne les indiens vu sa propre
origine. . . . Tous deux . . . ont porté et portent toujours le flambeau d’un
vrai mauricianisme, incarnant en même temps la lutte et les aspirations
des classes labourieuses. [my emphases] (2)
[In the same tradition comes to mind another author who is Mauritian
in the strong sense of the term: Abhimanyu Unnuth. Writing in Hindi,
he too lives the problems that he addresses in his work; he lives them
even more intensely than Cabon with regard to the Indians, given his ori-
gin. . . . Both these writers . . . carried and still carry the flame of a true
Mauritianism, incarnating at the same time the struggles and aspirations
of the labouring classes].

Once again, the authenticity of the Indian experience within the national
sphere surreptitiously becomes the point of departure. The suggestion is, then,
the adequacy of Indianness to account for Mauritianness tout court in a sort of
synecdochy not at all uncommon in prominent nationalist discourse. In Cal-
likan-Proag’s presentation, Cabon and Unnuth reach a true Mauritianism by
way of Indianness—the former by the “Indian” inspiration and content of his
work and the latter by virtue of his “Indian” origin and the experience it
implies. For Thomas H. Eriksen, the anthropologist who has studied Maurit-
ian society in detail, “[t]he culturally homogenizing tendencies of nationalism
and globalization should be counteracted through institutional arrangements
which secure some form of ethnic autonomy and encourage cultural plural-
ism” (Communicating 49). In the history of Mauritian politics, this cultural
pluralism has played out in the electoral strategies with the rhetoric being that
of ethnic autonomy and cultural pluralism.8 As a result, there has been a
greater tendency toward coalitions around ossified notions of ethnicity and a
cultural pluralism that continues to be conceived in the terms inherited from
the institution of colonialism in Mauritius.
Language, as follows from the earlier discussion of this question,
becomes a political tool that can manipulate questions of identity for groups
vying for greater power. Mauritius, as a postcolonial nation, is certainly not
unique with regard to the volatility around the issue of language. Still the for-
mation of group identities around language mascots in a cultural affiliation
that was not necessarily linked to any competence in the language is peculiar
66 Hybridity

to this situation. Indians and Chinese from Mauritius have been quick to
establish links with the peninsula and China, respectively, via language. Mau-
ritius was, for example, notably represented at the World Hindi Convention
held in Nagpur, India in the early seventies; Mauritius itself was the site for
its second convention. Teachers of Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, Urdu, Marathi, and
Chinese were appointed, several coming from India and China, while English
and French remained the main languages of education. Even if Creole is the
undisputed lingua franca, it enjoys no official status. In fact, as recently as in
1982, when the radical MMM (mouvement militant mauricien) wanted to
introduce Creole as the national language, the unified protest came from
almost all segments of the population.
Some discourses around this protest were linked to ethnicity. Claims
were made that since Creole “belonged to” the Creole (i.e., mixed) population,
that section of the population would be privileged in the nation. The fact that
everyone spoke and speaks this language, regardless of claimed ethnicity, could
not defeat this symbolic relation between ethnicity and language. Creoles
themselves objected, preferring the more international and prestigious French.
In fact, many working-class Creoles and Indians were against rendering offi-
cial the only language they themselves knew well. Lionnet explains that:

Mauritians of Indian origin [. . .] are a numerical majority in Mauritius.

Among them, the urban educated elite speak both French and English as
well as Hindi or Tamil, whereas the rural Indians are generally bilingual in
Bhojpuri and Creole. The white or mixed Mauritian minorities [to be read
“mulâtres”], on the other hand, speak Creole, French, and English, and take
pride in the fact that it is this very diversity of linguistic ability that makes
Mauritius both unique and a truly nonhegemonic nation.” (Créolité 105)

Yet these minorities can indeed be seen as constituting a hegemonic group

within the nation, because of their legitimacy in speaking the language of
prestige, French, and the advantage (“diversity of linguistic ability”) they have,
given the specific language choices available to most of them. Once again,
while the “Indian” space and the space of the “white or mixed minorities” are
clearly demarcated, no space is envisioned for the “less mixed” (more obvi-
ously African) minority. Indeed, getting out of this overworked racial identi-
fication could augur a Creole-speaking majority group of Mauritians, which
would not, in fact, be marked by ethnic categories.
Returning once more to Ramgoolam’s political discourse, Africanness
enters it precariously and is treated delicately by him. The prime minister, on
the occasion of the inauguration of the School of Mauritian, African and
Asian Studies noted:
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 67

Our people are a mixture of the people of Africa and Asia. Our inheri-
tance is evident in our whole personality. Because the immigration from
India was more recent than the arrival of the people from Africa we have
preserved much more of our traditional ways, in our dress, in our speech,
in our music and literature. Our African inheritance was too long
neglected and a conscious effort must now be made to rediscover it and
bring it to the light of day. There are African words in our Creole speech;
there are African traditions, half-buried in our folk-tales, and there are
African rhythms in our dance, the Sega (119).

Despite these gestures to “Africanness,” Ramgoolam’s speech glosses over

slavery and does not “bring it to the light of day”! The fact of having preserved
“Indianness” is attributed to the more recent arrival of Indians. The conditions
under which Africans lost their ways under slavery is once again left out. The
government, after independence, followed (British) colonial practice, and rec-
ognized four distinct ethnic groups: Hindus (55 percent), Muslims (16 per-
cent), Chinese (3 percent), General Population (26 percent). This last category
has been described by Boisson and Louit in their work on Mauritian politics,
as the most diverse. It includes “pure” Europeans (read whites), the least
“racially” mixed people of African or Malagasy descent (called Creoles), and
different “métis” or “mixed-bloods.” “General Population” actually implies all
sections of the population excluding Asians, and the motley group has histor-
ically rallied around issues that became articulated through the cause of the
French language illustrated so well by Boisson and Louit. The Creole popu-
lation has not found a niche in the collective memory, as the prime minister’s
Independence Day speech testifies. There is no space to resurrect the African
or Malagasy slave. The reticence shown in the Independence Day speech
examined earlier is protracted here in a celebration of Africanness that can be
no more than a token gesture without its being granted a historicity as are
other “inheritence[s]” of the Mauritian “personality.”
When viewed historically, much of the General Population (excluding
the so-called whites) includes descendants of the illegitimate offspring of the
colonialists with slaves. Their current existence is rarely addressed historically
and materially. That is to say, illegitimate children (mostly of white masters
and black slave women) were generally not allowed to inherit land, titles, or
property. Indians, on the contrary, did manage to inherit land from their
indentured ancestors, as they were able, with much hardship, to purchase plots
of the land on which they toiled. The illegitimate offspring of whites and
slaves, most often received no land or wealth but sometimes did receive, as was
the case in various other colonies, a European education. They also partici-
pated, to some degree, in that culture, acquiring, at that time, greater skills in
68 Hybridity

French in general than the Indians had the opportunity to do. This popula-
tion gradually moved into the administration where some “passed” for white.
As a result, assimilation had greater expediency, in their case, and permitted
them entry into some areas formerly restricted to whites. Those who did not
gain such access into the “white” areas, however, continued to ally with those
who could and with the whites themselves. There was no alternative space,
no real Creole space that might articulate the in-betweenness of this part of
the population, while their entry into the vast (and equally varied) “Indian”
spaces was neither desired nor desirable from both the (not!) Creole and
Indian perspectives.
Returning to the prime minister’s speech (cited above), what he fails to
address—and there is a silence on the part of all sections on this subject—is
the conditions in the case of early African immigrants to Mauritius under
slavery. Such conditions did not permit a preservation of speech, clothes, etc.
The mythical ties with the African continent are hardly accessed, most Cre-
oles and “métis” still preferring to be more French or “Frenchified.” Those who
are “less creolized” racially and, ironically (as well as euphemistically consid-
ering the color spectrum as set up in Mauritius), called Creoles are perceived
as having darker skin. There is no monumental “Gandhian” figure that links
Mauritius with Africa in the way it is linked to India in Ramgoolam’s speech,
for example. A notable counter discourse is, of course, produced by Edouard
Maunick, the Mauritian poet and, as his poem goes, “nègre de préférence”
[negro by choice].
Nation, as Homi Bhabha points out, becomes “a space that is internally
marked by cultural difference and the heterogenous histories of contending
peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations” (Nation and
Narration 299). I have discussed how, in Mauritius, language functions as a
marker of difference within the nation and examined the way African heritage
is elided in the negotiation of cultural difference in Mauritius. This latter eli-
sion creates a constant tension that is registered in discourses of/about the
nation. It is furthermore cooperative with the impossibility for this heritage to
be linked symbolically to a language, as are other heritages in political dis-
course on the Mauritian national scene. It also projects an impossible space—
the space of the Creole—whose “aridity,” I propose, is both a consequence of
a lack of an ethnic language marker and also the cause that prevents the claim-
ing of an ethnic language marker. The difficulty of claiming Creole as an eth-
nic marker arises, first because virtually all Mauritians speak Creole. It there-
fore loses any power of exclusivity to demarcate an ethnicity. Second, there is
a negative value ascribed to Creole almost univocally by all sections as seen in
the response to officially recognize this language. By the same token, although
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 69

a large portion of Indo-Mauritians might speak French, I offer that their use
of French is not regarded as sufficiently legitimate and therefore forecloses
their identification with those who are seen as legitimate speakers of French.
Given this position of Creole, and, simultaneously, the position of “eth-
nifying” Indian languages and Chinese and even French, it is quite evident
that the lack of any kind of functioning for an African language in Mauritius
supports the elision of things African. The impossibility of this connection in
the case of “Africans” (who cannot even be named in this way) therefore ren-
ders untenable the formation of such a group. In its contingency, Africanness
is “outside the sentence” in Bhabha’s terms. If Bhabha writes that it is outside
the sentence that he wants to explore “the question of agency, as it emerges in
relation to the indeterminate and the contingent[,]” (Location 182) it is in the
inarticulated (and even invisible) that he locates agency. How this agency is
actualized remains less evident. How does the unnamed and unnameable, and
therefore entirely contingent, “African” become a subject of his/her history?
The fate of the Mauritian nation (and perhaps all nations) is doomed if
Ernest Renan was correct when he pronounced that:

[a] nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are
but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past,
one in the present. [. . .] To have common glories in the past and to have a
common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to
perform still more—these are the essential conditions for being a people. [my
emphases] (19)

What today constitutes the Mauritian nation consists of a population

including groups that have historically had vastly different interests. The
great deeds of one group prove to be the damnation of another; the glories of
one being the shame of the other. On this point, Lionnet reminds us that
“[i]ts multiracial society was faced with the burdens of two centuries of col-
onization first by the French, then by the English, whereas its survival has
been ensured by the labour of Indian and black populations who were not
natives either” (“Créolité” 213). On one hand, the Creole population denies
its own historicity and connection to slave labor, thus rendering impossible
any group identity based on this. On the other hand, the lack of Africanness
that arises from an impracticable “ethnification” toward Frenchness through
language by Creoles and such a disavowal of its historicity that I have shown
can be productively viewed. Such a productive view would regard this
African space, in all its impossibility within Mauritian society, as neverthe-
less generating a site from which the rather rigid lines of identity patterns—
that one tends to replicate even in analyses—can be disrupted. This lack and
70 Hybridity

disavowal bear within them the possibility of thinking “less [of ] a question
of mixed identity d’identité métissée [sic] than of the mestizaje of identity
itself, of any identity” (Nancy 123).
It is evident from the above remarks that the difficulty of articulating
Africanness in Mauritius is a very specific problematic that has to do with the
particular history of Africans in Mauritius and especially with their relations
with other groups. Therefore, it would follow that the possibility to general-
ize these analyses to other situations of postcoloniality is limited. In the
Mauritian context, because the troubled idea of Africanness can be traced to
the lack of a language “mascot,” it can reopen the issue of the different
emblematic languages in their narrow functioning with the corresponding
ethnic group. An engagement with this problem also consistently reveals the
universality of Creole (language) and shows up various other language-eth-
nic affiliations to be imaginative and important links to the country of origin
from a situation of diaspora. Such affiliations are, however, not usually con-
ducive to relationality or creolization in the new land. The lack of African-
ness can thus weaken the “racist” thinking of identity Balibar criticizes in the
context of politics and alliances. It can make room for a more realistic delib-
eration of the interests of groups and individuals in their current functioning
within Mauritian society and their aspirations for themselves. What I mean
is that in rethinking Africanness, groupings within Mauritian society exercise
a greater engagement with creolization or relationality in the new land in lieu
of the rather obsessive diasporic fantasy (toward India, China, or even
France, and its lack in the case of an African diaspora) that has pervaded
nationalist discourse.

Contemporary Mauritian Politics:

Who Speaks for African Pasts?

The Indian prime minister’s visit to Mauritius in April 2005 and the question
of monetary retribution to descendants of slaves, which had received interna-
tional attention in the form of the United Nation’s 2002 statement on this
issue, are two events that position Mauritius as part of the Indian and African
diaspora respectively. For Paul Gilroy, diaspora “[. . .] is a concept that prob-
lematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging. It disrupts the
fundamental power of territory to determine identity by breaking the simple
sequence of explanatory links between place, location, and consciousness. It
destroys the naïve invocation of common memory as the basis of particularity
in a similar fashion by drawing attention to the contingent political dynamics
of commemoration” (Gilroy Between Camps 123). These words from Gilroy
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 71

invoke hybridity as creolization rather than diaspora (although the latter is

Gilroy’s preferred term) in the sense given to these two terms in chapter 1. By
examining some of the ways in which these two events explicitly call forth a
hybrid definition of the Mauritian people, I show that the conception of this
“plural” nation is refashioned by activating both the question of common
memory and the politics of identification. Gilroy’s conception of the Black
Atlantic seeks “to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the
constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (Black Atlantic 19). Here I
explore how such a Black Atlantic double consciousness of diaspora and cre-
olization plays out in Mauritius. The different groups that comprise the plu-
rality of Mauritius are implicated in the analyses that follow, although we will
be most specifically concerned with this nation’s “African” and “Indian” past
and present.
Paul Bérenger, the first prime minister of non-Indian origin to be
elected since Mauritian independence in 1968, was chastized for intending to
manipulate the imminent arrival of Manmohan Singh, his Indian counter-
part, in order to garner support for himself among the Indo-Mauritians, who
form more than 60 percent of the Mauritian electorate. An Indian journalist
in Calcutta (India) reported: “Singh [. . .] finds himself unwittingly caught in
the vortex of the island’s politics” (Ramaseshan 1). Even though it is obvious
that the relatively large size of the Indian population makes the latter visible
and allows “Indianness” to play a dominant role in public discourse,9 other his-
torical factors explain Bérenger’s complex position vis-à-vis his electorate and
underscore a more general aspect of public discourse in Mauritius, namely, the
uneasy position of “Africanness.”
The official emancipation of slavery (1835 for Mauritius) spurred mas-
sive Indian immigration to replace slave labor in the fields while Chinese
immigrants hailed primarily from the merchant class. Indo-Mauritians are
primarily Hindus and Muslims, but also include groups that cohere around
language and ethnicity, such as Tamils, Telugus, or Gujaratis. Such linkages
between categories of immigrants based on their region of origin and their
role in the new colony are not completely stable, as noted. Still, at the time of
Mauritian independence in 1968 and in the discussions regarding representa-
tion that preceded it, whites were historically linked to the colonizers, and
accounted for most plantation owners. Those of mixed-blood (usually black
and white) were seen as descendants of the offspring of slaves and their white
masters and refered to as métis or mulâtres, while those of African ancestry,
identified by dark skin and “African appearance,” were called Creoles and
linked to the mixed-blood or métis group and to the white population
through a cultural alliance, often characterized by the use of and attachment
72 Hybridity

to the French language.10 Since independence, this “plural” nation has experi-
enced a major recession following a slump in sugar prices and then made a
comeback with a diversified economy relying on an educated workforce, tax-
free havens, and a boom in textile and technology-related industries.
For electoral purposes, as we have seen, whites, métis, and Creoles make
up what is called the “General population,” while other categories including
Indians and Chinese are registered separately. These categories become sig-
nificant, and almost unavoidable, as representation of the electorate is under-
stood in these terms.11
The road leading up to the September 2005 Mauritian elections was not
smooth for the incumbent. Through a complex mechanism, ethnic groups are
identified as requiring protection in the electoral process, and then accorded
seats. This “best-losers” system was put in place to ensure equal representation
to all visible “ethnic” groups of the island as the electoral process was being
worked out, even prior to independence. The coalition currently in power in
Mauritius has proposed to have this “best-loser” system additionally extended to
women and allotted them seven of its “best-loser” seats. Women of different
convictions expressed their dissatisfaction with this hasty effort to include them
in active Mauritian politics. As Pauline Etienne reports, not only do women
aspire to increase their visibility from the current 4 percent (or the proposed 8
percent in this proposal), but they refuse to be considered “second-class citi-
zens,” as the system of “best-losers” might imply (2). This adds greatly to the
complexity in the process of public representation in Mauritius, with a gender
group now becoming increasingly vocal alongside the existing ethnic groups.
Paul Bérenger, a visibly white Franco-Mauritian, belongs to the small
elite 3 percent minority of the total population. His political success has
depended on, among other things, massive support from a majority of the
electorate that is identified as Indo-Mauritian. It is this appeal that was high-
lighted in the questions raised by the Mauritian press regarding the Indian
prime minister’s visit. According to K. Venugopal of the Hindu (an Indian
newspaper), Manmohan Singh’s visit has a strictly economic objective, namely
to increase commercial exchange through a treaty between the two nations.
Mr. Singh inaugurated various sites during the course of his visit, including a
cybertower, financed in large part by Indian companies. This inauguration was
to be suggestive of the closer ties with regard to information technology that
the two nations are seeking. Bérenger’s position as the incumbent seeking
reelection forces him into a web of relations with his potential voters and is
reminiscent of the fact that “India” for Mauritians cannot simply function as
the “basis for particularity” through common memory for a single group, but
is also part of the “contingent political dynamics of commemoration” (Gilroy
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 73

Between Camps 123 cited earlier). The Indian premier’s visit, then, implicated
the Indianness of Mauritius, the Frenchness of its prime minister, and in this
manner, called up other ethnic, racial, and cultural “aspects” of Mauritian soci-
ety. But the visit also simultaneously established a more dialectical position
between this nation’s past and its present, situating it as diasporic rather than
simply pluralistic.
The increased recognition of “oriential” languages and the use of lan-
guage as an ethnic marker further point to the ease with which Indianness has
entered public discourse in Mauritius. We have seen how the institutionaliza-
tion of surveys regarding language affiliation and use from the 1930s onward
as well as the subsequent inclusion of “oriental” languages in the curriculum
have given the language/ethnic marker greater “reality.” As we noted, no
African language has ever been taught in the public curriculum. Likewise,
though virtually all Mauritians speak and understand Mauritian Creole and
the fact that Bérenger’s party, the mouvement militant mauricien (MMM),
supported its official recognition in the 1970s and 1980s, most of the popula-
tion has been opposed to giving it any official credence.12 Mauritian Creole is
seen as not sufficiently international or prestigious to be a national language
but it is also subliminally attached to the “Creoles” as a demographic group. If
whites are perceived in Mauritian culture as the legitimate speakers of French,
the tendency of most Mauritians is to aspire to speak this language with ease
and authority. English functions as a language of prestige and international
use, although more recently it has become intertwined with independent
India’s adoption of English as its official language. Although we cannot dis-
cuss here all the ramifications of the language situation in Mauritius and its
connections to ethnicity, it is to be noted that while language became an offi-
cial way of “ethnification” for Mauritians of Asian descent, there has been no
comparable mechanism for ethnification in the case of “Africans,” an appella-
tion that is almost never heard in Mauritian public discourse. Today’s prime
minister, as any other public figure, engages this issue in his interactions with
his electorate.
Paul Bérenger is no newcomer to Mauritian politics. One of the found-
ing members of the radical MMM, Bérenger is also remembered for leading
the General Workers’ Federation to a general strike that practically crippled the
economy in 1979. This was a period of economic crisis for Mauritius, with the
country having to approach the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the
rupee being heavily devalued. During the 1982 elections, the Labour Party,
represented by the first prime minister of Mauritius, Sir Seewoosagar Ram-
goolam who is also known as the Father of the Nation, accused the MMM of
Libyan connections through the Muslim faction of the party. The MMM
74 Hybridity

swept the polls, winning 64 percent of the vote with its alliance with the self-
proclaimed Hindu Parti Socialiste Mauricien.13 Paul Bérenger served as finance
minister following this election. In 1995 he became deputy prime minister to
Navin Ramgoolam’s Prime Ministership while Jugnauth led the opposition.
Despite these rapidly changing alliances, which might legitimately
make a voter cynical, Bérenger’s support by a fairly large section of the Indian
majority is now indisputable. Following the historic defeat of the Indian dom-
inated Labour Party in 1982, the new coalition government was soon beset by
its own problems, which came to a head in a rift between Anerood Jugnauth,
the prime minister and comember of the MMM, and Bérenger. New elections
were held in 1983, with Jugnauth garnering the support of a huge coalition of
various parties under the banner of the Alliance. Bérenger disregarded tradi-
tional Mauritian concerns with ethnicity, which would have entailed a more
proactive approach to ensure overt connections to all ethnic groups, and con-
tinued to lead the self-proclaimed nonsectarian MMM against this coalition.
Though defeated, he entered Parliament as the leader of the opposition
through the “best-loser” system mentioned before. In a reversal of fortunes
(for Bérenger’s future), the timely arrest of four members of Jugnauth’s
Alliance for drug trafficking in Amsterdam provided sufficient scandal to help
fuel the future 1991 win of the coalition formed by the MMM with Jug-
nauth’s mouvement socialiste mauricien (MSM)!
Bérenger’s election, in some ways, reclaims authorship of the MMM’s
slogan “Ene sel lepep, ène sel nasyon” [One people, one nation]. A white
Franco-Mauritian who can secure sufficient voters’ support in a small “plural”
country with a large Indian majority, Paul Bérenger can be seen as exemplify-
ing the spirit of the “nasyon” and its future. A more cynical view might see his
shifting loyalties, attributable to the different alliances he has made, as mere
opportunism. Nevertheless, any understanding of his victory has to contend
with the over-determined, communally understood Mauritian electorate.

Indian Representation: Historical Perspective

The question of Indian representation entered public discourse in Mauritius

well before independence. The misery of the Indian indentured laborer in
Mauritius and his lack of representation were documented as early as 1832 by
the lawyer Plevitz in the Petition of the Old Immigrants, which he addressed to
the King of England. The long list of petitions regarding beatings or dupery
led to the appointment of a Protector. The collusion of the overseers and the
proprietors to the detriment of the Indian laborers is also recorded in this
same document:
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 75

For each day in hospital [the Indian laborer] forfeits the pay of that day,
but for each day that he is absent from his work he forfeits two days’s [sic]
pay. The overseers are in the interest of the proprietor, and are unfortu-
nately but too often valued in proportion to the sum which they can
enable the proprietor to deduct from the wages of the Indian labourers.
Accordingly the labourers are frequently marked as absent when not
absent and stoppages are made from their wages for the noncompletion
of tasks almost impossible to accomplish or for other reasons invented by
the ingenuity or caprice of the overseers, who must adopt this means to
retain the favour of their employers and their situations. (22)

If not intentionally pernicious, the Protectors have also been noted to be just
unsuitable, as recorded in the Memorial presented by the Inhabitants of Mau-
ritius. Here, it is noted that the Protectors are often “strangers to the Colony
and unknown to its inhabitants, enjoy no public confidence, [. . .] are regarded
as enemies; and are consequently distrusted, shunned and hated” (15). A note
informs that “[o]ne of the Protectors discovered only after his landing in the
Mauritius, that he had forgot [sic] to learn French!” (15).
Historically, representation in island politics has been a charged issue for
all sections of the population. From 1810, when the British took over Mauri-
tius from the French, until 1831, the governor, who received direct orders
from the colonial administration in Britain, held complete power over all
aspects of the governance of this colony. Until 1881, the only input received
in decision making was from the officials named by the Governor himself.
Gradually, with much agitation from powerful sections of the French popula-
tion, concessions were made for greater representation of the French planters
and sugar barons.
When universal suffrage was being debated in the Legislative Council on
25 July 1950, most Indo-Mauritians were in favor of it. Their desire to be rep-
resented became incarnated in Seewoosagar Ramgoolam, who was to take over
as first prime minister of Mauritius.14 The linking of representation to ethnic
groups, however, caused some acrimonious exchanges on the issue of commu-
nalism during the 1950s debates on universal suffrage. Mr. Kœnig, a non-
Indian representative, remarked sarcastically in reaction to the ways in which
Indians began to anticipate their full-fledged entry into Mauritian politics on
the eve of independence: “When we are asking for posts in the Judicial Depart-
ment, we are Indo-Mauritians, but when we are asking for universal suffrage,
we are all Mauritians” (Mauritius Legislative Council 21). Although he
believes that “all representatives of all the communities living in this country
should have a share in the administration of the colony” (Mauritius Legislative
Council 20–21), he puts forth his views on universal suffrage in this manner:
76 Hybridity

My friends have found it extraordinary, and I agree with them, that in the
past with the old constitution, in spite of the fact that the white commu-
nity represented some 1.5% of the whole population, the general elec-
tions returned a great majority of white members in this house. Well, if
we are not careful, what will happen? What will happen in the future? If
we resort to universal suffrage, when we know the real results of the last
elections, with this suffrage which is not totally universal, it goes without
saying that the members of that community who were elected in the past
will be replaced by members of another single community in the future.
What about the past? Is it because in the past the overwhelming major-
ity represented only one community. That is the point. The point is,
being given the communalistic feelings of the mass of the population, we
are bound to be careful and see not only that the white community
should not be trempled down [sic] but that the other communities should
not be trampled down. (Mauritius Legislative Council 21)

Mr. Bissoondoyal, representing the “Indian” and quite specifically “Hindu”

side, retorts to this that “[w]e claim that it will not be reasonable to say that if
universal suffrage is granted, all the Hindus of Mauritius, because they are the
bulk of the population will vote for Hindu candidates, and that only Hindu
candidates will sit in this house, that they will entirely forget that there are
other communities living in this country [. . .]” (Mauritius Legislative Coun-
cil 22). Bissoondoyal further cites various examples of how Hindus can think
outside of their community and defend other constituents. He concludes that:

Now, if we were to go and look into the texts of the newspapers of

Mauritius, we would see that people are not communally driven. Thou-
sands of people of the Hindu community are not the subscribers of the
Hindu paper. They are the subscribers of the “Cernéen” and the
“Mauricien” and there are thousands of non Hindus who are not sub-
scribers of the “Mauricien” or the “Cernéen.” They are the subscribers
of the “Advance” and they buy the Hindu paper. These are the proofs
and the evidence to show us that the people of Mauritius are reasoning
in a far different way from that in which some members of this House
are trying to show us. It is because people are still believing in commu-
nalism that they see the shadow of it everywhere around them. (Mau-
ritius Legislative Council 24)

It is against this backdrop of over-determined communal vocabulary and

thinking that Bérenger’s election under the auspices of the MMM becomes
interesting and, indeed, remarkable. Koenig, a white Franco-Mauritian repre-
sentative, neglected an important aspect of Mauritian reality in his statement
that the one community that previously dominated the assembly in numbers
(i.e., the whites) would now be replaced by “members of another single com-
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 77

munity” (i.e., the Indians). This reality is that the latter group comprised, even
at that time, a formidable majority of the Mauritian population. A white
majority in the assembly indicated the domination of politics by a minority
group whereas the anticipated Indian majority would indicate acknowledg-
ment of such domination in the make-up of the Mauritian population itself.
The long fight waged by indentured Indians, whose offspring would form the
future majority of the Mauritian electorate, continues to fuel Mauritian Indi-
ans’ emotional investment in the electoral process. This idea of representation
remains central to the Indo-Mauritian psyche and Paul Bérenger does not
overlook this fact in contemporary Mauritian politics.

The Difficulty of Articulating Africanness

Representation was also central to the colonial planters, who constantly

opposed British control of the colony in various contexts, the most con-
tentious being that of slavery. From the 1810 takeover of the island by the
British, French planters enjoyed great freedom in terms of language and many
other administrative issues. Yet the question of slavery became a sore point in
their dealings with the British administration, which was keen to do away
with the practice, perhaps in an effort to maintain international credibility.
Somehow, slavery is less visible in all forms of public discourse in Mauritius.
Although it is true that slavery predates indenture, and that those who actu-
ally feel an emotional connection to the period and question of slavery
through ancestry is far smaller, this issue remains startlingly invisible, as we
have already seen. The question of representation, even as a bone of con-
tention, may have long remained inconceivable to this section of the popula-
tion historically—precisely because of the lack of power that characterized the
position of slaves. As it is noted in the official document of the Colonial
Archives as early as 1887, the infamous Code Noir deprived the slave of the
experience of his civil rights: he was stricken by an absolute inability to receive
any donation or inheritance; he could not appeal to the judicial system, be a
witness, play any public role, or participate in a private institution. Marriage
between slaves had to be by permission of the master, and children belonged
to the master of the mother. Marriage between blacks and whites was not per-
mitted and severely punished; priests were not allowed to preside over them
(Archives coloniales 14). This history, although cited in an official document,
is never officially summoned in any significant manner for today’s Mauritian
population.
The most notable discourse on slavery in Mauritius comes from the
French writer, Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, who published his Voyages à l’Ile de
78 Hybridity

France in 1773. In 1805, Thomi Pitot refuted Saint-Pierre’s published collec-

tion of observations. He was in his turn refuted by l’abbé Ducrocq who
denounced slavery and its heritage in the early twentieth century.15 Although
these texts are interesting in and of themselves, they are evoked here because
their very presence brings back the reality of slavery in a way that no other
available official discourse really does. In Pitot’s attack against Saint-Pierre, he
writes:

M. de Saint-Pierre s’indigne de la rigueur des châtiments infligés aux

esclaves: mais, a-t-il dit la vérité en donnant comme fréquents ces 50,
100, 200 coups de fouets? Non. La calomnie seule écrivit sous sa dictée
ces mensonges odieux . . . J’ai habité sept années la colonie; j’ai visité
beaucoup d’habitations et j’ai trouvé souvent plusieurs centaines de noirs
réunis, et jamais, je l’atteste, je n’ai vu infliger à un noir plus de 25 coups
de fouets. (154)
Mr. Saint-Pierre complains of the harshness of the punishments inflicted
upon slaves: but has he been truthful in citing as frequent these 50, 100,
200 lashes of the whip? No. It is only malicious gossip that gave rise to
these odious untruths written under his pen . . . I lived in the colony for
seven years; I visited many of the habitations and I often found several
hundreds of blacks together, and never, I swear, I never saw a black sub-
jected to more than 25 lashes of the whip.

This refutation of 50, 100, 200 whiplashes by confirming a maximum of 25

only serves to verify rather than deny the terrible treatment of slaves. Also
speaking of the Code Noir, Ducrocq cites the following article:

Voulons que les esclaves qui auront encouru les peines du fouet, de la fleur
de lys et des oreilles coupées soient jugés en dernier ressort par les juges
ordinaires et exécutés sans qu’il soit nécessaire que tel jugement soit con-
firmé par le Conseil supérieur, nonobstant le contenu de l’article 25 des
présentes qui n’aura lieu que pour les jugements portant condamnation à
mort ou de jarret coupé. (qtd in Saint-Pierre, Pitot, Ducroq 194)
It is necessary that slaves who will have undergone punishment by
whiplash, by branding and by severing their ears be judged as a last
resort by ordinary judges and that they be executed without it being nec-
essary that such a judgment be confirmed by the Superior Council,
notwithstanding the content of article 25 of this document which will
not occur except for judgments of death penalty or of cutting of the
hamstrings.

Ducrocq points out that these ordinary judges were most often friends and
acquaintances of the owners. “Le misérable, condamné sans recours, n’avait
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 79

donc aucune aide à attendre en ce monde. Il était absolument à la merci de

son maître” (Saint-Pierre, Pitot, Ducroq 194) [The wretched one, con-
demned without recourse, therefore had no help in waiting in this world. He
was completely at the mercy of his master]. A return to these historical texts
does not serve here to provide a more accurate account of slavery in Mauri-
tius—a task opened by Karl Noël’s 1991 publication16—but rather to draw
attention to the manner in which Africans, and slaves in particular, entered
public discourse in mediated, indeed mitigated ways, as this occurs in the
quotation from Pitot. There is some continuity between the Protector’s inad-
equacy as a defender of Indians’ interests and the efforts of Indians to gain
credible and satisfactory representation. However, there is no such continu-
ity from the supposed intent of the Code Noir to “protect” slaves to any
mechanism of representation of descendants of slaves. Instead, they are
grouped with (and ally with) the white population. This could be seen as a
very positive development in the postcolony insofar as former masters and
slaves would require no further mediation. In reality, the wide disparities in
income, status, and representation between white Mauritians and “Creoles”
(or their perceivably black counterparts) give the lie to such an interpretation.
It is implausible, then, to consider as productive this lack of “ethnification” in
the case of “Africans” in Mauritius.
The presence, today, of various languages (French, English, Hindi,
Mandarin, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, for example) in Mauritius pro-
vides a forum for representation within Mauritian culture of a history and a
link to something greater than, and outside of, the colonial structure. No
African language is inscribed in the Mauritian educational system in the way
these other languages have been promoted, to different degrees, of course. Yet
it is not always the case that the Indian languages in question were widely spo-
ken in the island before their introduction into the system. This move was one
that acknowledged a particular history and provided a vehicle for the devel-
opment of an “ethnic” identity, which, by virtue of appearing in the idiom of
the “cultural” escaped being a racial nomination derived so directly through
colonial purpose. In the recent electoral history of Mauritius, those of African
descent have tended to ally themselves with the small French minority. The
term “Creole” to denote this population can also be seen positively because it
previously referred to whites born in the colony: such interchangeability of the
term could suggest that the previous difference in situation and signification
between whites and blacks no longer counts. At the same time, the lack of any
“African” referents as symbolic landmarks for this group, which for electoral
purposes is considered no different from whites (within the category of “gen-
eral population” beginning from the period prior to independence), seems
80 Hybridity

artificially construed. In other terms, it is surprising that a common history of

labor in the plantations, albeit under different circumstances, between
Africans and Indians who came to Mauritius should not link their descen-
dants more closely. What the rubric of “general population” encompasses sug-
gests that former slaves and former white masters have more in common with
each other than what could be expected between former slaves and former
indentured laborers.
Since virtually all Mauritians speak Creole (or “morisyen”) with facility,
there is no argument to be made that actual language becomes a barrier
between those of African descent and those of Indian descent. The impossi-
bility to really enunciate the term “African” in contemporary public discourse
in Mauritius simultaneously trips up any legitimate reference to slavery.
“French” culture or Mauritian French culture proved easier to reclaim by métis
and Creoles. It follows that, in general, alliances between Africans and Indi-
ans would be forestalled due to the very different strategies these groups
deploy for group identification in modern Mauritius.
As we saw earlier, Seewoosagar Ramgoolam’s elision of this very ques-
tion in his speech, in the capacity of first prime minister of Mauritius, on Inde-
pendence Day only continues a tendency that was already entrenched. Still,
several more recent cultural ventures have provided a forum for exploring
African pasts. Gilroy has shown the significance of music in the transatlantic
dialogues of diaspora (Black Atlantic). The Mauritian-born “séga,” which
derives from the music and dance of the slaves, and which grew to encompass
within it European dances such as the polka, could well be seen as capturing
an African past as well as reaching out beyond the nation or the region in a dia-
logue with jazz, reggae, or hip-hop as well as other kinds of music of fusion.
The artist, Ti Frère’s renown as a séga musician was acknowledged on a night
of music shortly before Mauritius’s independence. Since then, new séga artists
and groups such as the Windblows, which have enjoyed great popularity that
reaches beyond Mauritian shores, have replaced or augmented the traditional
instruments of the “maravane” and “ravanne” with various newer instruments
and even electronic synthesizers.17 Even at the academic level, discussion of the
origins of Mauritian Creole has led to a consideration of the impact of slavery
on Mauritian culture. Linguists Baker and Corne have argued that there is a
far greater connection of African languages to Creole from the period of slav-
ery than acknowledged. Notwithstanding these cultural and academic ven-
tures, it remains a fact that since the period preceding independence, official
Mauritian discourse on the nation elides, formulaically, the question of slavery.
In the animated debate in the Legislative Council evoked earlier, Mr.
Bedaysee, an Indian representative, made a passionate plea for universal
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 81

suffrage. During the course of his debate, he evoked the need for education
in Mauritius to catch up for all sections of the society in order to render
such suffrage legitimate, rather than looking at it the other way around by
saying the masses were not sufficiently educated for universal suffrage. He
makes a very interesting elision of slavery in the course of this discussion:
“Intelligent men were caught in Africa and sold to the Americans as slaves.
In India thousands of poor and intelligent people were led to the sugar cane
planters and sold for sixty million rupees and they were denied educa-
tion . . .” (Mauritius Legislative Council 27). Locating slavery in distant
America and using rupees as the currency paid by planters, the member
simultaneously shifts indenture as being the sole issue at stake in Mauri-
tius. This blatant neglect of the Africans brought as slaves to Mauritius
appears to be the naturalized impulse in official Mauritian discourse con-
cerning the nation.
It is evident that Bérenger has been focusing his electoral preoccupa-
tions upon the Indo-Mauritian electorate, and that he must now pay attention
to a newer discourse of difference, namely gender.18 To suggest, as I have done
here, that an acknowledgement of “African” identity is lacking in Mauritian
public discourse is not necessarily to also suggest that establishing this cultural
or geographical or racial identity is the only political choice to be exercized.
Nevertheless, during Bérenger’s term, the issue of slavery has finally come
back, boomeranging into official Mauritian national discourse.
This question was raised in Mauritian parliament as recently as 15
February 2005, following the African Union Commission’s statement regard-
ing compensation of descendants of slaves. Since the United Nations’ 2002
statement by the general assembly that slavery and the slave trade were a
crime against humanity, this question had to be addressed in this former
French and then British colony. The prime minister was asked to state his
position on this issue and whether it would inform the Mauritian govern-
ment’s initiatives:

1. Sir, With your permission, Sir, I will reply to PQ B/59 and PQ B/74
together.
2. Mr Speaker Sir, I wish to remind the House of the commitment of
Government on this issue. At page 70 of the MSM-MMM Electoral
manifesto for General Election 2000, it is mentioned that, I quote, “Le
gouvernement MSM-MMM s’engage à souscrire à toute action inter-
nationale visant au paiement d’une compensation aux descendants des
esclaves. Vu la spécificité de Maurice, nous envisageons qu’une telle
démarche puisse également inclure le paiement d’une compensation aux
descendants des travailleurs engagés.”[The MSM-MMM government
82 Hybridity

undertakes to respect all international action that attempts to pay com-

pensation to decendants of slaves. Given the specificity of Mauritius, we
envisage such a process would also include payment of compensation to
descendants of indentured workers]
3. I am informed that Mr Adam Thiam, spokesperson of the African
Union Commission, made a statement on 4 February 2005 to the
effect that, I quote, “la Commission de l’Union Africaine va relancer
le Comité panafricain sur les réparations des dommages causés par
l’esclavage” [the Comission of the African Union is going to once
more put to work the panafrican committee on the reparations of
damages caused by slavery]. The “Comité panafricain” was set-up in
1991 but has been dormant since the late 1990s. The Government
completely associates itself with this proposal of the African Union
Commission.
4. I am also advised that the Chairperson of the African Union Com-
mission has called on the Parliaments of African countries to adopt
legislation along the lines of the French 10 May 2001 law which
described the slave trade and slavery as “crimes contre l’humanité.”
[crimes against humanity]
5. We are gathering information from the African Union to see how
Mauritius can participate fully in this initiative of the African Union
and are examining how this issue should be brought to Parliament. (1)

The simultaneous consideration of indentured servants in the debate on com-

pensation for the descendants of slaves is a double-edged sword. On the one
hand, it may be seen as depriving slavery of its specificity and exercising a
grouping in which once again descendants of slaves lose their specificity as has
been the case in the grouping of “Creoles” with whites and métis as “general
population” in the election process. Still, perhaps such a move would finally
enable a connection between “Africans” and “Indians” in Mauritius within a
particular and well-defined collaborative project, no matter what its aims turn
out to be, that could open the door to greater dialogue as well as more conse-
quential sharing of a history of struggle and hardship.
The way representation will play out with regard to this issue, both in
Parliament and in the society at large, and the influence that the creation of
some identity, which assumes an “African” and postslavery character will
exert on identifications based on gender remain open for future analysis.
The issue of slavery and Africanness has remained beyond the vocabulary of
contemporary official discourse in Mauritius but the question of slavery,
arising from outside the nation, makes imperative some mechanism for rep-
resentation within the nation of this “section” of the society. It is premature
to speculate on how representation in this case will develop, but it is evident
that the issue reintroduces a vocabulary and history that will require some
 On the Difficulty of Articulating Hybridity 83

practice in Mauritian public life before they are pronounced and remem-
bered, respectively, with ease.
These mechanisms within Mauritian public discourse to call up partic-
ular, ethnically defined groups are short-circuited by ongoing processes in less
official spheres. Additionally, the question of gender provides a concrete
instance of new types of potential affiliations that could function in defiance
of the groupings that have continued to operate largely by adhering to the
colonial conception (in the sense of birthing as well as thinking) of this island.
The recent visit of the Indian prime minister and renewed international atten-
tion to slavery, both emerging quite literally from without the nation, require
a notable response in the public sphere. The controversy surrounding
Bérenger’s handling of the first with regard to manipulating Indian sensibil-
ity shows how invested in Indianness his electorate still remains. In the sec-
ond case, Bérenger is not able to state his “position” on the issue. The very
word slavery remains somewhat foreign to the Mauritian psyche. His response
above, which is very measured and careful, indicates he has been “informed”
and “advised” about the issue and that his government is still “gathering infor-
mation” and “examining how this issue could be brought to parliament”
(Berenger 1).
If the question of diaspora, as Gilroy explains, records the “desire to
transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of eth-
nicity” (Black Atlantic 19), simply positioning Mauritian society as diasporic
already puts pressure on the more secure idea of a “plural” society. Plural, in
this sense, privileges the existence of difference within. However, this “dou-
bleness,” when exercised, acts like a centripetal force that stretches to tautness
Mauritians’ identifications. To privilege it is to require this diasporic society to
acknowledge, within the same act of identification, various connections with
the “original” lands of its immigrant population and those with similar and
dissimilar others within the nation. The Indian prime minister’s official visit
and the entry of the issue of slavery in Parliament both function to position
Mauritian society in this way. In the case of slavery, the question of who are
the descendants of slaves as well as of what is the idea of Africa for them (and
by extension for the society in which they live) are yet to be convincingly
posed. In this context, Gilroy acknowledges that these desires to transcend
narrow definitions (in what he has observed in America, the Caribbean, and
Europe) “have always sat uneasily alongside the strategic choices forced on
black movements and individuals embedded in national political cultures and
national states [. . .]” (Gilroy Black Atlantic 19).
However, one might suggest, in viewing the African past of Mauritius
in light of the remarks above, that “[t]o articulate the past historically does not
84 Hybridity

mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a mean-
ing as it flashes up in a moment of danger” (Walter Benjamin qtd. in Gilroy
Black Atlantic 191). If this moment of the entry of Africanness into Maurit-
ian public discourse can be seen as one of “danger,” in the sense of exigency,
it is indeed a moment to creatively seize hold of a hitherto unarticulated
“meaning” of Africanness. It is conceivable, then, that Mauritians might
invent a new way of thinking, in which Africanness need not be restrictively
connected to slavery, and where slavery need not lead back only to an iden-
tifiable African part of the population, but rather be owned as the history of
the totality of the Mauritian nation. In this way despite Benjamin’s reminder
of the claim the past has on our ability to envision the future—a “claim that
cannot be settled cheaply” (Benjamin 254)—the notion of the “diasporic”
itself might be transformed.
These analyses suggest that the idea of Africa remains largely untapped
in the model of creolization envisaged in Mauritian society, and particularly in
the way in which such creolization has been conceived from within official
discourse of this nation. Anticipating the directions creolization in Mauritius
might take in the twenty-first century signals an exciting moment for the con-
ception of this African diaspora and, due to the rather unique situation of
Africans on this island as outlined, for the notion of diaspora itself.
 CHAPTER FIVE

Ethnicity and the Fate of the Nation

Reading Mauritius

The truth is that there is no pure race and that to make politics
depend upon ethnographic analysis is to surrender it to a chimera.
—Ernest Renan (“What is a Nation” 14)

As we have seen briefly, Marie-Thérèse Humbert’s novel, A l’autre bout de moi,

dramatizes the ethnicity-class relationship in pre-independence Mauritius
through the experiences of a family of mixed-blood Creoles.1 The twin girls
Nadège and Anne have very different strategies with regard to their self-
image and the one that they project outward. Anne is the narrator of the novel
and in this sense creates herself and her twin through the narrative. Anne does
all she can to assimilate in order to pass as white and, in this way, exemplifies
the classic case of the non-(“pure”) white in the “general population” of Mau-
ritius that we discussed in chapter 4. Her twin Nadège embraces all that is
nonwhite and ends up dying from aborting the child she shares with her
Indian boyfriend.

Hierarchy and Structure

When Nadège’s uncle André is at the police station after Nadège’s death, he
is in a rage that his attempt to bribe the policeman has been rebuffed. In the
passage below, narration occurs from the perspective (in free indirect style as

85
86 Hybridity

well as direct quotation) of uncle André. This tense situation highlights an

almost frantic effort to distance himself and the group with which he allies
from the Indians:

Ce policier indien qui a recueilli des dépositions—un travailliste fanatique,

et crypto-communiste de toute évidence [. . .]. Pensez donc! il a refusé de
se taire en échange de la somme rondelette que l’avocat [André] mettait
à sa disposition! Pis encore il a osé porter plainte: ‘tentative de corruption
d’un fonctionnaire de police!’ Laissez-moi rire! ‘Ten-ta-tive de corrup-
tion!’ Je vais t’en foutre, moi, de la corruption! Comme si ça ne se faisait
pas couramment, [. . .] Oui mais voilà: ces gens-là ne pensent qu’à une
chose, nous couvrir de merde. Et quel merdier, bon Dieu, quel merdier!
[my emphases] (445)2
That Indian policeman who took the depositions—a fanatic “travailliste,”
and a crypto communist by all evidence [. . .]. Imagine! He refused to be
silent in exchange for the nice round sum that the lawyer [André] was
offering him! And worse still, he dared to complain: “Attempt to corrupt
a police employee!” You have to laugh! “At-tempt to corrupt!” Screw cor-
ruption! As if it wasn’t routinely done, [. . .]. Yes, but that’s it: those peo-
ple only think of one thing, and that is to cover us in shit. And what shit,
my God, what shit!

The demonstratives “that” and “those” reinforce the distance between the
group of Indians to which the policeman belongs and André, who sees him-
self as a respectable middle-class person whose position renders him almost
white. What irks André is not just the rebuff, but the place of its origin: from
that Indian policeman, especially when he knows that those people, and in fact
the same policeman in question, surely accept “de petits bakchichs de ce
genre” [small bakshish of this kind] (445). The term “bakchichs,” from Hindi,
means gift given to a paid employee in appreciation of a service rendered. The
choice of this Creole word of Indian origin (from Turkish) reinforces the truth
or truth-value of the statement—after all, the word used to describe their
underhand practices is from their language!
Simultaneously, and still at the police station, Yolande, his wife, who is
considered “pure” white, anticipates the remarks resulting from this “scandal”
of her husband’s niece having died hemorrhaging, trying to get rid of an
Indian baby. The frequent visitors to their palatial home at Cassis (at the sea-
side) were:

déjà moins aimables, déjà devenus si blancs soudain en face de ces mori-
cauds [. . .]. Que voulez-vous ma chère, on veut bien avoir l’esprit ouvert,
consentir chrétiennement à fréquenter les gens convenables qui vous font
 Ethnicity and the Fate of the Nation 87

des avances . . . [. . .] Moi je me demande comment Yolande a pu épouser

cet André Morin. Après tout, ces Morin, on ne sait pas trop d’où ça vient.
[my emphases] (444)3
already less amiable, had already become so white suddenly when faced
with these dark-skinned people. [. . .] What do you expect my dear, we’d
like to have an open mind, to agree in a Christian manner to socialize
with suitable people who approach you . . . [. . .] As for me, I wonder how
Yolande could have married that André Morin. After all, those Morins,
one doesn’t quite know where they come from.

So, for André Morin, unlike his impoverished brother (Nadège and Anne’s
father), success and material advancement as well as a “white” wife, enable him
to penetrate the sanctuary of the whites, even though he is a mulatto. His
“doubtful” (i.e., not pure white) origins were overlooked until the scandal
brought on by his niece forces the reconsideration of his position amongst
them. Behavior is always justified by “who” or “what” people are; that is, where
they came from, their history. Note the demonstratives emphasized in the
quotation, indicating position within the structure that the speaker conceives.
The impediments posed by historical notions of cultural difference to
the forging of a “mass of people,” are underscored in A l’autre bout de moi. Sas-
sita, the maid in the Morin household is constantly presented as a Hindu by
focusing on her behavior, her docility, the way she rationalizes her fate. The
other female character who knows a harsh reality due to position in structure
is Mme Lydie. She “helps” Nadège with her abortion and brings about her
death. Mme Lydie is also constantly described as Creole. Putting aside the
obvious differences between these two characters, there is nothing in the novel
that brings them together as women operating under patriarchal forces: Sas-
sita, discarded by a man twice her age because the sheets were not stained with
her blood on the night of her wedding; Lydie, raising her children alone on
the outskirts of society, operating outside the official domains of Medicine
and Law. Sassita remains in Quatre Bornes with the twins’ father while they
are sent off to the coastal Cassis to get over the scandal caused by Nadège’s
association with the Indian politician, Aunauth Gopaul. This distance is also
inscribed in the body of the printed text, with most of Sassita’s story being told
at the beginning whereas the character of Mme Lydie only figures at the end
of the story after Nadège is pregnant.4 This serves to separate their paths, their
fate, and their comparable position in the general structure much as all else
occurs in Mauritian society to separate Indians from Creoles as chapter 4
demonstrated. Gaston Daronville from La Maison qui marchait vers le large
also acts from such an understanding.
88 Hybridity

Carl de Souza’s Gaston Daronville is a mulatto whose ancestors must

have had some “standing” in Mauritian society. This character understands
how historical privilege functions in people’s minds: as a child, he resented the
“gens de maison qui, [. . .] par leur servilité de tous les instants, les avaient
ancrés dans cette supériorité factice” (182–83) [the servants who, [. . .] by their
servility at all times, anchored them in this artificial superiority]. Daronville’s
anger and resentment stem less from the superiority he is granted, but rather
from its falseness. Daronville describes a scene from his childhood when he
and his classmate Emile Laqueyre climb a tamarind tree and look out to sea
and then back at the island and their neighborhood. He sees his family’s house
and gets into a rage when he glimpses the dilapidated condition of the roof,
which was not visible from inside:

Hé oui, il l’avait bien vu, le toit désigné par Emile, émergeant au-dessus
des bouquets de manguiers. Son aspect lui avait fait l’effet d’une trahison.
D’en bas, quand il jouait dans la petite pelouse devant la varangue, il s’é-
tait rendu compte, bien entendu, des quelques rides que la maison avait
prises mais, aux yeux du gosse qu’il était, elle conserverait son allure de
vieille douairière, éternellement. Indestructible. Ils avaient grandi avec
l’idée que rien ne pouvait être plus beau, mieux que leur maison. “Ton
père est plus fort que mon père, ta voiture va plus vite que la mienne, d’ac-
cord, mais ma maison est plus belle que la tienne.” A cela, aucun des
cousins n’avait jamais rien trouvé à redire. (181)
Oh yes, he had seen it, the roof that Emile pointed out, emerging over
the bouquets of mango trees. Its appearance had seemed like a betrayal to
him. From down below when he played on the little lawn in front of the
veranda, he had noticed, of course, a few cracks that the house had devel-
oped, but to the eyes of the boy that he was, the house kept its allure of
an old dowager, eternally. Indestructible. They had grown up with the
idea that nothing could be more beautiful or better than their house.
“Your father is stronger than my father, your car goes faster than mine,
okay, but my house is more beautiful than yours.” None of the cousins
had ever found anything to say in response to that.

It is this same house that Daronville refuses to sell as an old man even though
his daughter tries to convince him to do so due to his failing health and inabil-
ity to manage the large dilapidated building. In a twist of fate, the house, along
with the rest of the slope on which it rests, will begin its slow descent toward
the sea: “la maison qui marchait vers le large” as the title of the novel charac-
terizes it. The house is but a symbol of old privileges held in place by the colo-
nial system and then preserved “symbolically,” we might say. Daronville’s reac-
tion is that of one who is unable to accept this change in situation and status:
 Ethnicity and the Fate of the Nation 89

“. . . il s”était refusé à reconnaître ce faîtage indigne, cette espèce de vieux crâne

frappé . . . L’enduit spécial dont on avait badigeonné le bois, [. . .], avait tro-
qué sa noble couleur de jais contre un gris délavé par la trop longue succession
de pluies et vagues de chaleur” (182) [. . . he had refused to recognize this
lowly construction, a kind of old beaten up head. . . . The coating with which
they had whitened the wood [. . .] had bartered its noble color of jade for a
gray that had been washed by a lengthy succession of rain and heat waves].
The final and decisive death of these class privileges in the movement
of the entire slope and the Daronville mansion toward the sea is hard for him
to accept since, as his grandfather told him, it was built with “quinze peids de
fondations dans le roc” (45) [a foundation fifteen feet deep in the rock]. Yet,
the truth of the crumbling French Empire elsewhere during Daronville’s
childhood had to be faced. Refusal to accept this descent characterizes
Daronville and his class in their inability to see themselves as they are, or even
what they could be, rather than what they were.

Historical Considerations

Early writing from Île de France, as Mauritius was then known, tended to
reflect the concerns and dilemmas of the newly established colony.5 Even
though attachment to the “mother country” remained strongly articulated,
there was also a trend, which established the superiority of the Creoles (at that
time indicating whites born in the colony), given the hardships under which
they were to function. In the nineteenth century, Thomi Pitot writes in praise
of these Creoles (to which group he belongs) regarding their “conduite
régulière” [proper behavior] and the fact that they remained “les dépositaires
fidèles des vertus de leurs aïeux au milieu de la corruption que l’Europe a
tenté, sans relâche d’y introduire . . .” (cited in Prosper Histoire 28) [the
devoted holders of their ancestors’ virtue in the middle of the corruption that
Europe has continually tried to introduce here . . .]. Preserving the noble char-
acter and superiority of the colony’s whites accounts for the basic preoccupa-
tion of the “colonial novel” discussed in chapter 3.
Slavery was an issue around which much of identity was “worked out”
by the white population, often in defense of slavery and against metropolitan
abolitionist positions. This was a clear point at which a certain nationalism
can be said to form: nationalism, in a consciousness of the geographical space
that was conquered and settled as well as the collective will that enabled these
acts. To the white settler, abolition was a threat to this space and its function-
ing. Abolition as an injustice to the white Creoles (colonists) was bemoaned
and reactions against the British government, under whom it took place,
90 Hybridity

formed a movement in which one can identify such a nationalism. Such were
the efforts toward defining and consolidating French identity, which neces-
sarily opposed itself to the British administrators who really did not have a
vested interest in Mauritius as a colony. The space of the nation was promi-
nently seen as legitimately belonging to those who formed it (i.e., the white
French who believed they had built it). The shift was thus from organization
against metropolitan France to that against imperial Britain.6
With the importation of massive Indian labor in 1865, one can see how
the nationalist sentiment of the French population coalesced through the var-
ious battles they had to wage against British protectors of indentured laborers
sent from India. The protectors were seen as troublesome to the colonists
when they insisted on certain conditions ordered by the British colonial
administration in India with whose authorization the immigrants arrived in
the new colony. In addition, French plantation owners would send their own
“recruiters” who used various means to entice Indian coolies to board the
immigration ships (including lying and kidnapping). Early revolts by African
slaves were sparse and no notable movement was launched, for obvious rea-
sons, the most significant of which was the coopting of the commandeurs by
the colonists.
Despite some movements against planters and sugar barons, no consol-
idated movement can be said to challenge this strand of nationalism on the
island until the organization of peasants and workers in the early part of the
twentieth century (1920s–40s). This is the first time a movement of some
magnitude against what we can term the nationalism of the elite occurs. Even
if there is not enough information on maroons and their opposition to the
colonial system, and slavery in particular, such workers movements also record
prenationalist activity from a different source.7 It is to be noted that the major-
ity participating in the movement given an impetus by the revolt of the work-
ers were “Indians.” However, many from other “races” participated as well. At
this point, however, the significance of being, within the Indian community,
Bihari versus Tamil still has not acquired the significance it will in the period
preceding the independence movement. The categorization of “race” does not
yet really become inadequate by the claiming of ethnicity.
Considering ethnicity as a communication of cultural difference in an
anthropological model, though valuable in other ways, cannot properly
account for the functioning of ethnicity in the national context of Mauritius.
Chapter 4 underscored the process of ethnification of the Indian groups (and
this is the case with the Chinese as well) through language. We have noted
also the formation of a new intermediary class made up of different figures.
This included the Indian bourgeoisie and the Creole bourgeoisie formed by
 Ethnicity and the Fate of the Nation 91

education, professionalization, and through the administration. Claims to

Mauritian Indianness, as seen in chapter 4, are nowhere matched by similar
claims to Africanness. There is a devaluation of things African because, in the
politics of difference, alliances with the French (Franco-Mauritian, especially
through language and its politics) have seemed more attractive and advancing
to the Creole (especially mulatto) population—in the later sense of mixed-
blood. The anthropologist, Thomas H. Eriksen notes this fact when he writes
that “[n]ot sensing belonging to a continent [sic], Mauritians of non-African
origin [thus excluding Creoles] tend to turn to their real or postulated ances-
tral homelands for a self-identification of loftier scope than the options locally
available” [my emphases] (Communication of Cultural Difference 13), confirm-
ing the ambiguous position of the Creole in Mauritian society.
Given the importance of the diasporic aspect of hybridity in connecting
with the homeland, privileging trauma, and valorizing the past, the figure of
the Creole could be an ideal expression for nationalist sentiment by bringing
together the variously positioned nationalisms at least symbolically. The body
of the Creole carries the history of the slave and that of the master—of
oppression and of subordination as well as resistance and survival. If the idea
of “the” Mauritian nation is so hard to imagine due to the different histories
and positions, as I have indicated, the figure of the Creole, could take on the
role of healing and integration, even if this is not through solidarity and good
will: the explosion of the Creole as a proper actor is the point at which the
racial (as innate, given, immutable) gave way to a new category, even before
the systematic communication of cultural difference would become part of the
propelling force of Mauritian nationalism.8 The role of the Creoles, who con-
stituted a new intermediary group functioning during the colonial period
between the group of laborers and former slaves, and the white colonialists,
thus allows a consideration of class. The complete exclusion of Indians from
this group even at that time is conceptually implausible, although this idea
tends to be repeated in public discourse in Mauritian society.
Simultaneously, though, if this new bourgeois section takes on its “rev-
olutionary” role, recognition by Creoles and Indians who are in a similar posi-
tion would necessarily follow in order to facilitate their cohesion as a group.
In this intermediary bourgeois class (made up primarily of Creoles and Indi-
ans), the essentially defined African slave or the Indian laborer can be tran-
scended in a creolizing move through the common vehicle and experience of
professionalization that recognizes a past history of trauma. Such an under-
standing becomes all the more pertinent given the opening up of the Maurit-
ian economy of the 1980s to various sources other than sugar to make up the
gross national product.
92 Hybridity

Still, foreseeing for this new bourgeoisie a revolutionary role is not (nec-
essarily) a restriction to its economic role of entrepreneurship and risk.9 It
includes rather an imaginative and creative role (entrepreneur-like in that
sense) to think its destiny. This is not to proscribe a selfless or unrealistic
“good” role of putting the nation or people before self-interest, even if Fanon
can want that “[i]n an underdeveloped country an authentic national middle
class ought to consider as its bounden duty to betray the calling fate has
marked out for it, and put itself to school with the people: in other words to
put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and technical capital that it has
snatched when going through the colonial universities” (Wretched of the Earth
150). As I see it, the most nationalistic act that this new bourgeoisie can con-
ceive of is to write itself into the national context, to narrate its own reality as
a group that exploits (in every sense of the word) its situation, instead of
remaining a weak appendage to the traditional bourgeoisie, or the white (and
other new) capitalists. As Fanon remarks (unhappily), “[t]he national middle
class discovers its historic mission: that of intermediary” (Wretched of the Earth
152).10 In my conception, a revolutionary role, as seen in earlier chapters, will
inevitably reveal the impossibility of an alliance for identity/politics based on
the ones inherited from colonialism. These revolutionary moments can be
significant acts of creolization, turning the stagnation of identity politics
upside down.11

Revolution and the Image of the Creole

Lionnet notes that A l’autre bout de moi is the story of “Mauritian métis, these
‘apatrides de la race [racially homeless people]’12 [. . .], the coloreds or mixed-
bloods, whose marginality is partly the result of their own inability to assume
their non white heritage because they have internalized the ideals of the
racist colonial society” (Autobiographical Voices 208). In the context of the
Mauritian nationalisms that I have described, perhaps one might say that
they are nonqualified (or homeless) “ethnically” through a lack of parallel
connections to ancestral claims.13 Nadège and Anne can be seen to represent
two “types” of Creoles (mulâtres), or two possibilities for Creoles: revolution-
ary and (false) assimilatory, respectively.
Anne’s entire struggle is against her sister, not only in claiming her own
identity against her stronger twin, but also in rejecting the “lower” ranked part
of her “mixture.” Her attempts to penetrate “white” society are similar to her
uncle André’s. She frequents the Church and pays visits to the old dowagers
she meets there; she believes herself to be in love with the white neighbor,
Pierre Augier, because he is white, even though she despises the way he treats
 Ethnicity and the Fate of the Nation 93

her. He keeps the relationship clandestine at all costs. Anne dresses as simply
and “elegantly” as possible to avoid association with Nadège’s “wild” style and
all things Oriental.14
Nadège, on the contrary, does not hide her scorn for the whites (ce sont
tous des cons [they are all stupid]) and her embracing of anything nonwhite
is reflected in her vocabulary, her actions, her dress. She loves to recite songs
learned from Sassita, and will not hesitate to be seen in the Hindu quarter, nor
adorn her arms with all sorts of bracelets and wear clothes that are loud to the
Western (i.e., cultivated) eye. Anne’s struggle against Nadège is revealed to be
a struggle against parts of herself: “Etre en dehors d’elle, être à tout prix, voilà
ce que je désirais, je ne savais pas encore que ce que j’étais ainsi amenée à
renier, parce que trop semblable à elle, constitutait souvent la partie la plus
authentique de moi-même” (419) [To be outside of her, to be at all costs, that
is what I desired, I did not yet know that what I came to deny, because it was
too similar to her, often constituted the most authentic part of myself ]. Yet,
this separation turned out to be an impossible task: “[. . .] dans les rêves je
parle souvent comme Nadège, je me gargarise des mots de Nadège) [. . .] il y
a moi qui parle et moi qui vis le rêve . . .” (Humbert A l’autre bout 74) [(. . .)
in my dreams I often speak like Nadège, I gargle Nadège’s words (. . .) there
is me who speaks and me who sees the dream . . .]. But further, Anne’s inabil-
ity to truly be part of either Nadège’s world or the white one her mother
would like to inhabit is brought out. The dream continues:

[. . .] [I]l y a moi qui parle et moi qui marche . . . Tranquille avec ça, tran-
quille l’idiote, alors que l’autre moi crie arrête, hurle, bat du cœur, des
pieds, des bras. Rien à faire. La chose est là devant nous, dans l’eau . . .
une masse blanchâtre et visqueuse, une masse de poissons agonisants.
Quelques-uns frétillent, encore, la tête couverte de sang [. . .]. Je me cabre
tout entière, emplie d’une seule certitude: cet entassement ensanglanté
vient d’un charme irréversible, destiné à nous fixer là pour le reste de
notre vie. (74)
[. . .] [T]here is I who speak and I who walk . . . Calmly, too, calmly,
the idiot, while the other I cries stop, screams, fights with her heart,
feet, arms. Nothing doing. The thing is there before us, in the water . . .
a whitish and viscous mass, a mass of fish in agony. Some of them are
still tossing about, their heads covered with blood. [. . .] I stumble back-
ward, filled with one certainty: this bloody mess comes from an irre-
versible magic source that was destined to pin [fix] us there for the rest
of our lives.

The doubling of herself where she is the twin in her dream marks the certi-
tude of being other than what she projects. In confronting the frightening
94 Hybridity

bloody mess of dead and dying fish, the “I,” that is already split assumes a “we”
[us]. The sorcery is aimed at fixing them there for the rest of their lives. The
I who walks and talks seems to do so in a stupor—it is the Anne of assimila-
tion. The other I is involved in a struggle for, we might say, a more authentic
identity in its relationship to otherness, beginning with the identification with
Nadège. But the struggle between the two possibilities in Anne’s case results
in paralysis. In an allegorical reading, Anne’s inaction shares in that of the
class of Creoles (mixed-bloods) who, instead of determining their own course
of action to match their interests, continue to constantly evaluate themselves
unfavorably with regard to the small group of whites from whose company
they are nevertheless banished. Anne continues that she is unable to decipher
the dream, and although there is no answer to the question, she does point out
that “[c]ela m’oblige à revenir si loin en arrière. A cette epoque de l’enfance
dont nul d’entre nous n’a jamais reparlé” (75) ([t]his obliged me to go so far
back in time to a period of our childhood about which none of us ever spoke
again). For Mauritian society, this initial sin, as it were, is the sin of slavery
(and its daughter indenture), which, as we have seen in chapter 4 is silenced
in the collective memory. Within the novel, the sin is that of being born dark-
skinned and it haunts Anne for the anguish it brought their mother.
Anne’s quest for a singular identity can be read as the effort of the Cre-
ole population for an unambiguous white identity. When the twins discover
their mother’s diary after her death, Anne cannot bear the disappointment
(her mother’s and her own) of not being white: “[. . .] je crie je voudrais
renaître, Nadège, avec des joues roses, des cheveux blonds, je voudrais renaître
blanche pour ne pas la decevoir” (130) [And I cry out that I want to be reborn,
Nadège, with pink cheeks, blond hair, I want to be reborn white so as not to
disappoint her].
When Mme Morin leaves her husband, she goes to the decrepit sea-
side house because she cannot tolerate his infidelities and the way he wastes
their resources on alcohol. The children are left to fend for themselves in the
hot sun. The bloody mess in the sea (in Anne’s dream), which has power
over them, is related to two aspects of Anne’s life, both entering the narra-
tive in this same chapter of the novel. The first is her impossibility to sepa-
rate herself from Nadège: “S’il m’arrive d’être seule, on est choqué, on s’in-
quiète, on m’accuse. “Où est ta sœur?’ demande Père impératif. ‘Où est ta
sœur?’ gémit Mère. ‘Où est ta sœur?’ me reprochent doucement les
religieuses . . .” (75–76) [If I happen to be alone, people are shocked, they
are worried, they accuse me: “Where is your sister?” asks Father urgently.
“Where is your sister?” cries out Mother. “Where is your sister?” the nuns
gently scold . . .].15 Any effort to disjoin from Nadège would thus be violent
 Ethnicity and the Fate of the Nation 95

and bloody. The second is her impossibility to enter white society, as she will
find out from Pierre’s reticence and hesitation to fully embrace her socially.
Pierre’s behavior is in fact a violent rejection of her personhood. Anne’s
paralysis results in an in-authenticity that is recorded as a marionette’s
actions (the I who walks and talks) as seen earlier. This dramatizes in a dif-
ferent way Fanon’s massive struggle recorded in the narrative of Black Skin,
White Masks, and which we shall examine later in this book. The idea of
authenticity, then, that is considered dubious and thus summarily dismissed
in many contemporary contexts, and particularly in postcolonial theory, is
not excluded from the experiences and desires of those who occupy hybrid
social locations.
Anne’s isolation is underscored in the same chapter when she recalls
the drive by taxi from their home in Quatre Bornes to the beach house:
“C’est ce jour-là que j’ai fait pour la première fois l’expérience de la solitude:
entre cette femme aux yeux bouffis et ma sœur endormie” [my emphases]
(85) [That was the day that I knew for the first time the experience of solitude:
between that woman with the swollen eyes and my sleeping sister.] This can
be read as the solitude of the nonethnified Creole, who struggles to produce
at both the individual and collective level, an authentic idiom of selfhood.
Nadège is rejected by “les gens bien,” [decent folk] and welcomes this, while
her mother tries at all costs, in almost Jansenite fashion, to continue to
behave with what she sees as the greatest virtue, knowing/living her rejec-
tion all the time. Between these two attitudes of mournful striving to con-
form by her mother (“yeux bouffis”) and happy acceptance of her rejection
by her sister (“sœur endormie”) Anne remains with no society of her own,
while sitting between them. What is presented as “solitude” for Anne can be
read as “nonengagement” with reality for the intermediary group outlined
earlier.
The single moment of triumph for Anne with regard to this white iden-
tity that she seeks is, inevitably, a moment of extreme emotional and physical
violence. Nadège takes her to the beach as she wants a beautiful expansive
place to announce her happy news. She announces there that she is pregnant
with Aunauth Gopaul’s child. Anne’s reaction is one of violence and hatred.
Nadège’s choice is not just a foil for the “bourgeois marriage” that she aspires
to with Pierre. It provides her with a moment to savor an instance of singu-
larity—through the act of dissociation. Singularity in identity against her sis-
ter, her twin who haunts her life becomes a moment of comparison that can
render her pure. Her reaction to Nadège’s news is revealed (in the narrative)
at the moment when she is being questioned in court before a judge: “Je l’ai
giflée” (426) [I slapped her]. Then the narrative continues after the courtroom
96 Hybridity

scene is described. She is given a pause and led out of the room to recover
emotionally. Yet the veritable violence and triumph of the moment is in
Anne’s continuing narrative to herself, to the reader:

Et il n’y eut plus en face de moi qu’un bizarre visage convulsé, une sorte de
défroque. Non. Je n’éprouvai pas de pitié, mais de nouveau cette affreuse
jouissance dans son acuité plus proche de la douleur que de la joie: devant
ce masque sans expression, enfin, moi, j’avais un visage.” (427)
And before me there was just this strange convulsive face, a sort of empty
shell. No. I did not feel any pity, but again this terrible ecstasy [jouis-
sance] that was, in its intensity, closer to pain than joy: before this mask
devoid of expression, at last, me, I had a face.

It is only at this moment that Anne steps out of her marionette-like self and
claims her being through action. It is the point where one is called on to make
an ethical decision, a moment that is of great significance to Edouard Glissant’s
conception of hybridity, as we shall see. In keeping with the fact that there can
be no prior determination of the type of action, its morality, or outcome, Anne’s
shocking behavior is the only one that was authentic for her, perhaps even eth-
ical, at that moment. In this way, such authenticity and ethics can only be under-
stood and theorized at the individual level and cannot be given in advance.
Anne finds Nadège “grotesque,” she has a feeling of “répulsion” (422) [repulsion]
and “répugnance” (425) [repugnance] toward her. But she continues inexorably
in her violence to reach that point at the very brink of her self, of her own sub-
jectivity: “[Q]u’il crève ton sale bâtard, qu’il crève dans l’œuf! Je criais comme
d’autres frappent, assourdie [. . .] mais enragée à frapper, à frapper encore, à frap-
per toujours . . .” (428) [(M)ay he die your dirty bastard, may he die in the egg!
I screamed as others might strike, loud [. . .] but obsessed with striking, with
striking again, striking forever . . .]. When she finally cries: “Fœtus! Horrible
Fœtus! Crève[!]” [Foetus! Horrible Foetus! Die(!)] she is referring less to the
child in Nadège than the Nadège in her. Nadège is at this moment on the
ground, curled up “la tête caché dans ses bras repliés, les jambes ramenées sous
elle” (see 428) [her head hidden in her folded arms, her legs curled in under her].
It is clear that Anne’s outrage is directed toward herself and that the violence
she does to Nadège is the best way to be violent to herself:

Mais en la regardant, je sus que j’étais arrivée là où je l’avais voulu: à l’ex-

trémité de la souffrance et à l’autre bout de moi, le seul horizon où je
pourrais jamais la rencontrer. Car celle que je contemplais à mes pieds,
dans une atroce et saignante satisfaction. C’était moi-même; à cause de
cela, je ne pouvais rien pour elle.” (430)
 Ethnicity and the Fate of the Nation 97

But looking at her, I knew that I had arrived at the point where I had
wanted to go: at the limit of suffering and at the other end of myself, the
only horizon where I could ever have met her. Because the one that I con-
sidered at my feet, in an atrocious and bloody satisfaction. It was myself;
because of that, I couldn’t do anything for her.

This is an example of the movement of “aggression,” which is pertinent to

Fanon’s examination of the choices available to individuals that we will exam-
ine in chapter 7. In the encounter with otherness, it signals at least the begin-
ning of a decision to “be.” It is from this point that any future Relation (which
is the focus of chapter 6 on Glissant) can even be envisaged. In heeding the end
of the story, we would need to resist here the temptation to stretch an act of
interpretation to claim that this is Anne’s moment of whiteness by annihilat-
ing the Creole.16 The story ends with Anne walking alone, after her father’s
death, to Aunauth Gopaul’s house and taking Nadège’s place there. I prefer to
see in this moment the long-deferred action by which Anne chooses to step out
of her twin’s shadow and which was initiated in the violent moment of authen-
tic selfhood, which (individually and even for Anne) implied a close alliance
with the Indian part of her island’s society. That it has to be a cruel and violent
act only signals the necessity for it, just as the moment of realization in Métisse,
examined in chapter 3, came at the violent moment in which the narrator’s
mother calls her father a nigger. Such a moment of violent epistemological
shock that highlights contradiction is required to spur action to be counted as
agency. For the Creole, whom we have allegorically linked with Anne, this
entails any kind of self-conscious, even self-interested, action through a break-
ing out of the syndrome of “bad faith” that we shall examine in chapter 6 in the
context of the Antillean that Fanon describes. Anne’s bad faith consists in cast-
ing her self-image in the reflection of the small white population who, in real-
ity, are so far removed from her social sphere and the material conditions of her
existence that her identity politics border on the absurd.
By her own admission, Anne can never be Nadège, that is, all that is sen-
sual and whole and beautiful, or life itself: “Nadège, douce, violente, et per-
verse sirène, le regard scintillant, la lèvre sensuelle, respirant autant que j’é-
touffais, avec une liberté de mouvement qui m’apeurait” (120) [Nadège, sweet,
violent, and a perverse siren, with a scintillating look, sensual lips, breathing
while I suffocated, with an ease of movement that scared me]. Afraid of move-
ment, of giving up the possibility of the fixed inherited position of privilege
through lighter skin in Mauritian society that she so covets:

l’image que j’essaie de saisir de moi me trahit, m‘échappe; c’est toi qui es
là dans la glace, il y a seulement dans le regard une autre expression et le
98 Hybridity

reflet que je vois, ma propre image, me semble une mauvaise photo: oui,
c’est l’expression qui manque, l’expression des yeux de Nadège. (122)
the image that I try to glimpse of myself betrays me, escapes me; it is you
who are there in the mirror, only, in your look there is another expression
and the reflection that I see, my own image, seems like a bad photo to me;
yes, it is the expression that is missing, the expression of Nadège’s eyes.

Anne cannot see herself the way she wants to (i.e., white) because of interfer-
ence from the image of Nadège within hers. Still she ends up being only a
poor copy of her sensuous twin, lacking the life of the latter. Throughout the
story, Anne is fearful of action, of seizing a new space, claiming a new path,
until she is capable of coming into being as an individual, which for her occurs
in a violent moment of assertion. Reflective of the ambiguous space of the
Creole, of the lack of insertion into the national framework Anne asks: “Où
est l’espace où je dois vivre?” (122) [Where is the space where I should live?].
Nadège, on the contrary, does not use a mirror (12), but sees herself, consti-
tutes herself, through the gaze of others (419). There is a tension between
such a restrictive (for Anne) as well as liberating (for Nadège) power invested
in the other’s gaze. Fanon will also theorize this question, as we shall see.
Anne allows it to determine what she can be while Nadège uses it to construct
a counter-image in which she becomes heroic.
Returning to the pitfalls of consistently reading the allegory of the
Creole in Anne, brings me to the oft-discussed idea that “all Third World
texts are necessarily [. . .] allegorical” ( Jameson “Third World Literature” 69).
Debates around this question have shown that to qualify them all as allegor-
ical is reductive and cannot account for the creativity of individual authors;
that it implies a high-handed and essentially Western notion of understand-
ing History in privileging the “national” allegory; that it settles for the ade-
quacy of categorizing texts as being of the “Third World.”17 I am mostly in
agreement with the general criticism of the thesis as it has been taken up in
the critical views of this essay. Still the more interesting aspects of the essay
such as the suggestion of the national allegory as a legitimate framework for
reading Third World texts in a particular context and Jameson’s wider stake
in the critique of capitalism from a Third World context become obscured in
many of the indignant responses. What makes the allegory so tempting in
the national context of postcolonial regions? My own reading of Anne was
self-proclaimedly “allegorical,” and the narrator of Métisse, as we also saw
overtly invites such an allegorical consideration.
Réda Bensmaïa’s central criticism of Jameson on this point is that in
reading postcolonial writing, the split between the “pedagogical” and the “per-
 Ethnicity and the Fate of the Nation 99

formative” (this is from Bhabha’s Nation and Narration) in the narrative disal-
lows such a recuperation under allegory. Invoking Paul de Mann’s Allegories of
Reading, he explains the impossibility of distinguishing between the “literal”
and “figural” meaning (Bensmaïa 155), quite essential to Jameson’s allegorical
reading. However, what if we were to consider Jameson’s article, as not being
about nationalist literature, but rather as part of the narrative of the nation,
stemming from his (intellectual) desire to preserve it as an analytical and legit-
imate political category? That is, can one not read in Jameson a very clear
nationalist sentiment described by Gellner? It is not for his own nation, but
rather for (particularly) Third World—here postcolonial for our purposes—
nation(s). My point is that mirroring the impossibility of distinguishing
between the literal and figurative, and the interference of the performative on
the pedagogical, the functioning of discourses about the nation also become
discourses of the nation through their own performance, and especially in this
instance through the performance of their reading. It is for this reason that the
anthropological study of cultural difference in Mauritius (about the nation)
that we shall consider joins up with a certain model of Mauritianness in which
history and totality can be elided as was pointed out with regard to the Mau-
ritian prime minister’s public speeches (of the nation) from chapter 4. These
speeches betrayed insufficient engagement with certain aspects of Mauritian
history, primarily slavery and its consequences, generating an incomplete
vision of both the history of the nation and the current unit or totality that it
incarnates.
Without over-emphasizing the point here, I think that texts of the
nation come in unexpected forms. The power of the national, especially
for/in nations of more recent construction, must be recognized as having
multiple sources and texts. In the context of nationalism and ethnicity, the
construction of ethnicity is far more complex within the national sphere of
Mauritius than the account provided from an anthropological understanding
of the plurality of Mauritius. If, as Trinh T. Minh Ha has pointed out, “writ-
ing as a system by itself has its own rules and structuring process” (21), so too
do discourses of the nation. Any analytical gesture must, then, pay attention
to these rules and structuring processes, which can only be understood with
a proper accounting of both the specific histories involved and the totality
that it calls up.

Ethnicity as the Communication of Cultural Difference

Eriksen presents Mauritian nationalism as on the one hand, “ostensibly

nonethnic” in character due to the depiction of the “mosaic of cultures.” He
100 Hybridity

points to the cultural shows on Independence Day where the different ethnic
groups are represented (for example, Sino-Mauritians with a dragon, Hindus
singing Indian film songs, Creoles with a séga).18 Along with this, he notes,
on the other hand, a “trend” in nationalism that “encompasses or transcends
ethnicity rather than endorsing it.” This happy coexistence of the universal in
the particular and vice-versa is echoed as a goal by the first prime minister of
Mauritius, Sir Seewoosagar Ramgoolam, on Independence Day in 1974:

We are now well set on the path of success and the country knows that
in a multiracial society like ours we must forge unity out of diversity.
This must always be an essential part of our national policy. [. . .] Inde-
pendence has ceased to be an issue dividing one Mauritian from
another.19 We have come to treasure it as the greatest achievement of the
country and to honour and venerate the flag which was born out of the
sacrifices of our people. (131–32)

Yet even in these lines we can adduce the tension around the term diversity,
which has to be reflected in “national policy.” One must conclude that when
Eriksen writes that Mauritius is “ostensibly non-ethnic,” this means not sin-
gle-ethnic. He adds that the Mauritian situation is more complex than this
outline and that “[t]here is some ethnic tension, and there are conflicts
between nationalism and ethnicity” (Ethnicity and Nationalism 117), as Ram-
goolam’s lines also suggest. The acknowledgment on Independence Day by
the prime minister that Independence and the nation-state were not common
goals and dreams for “the Mauritian people” is not insignificant. On this occa-
sion of the sixth anniversary of independence, Ramgoolam speaks against a
“narrow nationalism,” which is “against the mass of the people from which we
derive our strength” (132).
Eriksen evokes several intellectuals who have been concerned with race
and ethnicity as categories.20 If, for the purposes of analysis, ethnicity is a sub-
category of race, all ethnic categories then carry in them their superordinate
racial category. For Eriksen, “[i]deas of ‘race’ may or may not form part of eth-
nic ideologies, and their presence or absence does not seem to be a decisive factor
in inter ethnic relations” [my emphases] (Ethnicity and Nationalism 5). When
interethnic relations are studied in the context of a national structure in Mau-
ritius, however, one cannot fail to see the significance of the superordinate in
their “ethnic” or subcategorical level, especially in light of the “ethnification”
of racially understood groups through the symbolic use of language, as we
have seen in chapter 4. A proper accounting of the totality in which particu-
lar Mauritian ethnicities are coherent would reveal the specific relationship to
race. Nationalism—at least in Mauritius—inevitably invokes (some form of )
 Ethnicity and the Fate of the Nation 101

the term or concept of ethnicity: ethnic diversity; ethnic relations; ethnic cat-
egories; ethnic conflict/harmony; “communalism;” ethnic-language corre-
spondence, etc. And such ethnically articulated relations clearly relate to his-
torical groups that were constructed and understood racially.
In Mauritius, it is impossible to distinguish between race and ethnicity
by claiming that the former is a categorization from the outside and that the
latter is claimed by the group (Banton paraphrased in Eriksen Ethnicity and
Nationalism 5). Indian immigration documents in Mauritius reveal how every
new immigrant was listed according to his/her port of origin, and the “ethnic”
category, which often coincided with the language spoken. African immi-
grants did not have the opportunity to posit ethnic differences due to massive
and rapid homogenization under French planters, given the disparate nature
of the demographic make-up of slaves and the urgent need to learn Creole. In
their case, then, ethnification through language was blocked and therefore
they have remained racially read. Even though the “pure” whites and Creoles
share common language identification (French), the whites also remain
racially read, thus preserving the distinction between themselves and mixed-
bloods. As noted in chapter 4, there is hardly a noticeable population with
British ancestry, most administrators having served for specific time periods
in Mauritius and then moved on. In the case of indentured laborers arriving
under British administration, the categorization on paper, which was part of
the immigrants’ documents in the new land, surely served to inscribe this eth-
nic category in his/her psyche and worldview. The importance of being Bihari
or Tamil [sic] became far more pertinent once the immigrant was issued
papers confirming it upon arrival in the new colony. Birth certificates, for
example, in “British” India contain information about “caste” and “religion,”
but not about language or ethnicity.
The more recent rhetoric of being Indian in Mauritius discussed in
chapter 4 must be viewed in light of this fact. Moreover, all statistical infor-
mation groups Indians into, at least, Hindus and Muslims—often Tamils and
Telugus [sic] as well. Among the Tamils, many were converted Christians.
Also, the Bhojpuri speakers make up the largest part of the Hindu population.
Gujarati “speakers” are often Muslims as well. Recent surveys on language can
be read as claiming (the use of ) language in a symbolic gesture, related to
those papers issued by the government to the ancestral immigrants. So, eth-
nicity is seen to function most actively in the Indian community. Perhaps one
should also remember that many Muslim Indians were later arrivals—they
were merchants and are historically concentrated in the Port-Louis region—
as the majority of the Chinese population (also traditionally merchants). The
Bhojpuri speakers—here the actual language use is higher than with other
102 Hybridity

groups given the large immigrant population from this part of British India—
make up an important part of the rural, or at least traditionally rural, popula-
tion, that is, indentured laborers who over generations acquired parts of the
land that they toiled.
Quite obviously, the historical reality of these diverse ethnic groups has
had a material impact on their role and functioning. Although there is a com-
mon reality shared by the group not only through language, but also common
memory, the “imagined,” shared “origin” is made explicit or “real” through
colonial documents. The relative histories of these groups also placed individ-
uals belonging to them in similar positions within the new colony owing to
the fact that they performed similar functions. Indentured laborers from Bihar
arrived in large numbers at the same time, worked on fields, gradually saved
money, bought small patches of land to which they added over generations;
sent their children to schools, and then, more recently, to university, often
abroad, creating a first generation of the “Bihari bourgeoisie.” The entry of
these inheritors of the indentured laborers into the middle class can be seen
in light of the idea of a new middle class replacing an older one. “By new mid-
dle class was meant the growing stratum of largely salaried professionals who
occupied managerial or quasi managerial positions in corporate structures by
virtue of the skills in which they had been trained at universities—originally,
primarily the engineers then later the legal and health professionals, the spe-
cialists in marketing, the computer analysts and so on” (Wallerstein 140).21
These aspects or actions seem more significant in generating a common “cul-
ture” than any other primordial or essential idea of the “ethnic.” “Tamil” immi-
grants in smaller numbers, from Pondichéry and Madras, came earlier, during
slavery and certainly during the governorship of Mahé Labourdonnais, whose
tenure ran from 1735 to 1747 (Hazareesingh 2). They were skilled workers
and clustered in the urban areas, especially Port-Louis, after which many con-
verted. The language did not survive and their affiliations with Hindus, as
Indians, as well as the Creole population, as Christians (but also as closer to
administration than labor), should be figured with the more recently arrived
Tamils who also did not keep their language to any great extent. In addition,
some of the early Indian arrivals are grouped with the Creole population,
some even intermarrying.22
The use of symbols in the service of nationalism, chiefly those that have
to do with kinship are noted by Eriksen. The reality of the nation-state is pro-
claimed by postulating that “political boundaries” are “coterminous with cul-
tural boundaries” (Ethnicity and Nationalism 109). Further, in describing the
nation-state more generally as a political system, Eriksen mentions the use of
legitimate violence and taxation, the use of a bureaucratic administration and
 Ethnicity and the Fate of the Nation 103

a written legislation encompassing all citizens, uniform (or ideally uniform)

educational system, a shared labor market, and often a national language that
might preclude the use of vernaculars in certain situations (see Eriksen Eth-
nicity and Nationalism 109). As opposed to ethnic nationalism, where “a suc-
cessful nationalism implies the linking of an ethnic ideology with a state appa-
ratus” (Ethnicity and Nationalism 108), Mauritius is proffered as providing an
example of nonethnic nationalism (see Ethnicity and Nationalism 116–18),
with two approaches: multiculturalism and the nation as a nonethnic (ethni-
cally neutral) entity. As I have shown in chapter 4, it is precisely within such
a positioning (examined through the prime minister’s speeches) that the his-
torical reality of Africans could be elided.
We have noted the revival of Indian languages as well as of Chinese in
the educational system with no such move having been made with regard to
any African languages, real or imagined.23 The idea of introducing Swahili
was proposed around independence, but this never gained any currency.24 The
most visible valorization of Africa comes in a connection with négritude by
the Mauritian poet Edouard Maunick.25 More recently, as suggested in chap-
ter 4, connections especially through music and other newer means for the
younger generation to connect with international currents are already chang-
ing the identity politics of Mauritius. The lack of adequate and easily
accessed symbols for the Creole population calls attention to the division in
this section between the mulâtres (of whiter skin and therefore with the pos-
sibility of “passing”) and the créoles (with a definite “trace” of African blood),
supposedly by skin color, but also historically to mark the difference between
the “ordinary” next-generation of former slaves, and those who could “credi-
bly” claim white blood. The introduction of the latter group into the higher
echelons of society through access to education and placement in the admin-
istration in fairly large numbers indicates a creation of the new, intermediary
class. This is what Wallerstein describes in post–World War II Africa as the
“administrative bourgeoisie” (141). He is referring here to the educated
“cadres” who are relatively well paid and employed by the government.26 In
the context of Mauritius, we could consider the entry of Creoles, especially
the mulâtres into the administration, from as early as the mid-nineteenth
century in the formation of a certain part of the bourgeoisie. As the reverend
Patrick Beaton, who spent five years in Mauritius at this time noted, numer-
ous whites were
content (to use a local phrase) to live and to die comme ça même [just like
that], and after death they bequeath their property and their name to
their coloured offspring. It is in this way, principally, that the gradual
transference of property has been effected and so general and widely
104 Hybridity

spread are the connexions [sic] to which we allude, that it is probable that
in the course of a century or two, the white population will be absorbed
by the coloured, or that the few remaining descendants of the former
lords of the soil will become the servants of a class whom they detest. (17)

Although the white population did not get completely “absorbed” they cer-
tainly did not become the “servants” of the mixed-bloods either, as Beaton
suggested. They have, however, become a very small, if still powerful, minor-
ity, currently at about 2 percent of the entire population.
Useful from Eriksen is his conception of “nationalism and ethnicity as
ideologies which stress the cultural similarity of their adherents” (Us and Them
51). Still, one must ask if an investment in cultural similarity within perceived
ethnic groups can hinder recognition of structural similarities in relation to
the national unit—similarities, which, I believe, can be equally read as “cul-
tural” if not “ethnic.” Would a serious acknowledgment of structural position
necessarily result in a mitigation of “ethnic” differences? Let us accept that
nationalism, based on the preceding discussion on the subject, is an invest-
ment in the nation-state as a politically sovereign and legitimate entity; and
that ethnicity is the communication or notation of a specific difference within
the national sphere, presented in cultural terms. Do structural differences not
generate their own cultures, which exist with and in combination with these
“ethnic” differences; do they not inform the communication of these ethnic
differences? I have suggested that the nation-state in fact requires such struc-
tural hierarchies for its very constitution.
The implicit suggestion of the anthropological model is that somehow
culture can be extricated from its knotty entanglements with the political his-
tory of the groups in question and from its specific articulation within a pro-
visional, structural totality. As Mbembe has noted, in recent scholarly work
(on Africa), “[o]nly rarely is there recourse to the effects of the longue durée to
explain the paths taken by different societies and to account for the contra-
dictory contemporary phenomena” (6). The extrication of culture from deep
structural and long historical realities is not incompatible, however, with the
new theories of postcolonial hybridity. In both cases, a hybrid quality is what
somehow proves to be the result of creativity and agency that escapes histori-
cal binding, while the extent to which history and structure themselves pro-
duce hybridity is less evident. It is of central concern in this book that radical
agency in “hybrid” locations risks being obscured if the particular paths taken
by different societies are not accounted for within notions of creolization.
 CHAPTER SIX

Interrogating Hybridity

Subaltern Agency and Totality Through

Edouard Glissant’s POÉTIQUE DE LA RELATION

Edouard Glissant’s vast writings have entered postcolonial theory in rather

tentative ways.1 Throughout his work, he develops a poetics of Relation that is
presented more specifically in the work of the same title. Much of the difficulty
that is now commonly associated with Glissant’s œuvre lies in what I read to
be a Marxian attempt to both inscribe a functional-instrumental version of cul-
ture as well as fulfill its more utopian ideals. In privileging this double aspect,
I will be formulating a reading, against the grain, of Glissant’s Poétique de la
Relation. My central interest is to follow how it seeks to satisfy the deepest
Marxist impulses while fleeing a Marxist idiom. In tracing the large theoreti-
cal sweeps it shares with Marxism, I see many fruitful connections between
Glissant’s thought and Western Marxism, which was heavily influenced by a
resuscitation of the Hegelian sub-text of Marx and Engels’ writing.2
Glissant’s poetics of Relation is primarily concerned with the ways in
which different cultures encountering one another in contingent historical cir-
cumstances transform themselves and each other into new and unforeseeable
entities. Such a concern is central to other theories that abound in postcolonial
studies as expressed in terms such as creolization, métissage, hybridity, and even
diaspora.3 In my view, Glissant’s departure from the strategy identifiable in
many of these theories arises, essentially, from the attention he pays to the
notion of totality. This reorientation has consequences for the way in which
specific encounters in history can be theorized from Glissant’s hybridity.

105
106 Hybridity

In his novels Glissant consistently seeks to dethrone the authoritative

narrator. But I am less inclined to see this aesthetic move to be indicative of
the author’s more modest approach to narrative. Michael Dash suggests such
an interpretation for Glissant’s avoidance of an authoritative narrator,
attributing it to the author’s belief that “poetic discoveries” are after all likely
to suffer the same fate as “historical discoveries” (53). The idea that knowledge
is provisional and often revised by subsequent discoveries is not objectionable
in the framework of Glissant’s work. However, his coining of the terms Rela-
tion with a capital “R” that informs much else he produces, and Tout-monde,
which becomes the title of a novel, suggests something more ambitious. The
narrative tactics contain fairly large aspirations that can be better understood
alongside Glissant’s theoretical stance toward language and subjectivity that
we shall examine in this paper. For me, there is no doubt that Glissant is inter-
ested in a type of grand-scale theorizing that seeks to transform/realize the
large reality/utopia his thought posits and envisions. Glissant’s thought, in
this reading, has tremendous significance for privileging the notion of agency
while understanding hybridity in the contemporary world.

Dialectics of RELATION

Glissant provides three terms that work together within his theory of hybridy:
métissage, creolization, and Relation.4 If métissage is the initial shock (“choc”)
or encounter (“rencontre”) that anticipates a synthesis (“synthèse”), creoliza-
tion is the more active (altering, differentiating) process that diffracts (“dif-
fracte”) (see Poetics 34 / Poétique 46). Métissage refers to an encounter that is
recorded as a cognitive shock, which can then allow us to track difference; it
is also identifiable as a moment in reality that opens up the possibility of the
process of creolization. While métissage could lead toward a process that priv-
ileges synthesis by the erasure, or at least the recuperation, of difference, in it
also resides the possibility for the complex process of creolization that Glis-
sant describes and admires. Creolization entails a dynamic process in which
difference continues to function and proliferate as a constitutive reality and as
a basis for thought and action (see Prabhu and Quayson 226–27). So the sig-
nificance of métissage is always to be understood retroactively, tracking back
to a moment when radically defined difference is identifiable as preceding the
encounter. The greater the success of the ensuing process as synthesis accom-
panied by the erasure of differences, the more the moment of métissage
“fades” [“s’en efface”] (Poétics 91 / Poétique 106).
Marxist thinkers have, likewise, differentially privileged the relationship
between action and understanding or practice and theory according to the exi-
 Interrogating Hybridity 107

gencies at hand. Métissage in Glissant speaks directly to this issue in that it is

a retroactive understanding, which can privilege the revolutionary potential of
a moment. Glissant’s desire to bring together action and thought can be seen
as continuing the efforts of a long history of Marxist-informed thought
regarding the relationship of theory and practice. Such a move is enabled by
his umbrella concept, Relation.
According to Glissant’s description:

Relation is not to be confused with the cultures we are discussing nor

with the economy of their internal relationships nor even the intangible
results of the intricate involvement of all internal relationships with all
possible external relationships. Nor is it to be confused with some mar-
velous accident that might suddenly occur apart from any relationship,
the known unknown, in which chance would be the magnet. Relation is
all these things at once. (Poetics 170–71)

This description is a performance of the idea of Relation itself. The reader is

put under pressure to hold the ideas of what it is not before being instructed
that it is all those things at the same time. In this manner Glissant approaches
what Fredric Jameson calls dialectical writing, where it is “as though you could
not say any one thing until you had first said everything; as though with each
new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system” (Marxism and
Form 306). There is no space for a passive consumer of Glissant’s writing
given the way the reader is drawn into the text. Relation requires an explicit
engagement of the intellect and, as we will see, Glissant demands of each indi-
vidual an ethical engagement in encountering otherness. Still, it is clear that
Glissant grounds his work in the Caribbean culture he discusses, engages the
specificities within it (drawing also from his earlier discussion in Caribbean
Discourse), and envisages relationships that exceed those within the
Caribbean. At the same time, he makes room for unforeseeable contacts,
which preclude a completely rational predictability.
A fuller appreciation of the complexity that Glissant wants to preserve
emerges upon close examination of his elaboration of Relation itself: “[W]hen
we speak of a poetics of Relation, we no longer need to add: relation between
what and what? This is why the French word Relation, which functions some-
what like an intransitive verb, could not correspond, for example, to the Eng-
lish term relationship” (Poetics 27). Here, a Hegelian-Marxist idiom is sug-
gested through a similarity with Hegel’s rejection of pre-Kantian thought,
which relied on understanding and functioned by attributing predicates that
could keep categories separate and mutually exclusive. Glissant’s reticence to
allow a one-to-one relationship and his preference for the more complex
108 Hybridity

notion of Relation can be seen as the espousal of dialectical thought privileged

by Hegel and taken up as a central feature of analyses by Marx and Engels.
Relation requires a constant figuring of the entire totality within which spe-
cific concepts and interactions become coherent. While discrete moments are
privileged as in postcolonial theories of hybridity, which focus on the contact
of otherness, such moments cannot be left as discrete and isolated in the act
of understanding.5 Likewise, for a Marxist critic: “There is no content for
dialectical thought, but total content” ( Jameson Marxism and Form 306).
Specifically in unearthing the Hegelian subtext of Glissant’s theory of
Relation, we could see the progression in Glissant from métissage to creoliza-
tion and then Relation as carrying the flavor of Hegel’s three “moments” of
understanding, dialectical thought, and positive or speculative reason. It is of
course to be understood here that for Hegel, reality implies that which we can
speak about in the sense of a totality: it is the unity of the subject that can
know the object and the object that can be known by the subject. Métissage
and Hegel’s understanding rest upon the heterogeneity of real objects, which
are given in their specific difference. Creolization and dialectical thought
involve an acknowledgment of the fact that every characteristic is self-contra-
dictory. For Hegel, everything contains its negation and in being linked with
its opposite must, in a sense, become what it is not. The tendency in creoliza-
tion to seek out opposition and privilege a process in which each element does
not remain the same but approaches its opposite, with which it is confronted
in the moment of métissage, contains the spirit of Hegelian dialectics. In its
final stage of Reason, for Hegel, thought transcends “the ‘either-or’ mode of
thinking and [. . .] recognize[s] the unity, the difference, and the identity of
opposites which, according to the Understanding are incompatible with each
other” ( Jordan 102). In Relation, likewise, this idea of opposites is not col-
lapsed, but rather embraced just as it is “recognized” in Reason. Hegel char-
acterizes this final stage of speculative reason by “the grasping of opposites in
their unity or of the positive in the negative” (Hegel 56).
Glissant preserves this sense of opposition in processes of relationality
with his idea that every people has the right to opacity. But he also, like Hegel,
links this sense of contradiction not simply to the objective world but also to
subjective cognition. The suggestion of some kind of resistance in opacity has
deep resonance, in this comparison, with Marx’s explanation of the seemingly
consensual relationship between the capitalist and the worker: “[. . .] [T]hat
relationship only constitutes itself within the process of production, and the
capitalist, who exists only as a potential purchaser of labour, becomes a real
capitalist only when the worker, who can be turned into a wage-labourer only
through the sale of his capacity for labour, really does submit to the commands
 Interrogating Hybridity 109

of capital” [all italics in original] (Marx Capital 989). The suggestion right
through this passage is that breaking out of this process of production and de-
linking from this relationship with the capitalist are truly in the hands of the
worker, who makes the entire system “real.” Such a relationship is only con-
ceivable within the established system of capitalism. In Poetics opacity protects
the sanctity and inaccessibility of “poetic intention” throughout the successful
process of writing and reading themselves (see 115). In Relation, opacity func-
tions as a corrective to essentializing or reducing the entity behind action
without canceling the value of subjectivity because, as we shall see, its ethical
engagement will be called upon to face contradiction. In this sense, for Glis-
sant refusal to fully expose poetic intention through the notion of difference
is the authorial refusal to be recuperated by the system of Europeanization, re-
colonization, canonization, or perhaps even capitalization. But opacity as a
concept only functions in this relationship with a/the dominant other(s). The
aesthetic task before the writer seeking Relation can be seen within the same
project as that of the class-conscious proletariat (seeking revolution). In each
case, what we find is a theoretical acknowledgment of the power of the worker
and the writer, respectively, to short circuit an entire system.
Glissant suggests the impossibility of grasping Relation in terms of any-
thing but itself. “We must [. . .] abandon this apposition of Being and beings:
renounce the fruitful maxim whereby Being is relation, to consider that Rela-
tion alone is relation” (Poetics 170). For Hegel

[. . .] there is not an infinite which is first of all infinite and only subse-
quently has need to become finite, to go forth into finitude; on the con-
trary, it is on its own account just as much finite as infinite. [It is there-
fore erroneous to assume] that the infinite, on the one side, exists by
itself, and that the finite which has gone forth from it into a separate exis-
tence—or from whatever source it might have come—is in its separation
from the infinite truly real; but it should rather be said that this separa-
tion is incomprehensible. [italics in original] (153)

Clearly, then, particular instances of being do not somehow all together sim-
ply become Being; likewise, in order to understand Relation, it is not enough
to figure various instances of particular relations. Therefore, while examining
Relation always implies the relation of all possible things and their interrela-
tions, it is impossible to name that totality, capture it or delimit, once and for
all, its boundaries. Here, Glissant activates the Hegelian dialectic of the uni-
versal and particular, and ends up “siding,” like Hegel in Adorno’s words, with
the universal (326). But this should in no way be seen as sacrificing the par-
ticular for the universal. What Adorno noted for Hegel can be seen as a strong
110 Hybridity

tendency in Glissant, for whom “not only particularity but the particular itself
is unthinkable without the moment of the universal which differentiates the
particular, puts its imprint on it, and in a sense is needed to make a particular
of it” (328). Hegel’s statement is that although Being is indeterminate, it does
not become the “opposite of determinate being” (Hegel 153). Neither métis-
sage nor creolization can be understood without the all-encompassing notion
of Relation, within whose logic they come to function as the conflictual, pro-
ductive processes Glissant describes. In this way, we can see that Glissant’s
ultimate interest in Caribbean creolization is anchored in a larger totality of
processual Relation.
Glissant’s writing—both theoretical and fictional or poetic—has the
effect of circularity, with characters who reappear, ideas that come back and
are repeated, changed, and revised.6 While a spiraling repetition that occurs at
a higher level is a typically Marxian metaphor the idea of thought as an inte-
gral process of reality itself in Glissant will allow for further development of
this parallelism.

Contradiction and Alienation in Glissant

The importance of the moment of métissage in Glissantian thinking is clear.

Métissage as a stage in the apprehension of reality has been shown in the
comparison with Hegel’s stages of thought. Here, however, I want to show
how this idea additionally activates a clearly Marxian concept of contradiction
in its strongest terms: contradiction as the essential catalyst of change. In a
rather more traditional Marxian formulation, contradiction is registered at
various levels in society. But the most salient and pertinent type of contradic-
tion is that between the interests of groups that then, in this formulation, must
coalesce into classes in the conscious identification of these contradictory
interests. It is most strongly articulated, of course, in the concept of alienation.
In the process of production, the relationship between the laborer and prod-
uct as subject and object becomes reversed when the former loses control over
what is produced, resulting in an alienation of the laborer from the product.
Further, when what counts is objectified labor itself, the laborer is alienated
from both the product of the labor and his/her humanness.
The root of the problem for Marx, as explained in Capital is the distanc-
ing or alienation in the sense of divestiture [Verräusserung] that accompanies
the process of commodification, when these products “strip off every trace of
their natural and original use-value, and of the particular kind of useful labour
to which they owe their creation” (204). The process in which the laborer alien-
ates [entfremdet] his labor-power by treating it as a commodity as s/he enters
 Interrogating Hybridity 111

into its sale to the “buyer,” is vividly described in these terms: “He who was pre-
viously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor
of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is
intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has
brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but—a
tanning” (Marx Capital 280). The alienation of the product of labor from labor,
between the objective conditions of labor and subjective labor power is the
basis of capitalist production and indeed draws in and creates the capitalist and
the worker as such. The worker’s power is transformed not only into com-
modities but also into capital, an alien power that dominates the worker (see
Marx Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 71). The capitalist produces
labor-power abstracted from the laborer. In this way the worker as a wage-
laborer is reproduced or perpetuated and becomes the necessary condition for
capitalist production (see Capital 716). The awakening of the laborer’s con-
sciousness and his realization of the scope of his own agency in the process are
crucial to Marx’s conception of revolutionary change, as we have already noted.
For Glissant, on the other hand, métissage is a moment of a brutal shock,
or an encounter of radical and irreconcilable difference. As we saw, it is in
tracking backward from a diffracting process of creolization that métissage is
restored in all its fullness. The idea of class-consciousness involves awareness of
a particular relationship of an exploited group to a larger reality and also has to
be anchored in an historical consciousness. We may recall Glissant’s call on the
ethical subjectivity to bring together the theoretical and the social through his
notion of opacity. Such a desire is recognizable in Fredric Jameson’s writing,
which shares many of the same impulses as Glissant’s work. In fact the frequent
inscription of the problematic of the distance between thought and reality
becomes the very fertile ground for much of Jameson’s investigative energy.7
From Lucien Goldmann to Raymond Williams to Fredric Jameson, Marxists
in different guises have struggled to bring together the aesthetic and the social
in the context of their projects. The processes ensuing from métissage construct
it as a cognitive shock in Glissant’s theory, and participate in progressive con-
sciousness of reality, as we have seen.8 For Glissant, differences and their
encounter do not work toward homogenizing difference upon the resolution of
contradiction. Still, when difference is historicized, the challenge is to preserve
it while simultaneously maintaining equality across differences that have, most
often, been predicated upon inequality.
If a Marxian idea of contradiction is understood as the precondition for
a productive antagonism that creates social upheaval, Glissant’s refusal to
abandon radical difference provides a revised view of this idea. It indicates that
even in a utopian mode, it is now impossible to envisage a classless or at least
112 Hybridity

a nonhierarchical society. Furthermore, it is also unproductive to do so, for this

would be to endorse a static configuration, which can today be made to sug-
gest a negative hegemony. Such a view is not incompatible with contemporary
post-Marxist theories. For Laclau and Mouffe, “there cannot be a radical pol-
itics without the definition of an adversary. That is to say, it requires the accep-
tance of the ineradicability of antagonism” (xvii). Similarly, for Jameson, it is
essential to conceive of a “perpetual cultural revolution, [which] can be appre-
hended and read as the deeper and more permanent constitutive structure in
which the empirical textual objects know intelligibility” (Political Unconscious
97). Glissant’s thought, then, in this respect, makes similar moves to those of
more recognizable, even if diverse, contemporary Marxists and post-Marxists.
Glissant tackles contradiction in his study of the dissociation between
language and subjectivity in the Martinican psyche. French was imposed on
vast, different, non-French, and then Creole speaking classes. At the same
time, Glissant incisively argues that Creole is not tied to any form of real pro-
duction and hence has become a sort of folklore. Language for Glissant is the
privileged site for Relation, but his treatment of language is intricately linked
to the actual language situation in Martinique. With Martinique’s depart-
mental status, there is no authentic self-generated production in the island.
Creole language has not been allowed to develop with and through the cre-
ative production of a people and this is the case particularly after departmen-
talization.9 Therefore, Glissant’s opposition to an accelerated and institutional
development of Creole was informed by his belief that until we can claim a
language develops from within a process of productivity, to promote it in any
artificial manner is to encourage a folkloric space of inauthenticity. Still,
French has functioned, like much else in Martinican culture, as an import. It
does not carry the inflection of a sustained history, remains spoken with
unease, and cannot, therefore, be the site of forging effective Relation until it
is appropriated through a process of production in which it participates and is
embedded. The arising alienation from language in Martinique separates the
individual from society and from a process of production (or a lack of it).10
I believe Glissant’s concept of alienation is a development of and from the
Marxian account of it. What is innovative here is the fact that it is not only
“work” but also a distance and isolation from it and from the production of what
is simply consumed (French culture, language, education, images), that can bring
about alienation. Glissant’s critique of the lack of consciousness of this alien-
ation from language in the adoption of French and an inability to see the need
for the centrality of Martinicans’ engagement with their production, culture, and
language calls up the way in which Marx explains the distortion operated by the
capitalist mode of production. In this context, “it is not only things—the prod-
 Interrogating Hybridity 113

ucts of labour, both use-values and exchange-values—that rise up on their hind

legs and face the worker and confront him as ‘Capital.’ But even the social form
of labour appears as a form of development of capital, and hence the productive
forces of social labour so developed appear as the productive forces of capital-
ism” (Marx Capital 1054). Conversely, Martinicans’ adoption of French and
their command of it give them a self-satisfied appearance of success or progress
whereas, as Glissant explains, their inability to participate in the process of cre-
ating and shaping the language (an inability that has far reaching significance
for its perpetuation in every aspect of their existence within a French Overseas
Department) is neglected. In capitalist production “the development of the social
productive forces of labour and the conditions of that development come to
appear as the achievement of capital, an achievement which the individual worker
endures passively, and which progresses at his expense” (Marx Capital 1055). In
a reversed situation, Martinicans believe they are fully participating in French
culture when in fact they are only passive consumers of it. On the other hand,
the achievements of the worker in capitalist production are presented as the
achievement of capital. This not only obscures his contribution but also does not
materially recompense it, thus stripping the laborer of the means to participate
in the fruits of such achievements.
I have suggested earlier a more ambitious project in the narrative of Glis-
sant’s novels than might be evident. His narrative structure delivers the type of
dissociation he envisages between authoritative speakers and language. Many
other postcolonial authors experiment with the narrative authority of a singu-
lar, speaking subject as part of a strategy to posit collective, disjunctive voices
in their fiction. Here, this historically marked split between language and sub-
jectivity ensues from the alienation of Martinicans from their labor in a partic-
ular way. In understanding Martinicans’ relationship with French Glissant acti-
vates the senses of alienation (especially as Entäusserung) Marx uses in
describing the ways in which the laborer is alienated: the idea of alienation in
the sense of selling something and renouncing that which is intrinsically yours
(for Martinicans we might say their identity or more poetically, their “soul”)
such as your own relationship with a culture and history you create; as well as
alienation in the sense of making external to oneself: here by adopting and liv-
ing in a language in which the self that is created cannot be annexed to the cre-
ator, much as labor gets separated from the one who labors. As Karin Barber
has shown, such an engagement with “real” “indigenous languages is woefully
lacking in postcolonial studies of all persuasions. Postcolonial theories of
hybridity in their most sophisticated (generalized) guise are unable to embrace
and explicate concrete language politics as elements of the hybrid. Instead they
opt to strategically engage with language in a metaphorical sense.
114 Hybridity

Glissant Historicized

Glissant’s innovative accomplishments can be seen against at least two con-

texts. The first being the properly Martinican context where Glissant’s two
compatriots automatically become interlocutors of his thought. Frantz Fanon,
proclaimed Marxist in his early association with François Tosquelles as well as
with his revolutionary work in Algeria; the other, Aimé Césaire, representa-
tive in the French Constituent Assembly on the Communist Party ticket.
Both figures with mythical status within Martinique as well as in the post-
colonial world. Césaire only resigned from the French Communist Party in
1956 to form the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais. It was around this time that
Edouard Glissant would be expulsed from Martinique for his work with the
Algerians. If Glissant, in his public persona, resisted the type of huge monu-
mental “arrival” that the revolutionary figures of both Fanon and Césaire
evoke, this gesture can also be read as an attempt to differentiate his career and
image from those of these figures.11 Glissant’s own style is adapted to one who
will linger and stay and whose career would be more easily characterized by
the rhythms of a long relationship between himself and a reading public rather
than by the sort of love at first sight of a brilliant, but short, affair.
The second context I wish to evoke includes two significant moments in
French intellectual history, the first being Alexandre Kojève’s Hegel seminars
between 1933 and 1939 at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. These semi-
nars were, as is well known, a clearly Marxist rendering of Hegel in which the
master-slave dialectic was privileged to propel the image of the proletariat as the
emancipator of mankind.12 While the seminar itself was attended by such fig-
ures as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan, the full impact of these lec-
tures can be said to have hit the intellectual scene in 1947, when Raymond Que-
neau published the students’ notebooks and other articles by Kojève. The second
moment is the seminars by Jean Hyppolite at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Nor-
male Supérieure from 1949. He translated the Phenomenology of the Spirit into
French between 1939 and 1941, and his lectures were attended by the likes of
Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Louis Althusser, and of course, Jacques Der-
rida. He privileged, for his part, the unhappy consciousness as man’s recognition
of the absolute and his awareness, at the same time, that this absolute is beyond
humanity. Hyppolite’s lectures were very much concerned with the individual as
a subject of history as well as a product of it. The self-other relationship
became pertinent in conjunction with the importance accorded to dialectical
thinking, in which life could not be separated from thought. These ideas were
making their indelible mark on French intellectual thought in the 1960s when
Glissant was forced out of Martinique for subversive activities. By this time,
 Interrogating Hybridity 115

Fanon was already a notorious figure with his untimely death in 1961 adding
to the mythic status of his revolutionary life. Glissant’s investment in thought
as revolutionary suggests his own preparation of a revolutionary moment for
and from his writing.16
I believe that Glissant’s work is further illuminated when seen in the
long view of his career of some six decades of theoretical and artistic pro-
duction. While Glissant might not “invok[e] [. . .] Marx, Breton, Sartre, nor
Césaire” (Dash 2), there is no doubt that the thought of these and other rec-
ognizable figures is deeply entwined with his own—our task here is
restricted to the Marxian subtext. From my reading, Glissant submits a
transformed Marxism, in which there is a less restrictive vocabulary that can
account for the contradictions arising with and beyond class or colonialism.
He works away from a simplistic instrumental vision that rests upon one-to-
one correspondence between theory and society. He also demonstrates an
original and radical way of linking the individual and society, the enuncia-
tive and the historical, the cognitive and social. These moves are suggestive
of a creative, forward-looking thinker whose very elusiveness works res-
olutely toward productive meaningfulness. Dash writes: “The political
thrust of earlier ideologies such as cultural universality, negritude, indi-
genism, Marxism was clear. It would however be impossible to derive a sys-
tematic politics from Glissant’s poetic and generously open-ended ideal of
irreducible plurality and diversity for the Caribbean” (24). While Dash is
quite right that Glissant’s work resists neat categorization, the substructure
of his entire thought rests on what we can identify as the Marxian dialectic.
Contra Dash, then (and polemically here), Marxism is not an “ideology” in
the sense that a particular (or even distorted) way of thinking gains hege-
mony by influencing how people view important aspects of reality as natural:
Martinicans from Frantz Fanon to Raphaël Confiant describe a deep-seated
feeling of inferiority in their culture’s relationship with France, a situation
that does not accord with a real dominance of Marxian thought. The eupho-
ria associated with Césaire’s early politics, even if self-proclaimedly Marx-
ist, was, in the general consensus, unsuccessful in forging the type of collec-
tivity any version of Marxism would envisage and culminated in
departmentalization for Martinique. In fact, the way in which Glissant
frames the most urgent problems faced by Martinique is based in clearly
Marxian terms: alienation and a lack of productivity. Also, while the word
“systematic” might intuitively be counter to Glissant’s impulses, plurality
and diversity do not preclude a notion of totality, as we have seen. Glissant’s
utopian vision is fiercely committed to a political agenda for Relation, which
aims at changing the world.14
116 Hybridity

Agency

That the language, structure, and processes of Marxian (inseparable from

Hegelian) thought are an essential part of Glissant’s, whether they are in oppo-
sition, disguised, or overtly present, is what I have indicated and shall further
argue. In the process described by Glissant, it is essential to first identify the sig-
nificant moment of (most often violent) contact: this is métissage, although it
cannot be recognized as such in the present of its appearance. As we have seen,
the moment of métissage has to be retroactively constructed. When métissage is
followed by a diffracting process rather than one of synthesis it is possible to track
back to this moment and call it up as métissage: this difference occurs in the
moment of enunciation. We might bring together Bhabha’s notion of difference
(as opposed to diversity) and the kind of alterity within creolization that Glissant
advocates as a move toward Relation.15 A process of synthesis would have ren-
dered such a move impossible because the moment of métissage is then (retroac-
tively) figured as “weak,” as we have seen earlier. Here, contingency in both its
spatial and temporal dimensions becomes clear. Bhabha’s rather abstract idea that
“the contingent is contiguity, metonymy, the touching of spatial boundaries at a
tangent, and, at the same time, the contingent is the temporality of the indeter-
minate and the undecidable” (186) is explicitly figured in Glissant’s description
of the process of creolization. The contingency of the moment is seen in time
because one cannot tell if a moment is métissage until the diffraction has been
witnessed; it is also recorded in space in that the moment of shock functions to
identify a border between differences. More interestingly, Bhabha’s notion of
active difference versus a more passive diversity goes further in Glissant who
describes the “other of thought” and “thought of the other” in much the same
way. The most basic thrust of Glissant’s thought and his theorizing impulse come
from the encounter (and not the parallel and incommensurable existence) of rad-
ical difference. For Glissant, a reality, when under analytical consideration,
becomes a theoretical process, which transforms the thinker into an agent.

Thought of the Other is the moral generosity disposing me to accept the

principle of alterity, to conceive of the world as not simple and straight-
forward, with only one truth—mine. But thought of the Other can dwell
within me without making me alter course, without ‘prizing me open,’
without changing me within myself. As an ethical principle, it is enough
that I not violate it.
The other of Thought is precisely this altering. Then I have to act. That
is the moment I change my thought, without renouncing its contribution.
I change, and I exchange. This is an aesthetics of turbulence whose corre-
sponding ethics is not provided in advance. (Glissant, Poetics 154–55)
 Interrogating Hybridity 117

The act of “thinking” (with the specifications made for it) propels action in
Glissant’s bid for collective reflection. Glissant’s métissage and creolization
startlingly privilege a conception of qualitative difference being articulated in
an encounter in the first place, rather than the classic Marxian notion (also
present in Hegel) of quantity being cumulatively transformed into qualitative
difference. It is perhaps in pushing this point further that the central task (of
privileging subaltern agency) identified by postcolonial theories of hybridity
could be better clarified. Rejecting, at the same time, an unrealistic idea of
happily coexisting otherness, Glissant’s notion of radical otherness requires
change through the cognitive process.16 While such a requirement of “deep”
transformation proceeding from antagonism forms the basis of a Marxian
view of historical change, for Glissant, the encounter of otherness itself trans-
forms people into agents by their experience of this otherness. He pays greater
attention, in this way, to agents in the process than does the Marxian render-
ing of “the people,” as central in the revolution. If the energies of Marxism are
in many ways directed toward prediction, Glissant rejects this predictability
for the unforseeable, but only within his total concept of Relation. This vision
disallows any kind of essentializing or even reduction of an acting individual
or agent or group (in terms of class, but also gender, race, or any other such
category) without restricting, as in Bhabha’s enunciative moment, any and all
possibility of coherence to that immediately available in the moment.
The other of Thought for Glissant and difference (as opposed to diver-
sity) for Bhabha are both prerequisites for pressing agency. In both cases they
lead to an active role of differentiation, which, for Bhabha, questions the lim-
its of sameness while for Glissant it explodes the cognitive into a social act. In
Bhabha’s proposal, agency becomes visible after the fact in particular enuncia-
tive moments, and, in this way, it ends up privileging a linearly defined textu-
ality. This results from the necessary though implicit theoretical distinction of
the hybrid from the nonhybrid, which privileges interpretation as the realm in
which that past action enters the present. In Glissant, the moment of contact
leads to action in the present, which is accomplished by registering contradic-
tion as being uncontainable within textuality (within the particular mode of its
inscription). In the sense of the “Other of thought” signification cannot con-
tinue without change that necessarily breaks out of this modality (representa-
tion). Introducing, in this manner, a definitive break in progression for any kind
of signifying chain, such a moment is worked into Glissant’s conception of an
aesthetics of turbulence in which is produced the ethical acting subject through
the encounter of difference. Seen as an ongoing process, métissage at different
points (from different points) makes of Relation a “chaos-world” that cannot be
understood within a linear inscription. Glissant clearly indicates the extent to
118 Hybridity

which relativizing difference is insufficient just as predictability allows an easy

morality that this poet wants to surpass: his insistence therefore that there can
be no pre-given ethics but rather one that has to be constantly re-invented
through the act of changing/exchanging/relating.
Otherness in Bhabha’s version of hybridity first challenges the coher-
ence of hegemonic (unitary) discourses. The notion of Nachträglichkeit draws
heavily from psychoanalysis and the telling process the latter involves. The
fact that social realities and their processes are closely connected with
processes of cognition in Glissant’s view of hybridity places the latter close to
psychoanalytic anamnesis. Regarding the latter, Lacan writes that “it is not a
question of reality, but of truth, because the effect of full speech is to reorder
past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come,
such as they are constituted by the little freedom through which the subject
makes them present” (Lacan Ecrits 48). If the limits of Relation are not so easy
to describe or represent in the Tout-monde of absolute Relation, the same dif-
ficulty is evident in the psychoanalytic process with which Lacan is concerned.
In a more idealistic (early) moment, Lacan comes close to the utopian element
in Relation, when he anticipates the “omnipresence of human discourse will
perhaps one day be embraced under the open sky of an omnicommunication
of its text” (Ecrits 56). The chaos (not disorder) that Glissant identifies in this
totality is also instinctively suggested by Lacan: “This is not to say that human
discourse will be any more harmonious than now” (Lacan 56), but no less
meaningful. But most significantly for us in Lacan, the inadequacy of the
intersubjective is indicated even if it is the soil for anchoring agency: “But this
is the field that our experience polarizes in a relation that is only apparently
two-way, for any positing of its structure in merely dual terms is as inadequate
to it in theory as it is ruinous for its technique” (Lacan 56). Glissant’s interest
begins with social realities and their processes only to move inward to the
most basic processes of individual recognition and construction. While his
theory begins with the wide historical sweeps of his earlier work, Relation
itself often returns to the language of the self. In the end, it shares much with
the more primeval knowing of the self through otherness with which psycho-
analysis is concerned. In Lacan, the direction is reversed in the sense that the
truth of the subject in the analysis lies beyond it: in the structuring realities of
the self that necessarily expand outward. This truth, following Freud, is to be
found in monuments (the body), archival documents (memories), semantic
evolution (the individual vocabulary), traditions (legends of the past), and the
distortions arising from the links of the traumatic moment to others around it
(see Lacan Ecrits 50). Although each of these pertains to the individual in
question, it is easy to see how they all implicate without fail, in their very
 Interrogating Hybridity 119

vocabulary, a larger societal reference. It is quite remarkable how this emi-

nently subject-driven theory meticulously connects to notions of collectivity.
In Glissant the question of who I am is insignificant when compared to the
question who we are (Caribbean Discourse 86). In these ways, the insistent pull
of the process of knowing beyond a self-other dialectic is suggestive of an
implicit totality in both Lacan and Glissant. On the other hand, while Bhahba
strongly identifies with Lacanian psychoanalysis, he rejects any discussion of
totality because “[t]he postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at holistic
forms of social explanation” (Location 173).
Disjunctive experience forms the very basis of the Caribbean worldview
for Glissant, whereas for Bhabha, it is the hybrid that, when sought out, can
disrupt what is otherwise known and knowable in a linear modality. The
Caribbean experience of resistance and agency has necessarily led its creative
agents to resort to a type of disjuncture from narrative and language by length-
ening the terms of its “moment” and thus altering the “time” of judgment (or
representation). One might say that in Glissant’s conception the labor of the
maroon (runaway slave) and storyteller to “disjoin,” is an activation of alien-
ation that cuts across the entire production and its social actants.17 The creative
production involved in breaking away from the plantation economy by the
maroon and from the bequeathed narrative of History by the storyteller respec-
tively, while recording a form of alienation, is insufficient until action proceed-
ing from it is turned into social upheaval that can lead to Relation. Relation in
its dialectical movement between thought and reality, the particular and total-
ity, cognition and action, aspires to nothing short of perpetual revolution. In
the moment of métissage, like in Jameson’s epistemological shock in dialectical
thinking, lies the utopian possibility for change that is both objective and sub-
jective, but necessarily beyond the realm of interpretation.
To be sure, the full possibility of the sign is not accounted for if we do
not acknowledge that it “itself faces simultaneously in two directions: it faces
toward the object in a ‘passive’ relation of being determined, and it faces
toward the interpretant in an ‘active’ relation of determining” (Peirce qtd. In
Parmentier 29). Most postcolonial theories of hybridity, in their eagerness to
privilege agency, seem quick to validate the active relation and prove less
enthusiastic about acknowledging the other direction. It is in this sense that
critics such as Benita Parry have questioned the disengagement of much post-
colonial theory from material reality (see Postcolonial Studies). Glissant’s work
readily embraces both and transforms the signifying process in pursuing con-
tradiction and engaging an ethics in its resolution, which necessarily exceeds
the particular interaction. One might see in it: “the simultaneous recognition
and transcendence of immediate appearances [which] is precisely the dialec-
120 Hybridity

tical nexus” (Lukács 8).

We can state following Glissant, that no social explanation is adequate
that does not itself seek (to be) change within a conception of totality. Glis-
sant’s hybridity in its meticulous movement from one stage to the next in
Relation, and in its bid for an ethical engagement called upon by contradic-
tion, accomplishes precisely this. His theory of Relation establishes a dialecti-
cal relation between heterogeneous entities and of these entities with them-
selves. It engages the relationship between them by also enlarging it to
encompass all other possible relationships. Glissant’s use of the umbrella term
Relation places his theory quite close to the more explicitly Marxian account
of inequalities that would be resolved only through total revolution.

Hybridity and Totality

With the many changes in the Twentieth Century, the Lukácsian idea of an
expressive totality and its essentializing of class became less possible to main-
tain in Marxian analyses alongside too many constituencies, which were com-
peting for a central and nameable collective agent. Althusser’s interpretation
of totality as a structure of structures made of it a theoretical form for under-
standing with less concern for a corresponding referent in reality. For Jame-
son, if totality is mode of production, in his work, capitalism forms the ulti-
mate structuring force within which actions and events of all kinds occur and
are understood. Now, in a postmodernist vocabulary, to refuse totality also
questions the very representability of reality. While the question is interesting
in and of itself, some locations, and here I wish to specify the postcolonial,
have a vested interest in the ways in which oppression is carried out and
expressed in reality. In Bhabha’s theory, the immediacy of the enunciative does
not allow the kind of abstraction and distance that is required to think a total-
ity. It is in this way that differentiation in the immediate is anomalous with
respect to the concept (or ideology, if one wishes) of totality. The crux of the
differences between much postcolonial theory on hybridity and more robustly
Marxist thought comes to rest in the position within each of them of the con-
cept of totality.
We might say that, in such a Marxian framing, Glissant’s version of
hybridity, through the idea of Relation—necessarily and always with a capital
‘R’—implicates both “the world space of multinational capital” while at the
same time “it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode
of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our position-
ing as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and strug-
gle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confu-
 Interrogating Hybridity 121

sion” ( Jameson “The Cultural Logic” 54). In this sense of “cognitive mapping”
any individual or collective act of political will necessarily engages with its sit-
uation and struggles to project its imprint outward to this vast but intercon-
nected space. As we have seen, Glissant is equally concerned with what has
remained a central Marxian problematic of the particular and the general
(what in Jameson’s formulation above contains the echo of class-conscious-
ness). This process of anchoring the enunciative moment in something other
than itself is what is explicitly neglected (or rejected) by Bhabha who stub-
bornly fixes the idea of totality as static, foreclosing any discussion of an
enlargement or expansion out from the particular: “The epistemological is
locked into the hermeneutic circle, in the description of cultural elements as
they tend towards a totality” (Location 177).
For the enunciative, Bhabha figures a more fluid space: “The enuncia-
tive is a more dialogic process that attempts to track displacements and
realignments that are the effects of cultural antagonisms and articulations—
subverting the rationale of the hegemonic moment and relocating alternative,
hybrid sites of cultural negotiation” (Location 178). It is less clear how sub-
verting the rationale of the hegemonic moment translates into action for the
subaltern from alternative locations. Subalternity is experienced, even in the
enunciative moment, in the relationship of the subaltern with the hegemonic.
While the rationale of such hegemony might be shown to be “irrational,” or
at least contingent, any theoretical project purporting to empower subalterns
should somehow address the question of undoing this hegemony—a project
that necessarily exceeds the (immediate) textual at some point. The point at
which the hybrid moment enables the move between a particular representa-
tive mode and the “outside” of such a provisionally sutured whole, which is
presumed and whose dominant logic maintains the subalternity of the subal-
tern would be crucial. The method ends for Bhabha where, for us, it must
begin.18 Endless relocation to alternative sites of negotiation which would
once again reveal the irrationality of hegemony at that point, only to revert to
relocation once more can be, somewhat reductively, named as the postmod-
ernist idea of endless textuality as process. It allows no way to connect discrete
“illogics” of hegemony.
The association of Relation to “chaos-monde” and “tout-monde” in
Glissant is a reckoning with totality. Creolization is, for him, the earthly
approximation of his idea of total Relation (of everything to everything else,
simultaneously and equally): “What took place in the Caribbean, which could
be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation for
us as nearly as possible” (Poetics 34). In evoking the comparison made with
Hegel earlier in this piece, the confusion here of moving one stage of thought
122 Hybridity

to the next reflects a more consequential tendency in Glissant to blur totality

and utopia. If Relation is a totality that is required for métissage and creoliza-
tion to gain coherence, without the complex process of creolization as a model
(which depends on the encounter in métissage), Relation would be unthink-
able. But Relation contains within it the utopian element of Glissant’s thought
as a world in which there is total on-going creolization without exception. We
can theorize further from Glissant Relation as totality and Relation as utopia.
However, in Relation, we find a complex linking of analytical totality to an
original theorization of agency, guided by an impulse to move that totality
toward utopia. The lack of a proper intervention of any idea of totality to
accompany the privileged agency of the subaltern, noted in Bhabha’s enuncia-
tive present and characteristic of most postcolonial understandings of hybrid-
ity, is what marks the incommensurability between these theories and Glis-
sant’s more particularly Marxian rendering of the same. In this, we might say
with Neil Lazarus, at least with specific reference to hybridity in postcolonial
studies, that “the conceptual reach of Marxism is superior to that of the prob-
lematics prevalent in the field” (Nationalism 15). Glissant’s Relation is predi-
cated upon a more immediate connection between thought and reality than
even a Marxian derived formulation of dialectics while it simultaneously
addresses the idea of the subject mediating between them.
Glissant’s poetics of Relation has begun a most provocative reframing of
Marxism for a world where the idea of “difference” could simply collapse into
incoherence, or worse, lead to complacency. The challenge that difference
poses for a conception of revolution is seen in the maneuvers of postcolonial
hybridity. Such maneuvers include a general resistance to accord a more con-
sequential place to true contradiction and its potential for restructuring as well
as to conceive of an analytical category of totality within which this might be
theorized. Utopian longings for revolutionary agency without these concepts
become meaningless. Glissant’s writing, under the aegis of Relation, rethinks
precisely the notion of revolution and responds to inexhaustible claims or
branding of “difference.” My suggestion is that all those interested in theoriz-
ing difference in the contemporary world (and Marxist-minded thinkers in
particular) would find reason to pause and consider his thought.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

Narration in Frantz Fanon’s

PEAU NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS

Some Reconsiderations for Hybridity

Frantz Fanon’s writings remain one of the most influential œuvres from which
postcolonial criticism draws. His work is referred to in discussions on, among
other things, violence, nationalism, inequality, racism, capitalism, elitism, sexu-
ality, and ethnicity in both the postcolonial nation state and various metropol-
itan contexts. Given that the essays in Black Skin, White Masks (hereafter
BSWM) are all about the unremitting opposition of black and white as onto-
logically incompatible spaces, the keen interest in Fanon by theorists of hybrid-
ity requires further thought. One of the pitfalls of Homi K. Bhabha’s appro-
priation of Fanon has been to read hybridity in Fanon in ways that are
untenable, undoing or at least playing down the oppositionality on which much
of Fanon’s thinking is predicated even in this earlier text.1 As Neil Lazarus has
noted, the appropriation of BSWM by this influential theorist of hybridity has
been from “back to front” “thereby falsifying the testimony of Fanon’s own evo-
lution as a theorist” (“Disavowing Decolonization” 87). Nevertheless, for Paul
Gilroy Fanon is less helpful in the current world because “his thinking remains
bound to a dualistic logic we must now abjure” even to ask how cultural analy-
ses and politics “might contribute to the new humanism he called for thirty
years ago” (Small Acts 253). I will show the continuing relevance of Fanon’s
thought owing, precisely, to the multiplicity of strategies he employs, which
could potentially tie it to a notion of hybridity. Critics have also demonstrated
that, in general, Fanon has been read out of context by theorists and isolated

123
124 Hybridity

from the body of his entire work.2 Here, I provide a close reading of parts of
BSWM to show the ways in which Fanon’s text (a) could give a different pro-
file and understanding to the notion of hybridity and (b) requires keen atten-
tion to its narrative processes. In doing so, I will also draw attention to the
manner in which the affect of this text becomes central to its theoretical moves.

Some Specifications for the Following Reading

My interest in this text is to first note how a certain conception of agency is pro-
grammatically laid out. This idea is of central importance to contemporary
notions of hybridity, for which agency is a central preoccupation. Stuart Hall and
Homi Bhabha, to take the most prominent readers of Fanon in such a context,
pay little attention to Fanon himself as providing a coherent theorizing on the in-
between. Rather, the metaphors, language, and tone of BSWM are extended and
even adopted in a rereading in which, particularly with reference to Bhabha, it is
hard to see where Fanon’s discourse ends and the later critics’ begins.
As the title of his book indicates, Fanon’s writing is about two radically
different spaces: the space of the white colonizer and that of the black (often
specifically Antillean) native. Fanon writes from his experience of being a
black man in France in BSWM. The poignancy of these inspiring, poetic, per-
sonal essays comes, in effect, from such a separation between black and white.
The fact that the black skin and white mask are configured from the same sub-
ject position—simultaneously or alternately—generates the need for negotia-
tion that theorists such as Bhabha or Stuart Hall have rightly seized in their
readings of Fanon.3 The idea of delaying the definitive interpretive moment,
suggested early in this text by the “perpetual question” (BSWM 29), is a seduc-
tive invitation to acknowledge in Fanonian thought the precursor of post-
modernist deferral and holds great possibility to read Fanon through Bhabha’s
notion of hybridity. However, I will further explore Fanon’s text in an attempt
to elucidate the wider implications for, and critique of, this dominant concep-
tion of hybridity in relation to Fanon.
Hybridity, in its colonial version was predicated on the superiority of the
white race. Hybrid examples of humans were seized to either reiterate that
humans formed one species (by the monogenists) or to contest this conception
by suggesting these different groups were incompatible and therefore to be con-
sidered naturally distinct (by the polygenists). Hybrids were of interest and pre-
sented a challenge to the colonial administration in its categorization of the dif-
ferent groups to be administered in the colonies (Dubois 99). Still, whether
monogenist or polygenist, whether the argument was used for or against slav-
ery, race subordination remained a constant. Robert Young defends hybridity (or
 Narration in Frantz Fanon’s P E A U NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS 125

hybridizing readings) as theorized by Bhabha, against the bulk of criticism of

the latter’s work. Such criticism focused on aspects of Bhabha’s work in general
(along with that of Said and Spivak in postcolonial criticism) that privilege tex-
tuality without paying sufficient attention to a politics of action. According to
Young’s defense, Bhabha’s work is not incompatible with, and does not preclude,
a more politically engaged form of analyses or indeed opposition, providing
instead a “significant framework for that other work” (163). What becomes evi-
dent in my reading of Fanon’s narrative, however, is that at a more basic textual
level, Bhabha’s hybridity, despite the latter’s ceaseless return to Fanon, is indeed
incompatible with Fanon’s central ideas about the encounter with otherness.
Relying on what he calls the “language metaphor,” which he identifies in the
work of Cornel West and Stuart Hall in contemporary cultural studies, Bhabha
shifts the emphasis from a more bland idea of cultural diversity to cultural dif-
ference. Even though this reorientation is indeed powerful, his development of
the notion of agency “outside the sentence,” (Location 180) remains unconvinc-
ing. This is because it is unclear how the specification of the “enunciative pre-
sent [. . .] provide[s] a process by which objectified others may be turned into
subjects of their history and experience” (Location 178). Without engaging in a
full discussion of this issue, we may note with others the conflation of the realm
of interpretation with the realm of other forms of action that occurs consistently
in Bhabha’s book. Fanon’s disagreement with Sartre, which we will examine,
clearly indicates the inadequacy to him of a notion of agency that could be
“deprived of subjectivity” (Location 191). Agency, for Fanon, is deeply inter-
twined with, and can only proceed from, a feeling of “authentic” subjectivity. As
we saw in chapter six, Bhabha’s picture of totality, which is constraining and
nondialectic in the association he makes between this concept and the episte-
mological (Location 177) as opposed to a more processual description of the
enunciative is also incompatible with another basic requirement of Fanon’s
analyses. This lack of any notion of totality in Bhabha as well as his unwilling-
ness to name the subject cannot be reconciled with the fundamental impulses of
Fanon’s work. 4 For Fanon, on the other hand, the black man’s subjecthood
within the totality of colonial domination becomes the substructure of BSWM.
In what follows, I will examine two key passages that, to my mind, pre-
sent Fanon’s writing (BSWM in particular), as not just an inviting text on
which hybridity can be projected, but one where there occurs a specific dra-
matizing of the moves essential to a theory of hybridity. My close reading of
parts of Fanon’s text will show that neglect of the specific chronology and tac-
tics in the narration, particularly of “The Fact of Blackness,” makes for rather
inaccurate assertions regarding statements that are attributed to Fanon’s
authorial “I.”
126 Hybridity

Theorizing from Fanon: Consequences for Hybridity

Fanon lays out how a reading of interactivity must proceed from the level of
the individual consciousness. Such a conception cannot be overlooked by
those allying Fanon’s thought with hybridity because the latter concept in
postcolonial studies is concerned with theorizing and enabling the agency of
subaltern subjects, which can be seen as the main impetus of intellectual and
political activity in this field. In this framework, Fanon gives a very clear artic-
ulation of a notion of totality. This is the first of two key passages I wish to
signal in relation to a theoretical discussion of hybridity via Fanon:

L’homme est mouvement vers le monde et vers son semblable. Mouve-

ment d’agressivité, qui engendre l’asservissement ou la conquête; mouve-
ment d’amour, don de soi, terme final de ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler
l’orientation éthique. Toute conscience semble pouvoir manifester, simul-
tanément ou alternativement, ces deux composantes. Energétiquement,
l’être aimé m’épaulera dans l’assomption de ma virilité, tandis que le souci
de mériter l’admiration ou l’amour d’autrui tissera tout le long de ma
vision du monde une superstructure valorisante” (Peau noire 33).
Man is motion toward the world and toward his like. A movement of
aggression, which leads to enslavement or to conquest; a movement of
love, a gift of self, the ultimate stage of what by common accord is called
ethical orientation. Every consciousness seems to have the capacity to
demonstrate these two components, simultaneously or alternatively. The
person I love will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my
manhood, while the need to earn the admiration or the love of others will
weave, consistently along my vision of the world, a validating superstruc-
ture. [translation modified] [my emphases] (BSWM 41)5

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the possibility to assume

both the black skin and the white mask simultaneously or alternately is what
has been identified in dramatizing hybridity for the very existence of the
évolué under colonialism as described by Fanon. Here, Fanon describes
aggression, which leads to enslavement and conquest, and love, which is the
final stage in one’s ethical orientation. Both these basic impulses of every con-
sciousness for Fanon play out, first, in the inter-subjective space. Manliness,
or the more neutral idea of strength, is produced at the level of the individual
in assuming such a characteristic in one’s identification with the other. Still,
the desire to be worthy of the other’s love or admiration—in other words in
one’s identification as a consciousness—presupposes an overarching totality of
coherence for the self ’s perspective. While still quite definitively in the con-
text of the black man, these remarks suggest a wider notion of struggle for an
 Narration in Frantz Fanon’s P E A U NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS 127

ethical orientation in interacting with otherness both within oneself and

between individuals or groups.
Fanon’s conception of the healthy encounter between the black man and
the world implies the same kind of ethical engagement. After showing to what
extent the black Antillean has absorbed white perspective even in relation to
negative stereotypes of blacks, he remarks that the black “vit une ambiguïté qui
est extraordinairement névrotique. [. . .] [L]’Antillais s’est connu comme nègre,
mais, par un glissement éthique, il s’est aperçu (inconscient collectif ), qu’on
était nègre dans la mesure où l’on était mauvais, veule, méchant, instinctif ”
(Peau noire 155) “lives an ambiguity that is extraordinarily neurotic. [. . .] [T]he
Antillean has recognized himself as a Negro, but, by virtue of an ethical tran-
sit [slip], he also feels (collective unconscious) that one is a negro to the degree
to which one is wicked, sloppy, malicious, instinctual” (BSWM 192). This is an
interesting idea drawing from Sartre’s notion of responsibility in that the black
man can be a “nigger” only through such a lapse in his own ethical mode. It is
for this reason that such cultural hegemony can occur in Martinique: “L’impo-
sition culturelle s’exerce facilement en Martinique. Le glissement éthique ne
rencontre pas d’obstacle”(Peau noire 156). “Cultural imposition is easily accom-
plished in Martinique. The ethical transit [slip] encounters no obstacle”
(BSWM 193). I have modified the English translation to better express this
idea of an ethical slip (in the sense of a mistake or a lapse in concentration in
the process of reasoning, as well as the idea of “glisser sur” or to “skim over”
something without properly entering into the detail). The black man’s com-
promise or lapse in ethics, which then allows him to ratify and hold up the
white man’s lie, is not compensated in the end by any privileges gained by him.
In fact, his ethical slip is facilitated by the relationship between blacks
and whites in colonial culture, whereby his negative image of himself as a nig-
ger is validated all around him. Instead of being compensated the Antillean is
rudely reminded of the falsity of his white mask by the white man who chides
him that “it is not enough to try to be white, but that a white totality must be
achieved. It is only then that I shall recognize the betrayal” (BSWM 193). The
latter is the betrayal of the French promise of assimilation in the colonial rela-
tionship. In the end, black skin comes back to haunt the Antillean and crudely
marks his exclusion from white culture. It is to an already constituted totality
that he was first invited and then denied a proper space within it because he
has no agency in its construction. The monumental ethical and material
engagement to undo such a situation will be theorized as revolution in Fanon’s
later work.
In the passage cited at the beginning of this section, Fanon draws atten-
tion to a notion of totality within which the individual engages with another.
128 Hybridity

Here, this totality is sustained by a certain logic by which the individual seeks to
be loved and admired; such love from a partner sustains and strengthens the
position of the self. A complex web of interdependency thus holds the entire
conception of the world together. Already in this early work, even (or especially)
at the level of the individual, Fanon is keen to establish how liberation involves
a strong comprehension of totality. Interdependency with the other who
“endorses” his “assumption of his manhood” and the need for acceptance and
“love” become the bases for the self ’s understanding of both its place in the
world and the limits and contours of that world. Fanon’s close attention to the
necessity of radical difference (distance) between the self and other in this, and
to their mutual dependency in this process of identification were also evident in
the two movements he describes of aggression and love.6 Although “The Fact
of Blackness” is an inexact rendering of the French title, “l’expérience vécue du
noir” [The lived experience of the black man] it captures quite accurately the
facticity against which the black man poetically forges a mode of thinking.7
The chapter begins with a dramatic presentation of this fact (of black-
ness) as it is lived in the person of a black man. The narrative opens with the
oft cited confrontation of the “I” of the black man by the eye (gaze) of the
white world which fixed him in the form of an object. This draws much from
Jean-Paul Sartre’s theorizing of the formation of selfhood in its relation to
otherness and the struggle for claiming subjecthood. The interesting part
about this introduction is that the other is the source of both anguish and lib-
eration; of both objectification and the basis for subjecthood. This twin func-
tion of the other’s gaze is noted by Fanon below. This is the second quotation
I find pertinent to a theory of hybridity available from Fanon.
“Sale nègre!” ou tout simplement: “Tiens un nègre!”
J’arrivais dans le monde, soucieux de faire lever un sens aux choses,
mon âme pleine du désir d’être à l’origine du monde, et voici que je me
découvrais objet au milieu d’autres objets.
Enfermé dans cette objectivité écrasante, j’implorai autrui. Son
regard libérateur, glissant sur mon corps devenu soudain nul d’aspérités,
me rend une légèreté que je croyais perdue, et, m’absentant du monde, me
rend au monde. Mais là-bas, juste à contre-pente, je bute, et l’autre, par
gestes, attitudes, regards, me fixe, dans le sens où l’on fixe une préparation
par un colorant. Je m’importai, exigeai une explication . . . Rien n’y fit. J’ex-
plosai. Voici les menus morceaux par un autre moi réunis. (Peau noire 88)

Dirty nigger! Or simply, “look, a Negro!”

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things.
My spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and
then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.
 Narration in Frantz Fanon’s P E A U NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS 129

Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others.

Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly
abraded into nonbeing [transformed into smoothness] endowing me
once more with an agility [a lightness] that I had thought lost, and by
taking me out of the world, restoring [restores] me to it. But just as I
reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, these attitudes,
the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemi-
cal solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explana-
tion. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put
together again by another self. (BSWM 109)

Thus, the black man becomes a nigger under the white gaze. From such a
position of objecthood, he implores the other to alter this state. It is the
searching gaze of the other that paradoxically discovers and delivers the sub-
ject that is formed from within the body of the narrator. This momentary
attention to his specificity lifts him out of objecthood, allows the gaze to pass
smoothly over him, separating him from the thickness of the world, and
endowing him with a lightness that he so craves. But then, the culturally
charged look (now buttressed by attitudes and gestures) “fixes” him within a
limited sphere of personhood that cannot match his own enthusiasm, his
own understanding of the vastness of his soul as a being-in-the-world. Once
again, it becomes clear that the metaphysical encounter of these two entities
is forced into its “worldliness,” by a grounding in the cultural context (here
defined by colonialism) in which it occurs. Surprisingly, Fanon uses the term
“dye” recalling Mayotte Capécia’s attempt to negrify the world by throwing
black ink on those who were unkind to her at school. In her case, he dismisses
it as an ineffective and ridiculous act. In this dramatic presentation of the
encounter with the other, Mayotte’s disparaged metaphor avenges its author
by appearing in Fanon’s text and recalling, despite Fanon’s harsh criticism of
Mayotte, their common story of being “French” Martinicans. It is, of course,
ironic that this metaphor becomes the most adequate form Fanon finds for
expressing the pigeonholing that negatively defines the narrator’s very exis-
tence, given Fanon’s refusal to understand affectively Mayotte’s use of the
very same. In the above quotation, no rebellion is capable of dislodging this
pigeonholing except that of explosion.
I wish to restore the significance of the last line quoted above to the
narrative of this chapter in following what it means to speak of hybridity
through Fanon. Re-assemblage of the body that is split apart enables the
black man’s subjectivity. All possibility of subjecthood lies in the narrator’s
willingness and ability to accept that point of explosion, which blasts apart
the black male body as it is known within colonial culture: Y’a bon banania;
130 Hybridity

the grin; the obsequious attitude that structures this body noted elsewhere
by Fanon. It is in a conscious and conscientious reconstruction of the idea
itself of the body of the black man that any kind of legitimate subjectivity
can occur. Since the black man is always to assume responsibility for his
body, for his race, for his ancestors (BSWM 112), which all come to rest in
the singular black man when he is encountered, one of the ways in which
hybridity intervenes as a method of resistance to this is in privileging the
individual black man in his multiplicity. All attempts by white culture and
history to “fix” the black man in his blackness are blasted open by an explo-
sion that comes from the ethical agency of the black man’s consciousness.
The subsequent construction, in this chapter, of a coherent, but multiple,
narrative “I,” which we will examine shortly, is a lesson in this hybrid pro-
ject. Although this multiplicity can easily be compatible with Bhabha’s ideas
of negotiation and ambiguity, the ethics that guide such a project and their
origin seem to sit less comfortably with his theory of hybridity. In Fanon,
the urgency of recognizing the black man’s subjectivity is tied to an ethics he
prescribes, which comes from his own bodily experience. In this way,
because of the responsibility placed on the black man for his agency,
Bhabha’s privileging of unconscious and fortuitous resistance enabled
through ambivalence collapses under the greater project of emancipation
envisioned by Fanon. Hybridity as a response to reductive stereotyping
replays that troubling aspect of the métis, which is to disturb the terms of
the hierarchy in place, an aspect of hybridity that is central to Bhabha’s
analyses. However, simply disturbing them is not an end in Fanon. Fanon’s
project is tied to a more explicit project of liberation from specifically colo-
nial subjugation, which begins at the level of subjecthood. Young’s defense
of Bhabha cited earlier picks up on the fact that a more clearly political
activism would be the “other work” that Bhabha’s theory does not purport to
fulfill. In considering Fanon’s narrative here, it is evident that hybridity is
called up in the necessity of a double response to stereotyping. This double
response is accomplished here through the strength of the collective in the
assumption of what I have called the historical-universal narrator and
through simultaneously reclaiming the affect of the individual, idiosyncratic
narrator. Bhabha’s vision of hybridity prompts him to chide Fanon for his
belief in a human essence: “Fanon is not principally posing the question of
political oppression as the violation of a human essence, although he lapses
into such a lament in his more existential moments” (Location 42). This is to
misunderstand that for Fanon it is impossible even to pose the question of
political oppression unless it employs the idiom of existential impossibility
arising from the black man’s experience of de-subjectification.
 Narration in Frantz Fanon’s P E A U NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS 131

Re-reading BSWM

Here, I reconsider several important passages that illustrate the historical-uni-

versal position of the narrator and privilege the overall affect of this chapter.
With such a focus, I suggest some reconsiderations for its interpretation via
Markman’s translation. What Fanon demonstrates so clearly here is that
Sartre’s notion of existentialism is rendered impossible from the subject posi-
tion of the black man. While Sartre writes, for example, in defense of his ver-
sion of existentialism that existence precedes essence, or you have to begin
with subjectivity [il faut partir de la subjectivité] (L’Existence est un humanisme
17), Fanon provides us the terms within which this is impossible with regard
to the black man’s subjectivity:

J’arrive lentement dans le monde, habitué à ne plus prétendre au

surgissement. Je m’achemine par reptation. Déjà des regards blancs, les
seuls vrais, me dissèquent. Je suis fixé. Ayant accommodé leur microtome
ils réalisent objectivement des coupes de ma réalité. Je suis trahi. Je sens,
je vois dans ces regards blancs que ce n’est pas un nouvel homme qui
entre, mais un nouveau type d’homme, un nouveau genre. Un nègre, quoi!
(Peau noire 93)
I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer for
upheaval. I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under
white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their micro-
tomes, they objectively cut away slices of [structure the contours of ] my
reality. I am laid bare [betrayed]. I feel, I see in those white faces that it
is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus.
Why, it’s a Negro [nigger]! (BSWM 116)

In the passage above, with no illusions of erupting into the world, the black
man enters unobtrusively, crawling slowly. Still he is captured, fixed and dis-
sected by the white gaze, under which he is not at liberty to construct his
own reality. I have modified the translation in square brackets (while leav-
ing the original English intact), suggesting here that it is not that his real-
ity is “cut away” but that it is structured—a point we have examined previ-
ously. Thus, I evoke the verb “réaliser” in the sense of making something real
or concrete. I suggest the tem “betrayal” to connect this passage to a lack of
acknowledgement of the individuality and emotional reality of this black
man (see the word “objectively” and note the metallic coldness of the micro-
tome) who has been dissected. It also connects to betrayal through the bro-
ken promise of assimilation, which remains out of reach for the black man
in the real encounter with whiteness. The word “betrayal” itself, as we shall
see later, is used elsewhere in this chapter to record the narrator’s dismay at
132 Hybridity

being ultimately rejected by the white culture that he has systematically

interiorized. Although “laid bare” accords very well with the sense of vio-
lence from the white gaze and the more general Sartrean idea of the gaze of
the “other,” I have preferred to evoke the idea of betrayal from the word
“trahi,” thus connecting it urgently through affect to the following sentence,
where such betrayal is tied to stereotype.
Following from this betrayal, the black man remains nothing but a
“type,”—a Negro (nigger). It is from this point that we must understand the
desire for absolute originality and the numerous assertions of independent
personhood, despite, in other places, the clear recognition of the dialogism
within which it has to be claimed. The historical lack of recognition in the
self-other relationship is at the base of these efforts. The “I” in this chapter is
that of the black man trying to be original, full of enthusiasm, and a complete
human being in encountering the world, but being deprived of all such possi-
bility by the white gaze. This gaze has been held up by dominant structures
historically and has fixed and limited him: “I came into the world imbued with
the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain
to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst
of other objects” (BSWM 109). This is followed by the passage quoted earlier
when the “I” explodes by seizing its agency in response to the fixing accom-
plished by the culturally loaded white gaze. Next follow a series of observa-
tions and statements about the Black (man) [le Noir]. Before resorting back
to the generic black “I” there is a slip into a “we” that could easily be missed,
but which clearly points to a purposeful forging of a collective consciousness
based on this experience of blackness that can be known through the bodily
experience of the white gaze:

Et puis, il nous fut donnee d’affronter le regard blanc. Une lourdeur inac-
coutumée nous oppressa. Le véritable monde nous disputait notre part.
Dans le monde blanc l’homme de couleur rencontre des difficultés dans
l’élaboration de son schéma corporel. La connaissance du corps est une
activité uniquement négatrice. C’est une connaissance en troisième per-
sonne. Tout autour du corps règne une atmosphère d’incertitude certaine.
Je sais que si je veux fumer, il faudra que je me recule. . . . (Peau noire 89)
And then the occasion arose when I [we] had to meet the white man’s
eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me [us]. The real world challenged
my [our] claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties
in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is
solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is
surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want
to smoke I shall have to reach out. . . . [my emphases] (BSWM 110–111)
 Narration in Frantz Fanon’s P E A U NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS 133

What Fanon underscores is that even though the black man’s body is given to
him through the harsh gaze of the white man through a cultural lens informed
by stereotypes inherited from colonialism, there remains a knowledge of the
body in space that is purely physical, which can only be experienced singularly
by each individual. It is unfortunate that the English translation does not
record the use of “we” in the first three sentences. Although in and of itself, this
might be a legitimate translation, I do believe that in this particular instance
the movement from “we” to the general “he” and then to “I” is quite significant.
Even though, for the black man, consciousness of the body is in the “third per-
son,” re-knowing the self as body consists in re-claiming through action as a
means of knowing. The full possibility of this re-knowing is suggested in the
notion of “certain uncertainty” that each claim to the self as body actualizes dif-
ferently, but necessarily individually. We have already encountered the passage
where a lapse in ethics at this point will lead back to cultural hegemony in
which the black man is stereotyped. It is in relation to this consciousness, to
this certain uncertainty that a move toward a collectivity has to occur. As we
have seen, such a connection between the body and its experience of itself by
the black man is central to Fanon’s development of an individual ethics that is
fundamental to any kind of political action. In the same manner, Fanon is at
pains to indicate that marking black collectivity through stereotype has to be
properly responded to through the black man’s reassertion as a consciousness,
full of possibility, recalling Sartre’s words: I am a freedom or I am a project:

Et tous ces gestes, je les fais non par habitude, mais par une connaissance
implicite. Lente construction de mon moi en tant que corps au sein d’un
monde spatial et temporel, tel semble être le schéma. Il ne s’impose pas
à moi, c’est plutôt une structuration définitive du moi et du monde—
definitive, car il s’installe entre mon corps et le monde une dialectique
effective. (Peau noire 89)
And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit
knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a
spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema. It does not
impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of
the world—definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body
and the world. (111) [BSWM my emphases]

Therefore, this passage from “we” to “I” indicated in the previous passage
becomes significant. While colonialism stamps the other in such a way that,
within the group, one is indistinguishable from the other, the more primeval
drama of the self-as-body and the experience of literally being-in-the-world
in interacting with space and time are so purely individual that any idea of
134 Hybridity

agency for Fanon has to proceed from this level of subjecthood. The central
modality of dismay in this chapter comes from a realization that access to this
basic relationship to the self is blocked for the black man; and it is all that
blurs the path to this experience of selfhood that dismays him, because it is
from this point of selfhood that some agency in participating in the process of
structuring a totality can be theorized. Here inheres a reciprocal form of inter-
activity between self and world in which the body encounters space, and space
is reoriented through the agency of this body-subject. This process involves
knowledge of the self that the self, alone, can attain through experience. It is
here that one can find an effective delivery of the basic Sartrean formulation
that existence precedes essence. Much is at stake, then, in this quest for the
black man’s most basic encounter with himself: his body as structuring his
experience, and thus a reestablishment of his selfhood outside the various con-
straints that have been actualized through the history of colonialism. Access
to this, if we follow Fanon, has been blocked for the black man as he is “epi-
dermized” and fixed in a negative generality before he can think of experienc-
ing his positive particularity. Working exclusively from the English transla-
tion, as we have seen, we would be unable to track the movement of the
narrative subject in its accounting of the most basic construction of the self.
Accosted as a nigger, the narrator is first amused, and then laughs
openly at the white child’s fear, but is not able to sustain this reaction, because,
“assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by
a racial epidermal schema” (BSWM 112). Referring to, and even assuming, the
move made by the poets who would be called the authors of négritude, Fanon
writes: “Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one
solution: to make myself known” (115). Fanon clearly had a more ambitious
project, which was at odds with such a reductive image producer of the black
man as the claims of négritude when articulated simplistically. However, the
narrator’s dependency on negritude as politics and aesthetics shows how indis-
pensable it remains in the story of black liberation. In fact, in this very chap-
ter the narrator assumes a historical-universal “I” of the black man in tracing
out, before the white man’s gaze, his many tactics, one of which is, indeed, the
“I” of négritude. In what follows I will show that such a reading of the narra-
tive here speaks to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s early identification of two aspects
of Fanon’s thought in any possible “Fanonism.” The first—drawing from Gay-
atri Chakravorty Spivak’s reversal of Derrida’s notion of “writing” to mean
“colonial discourse”—being that in this context, “all discourse is colonial dis-
course” (Gates 466) and the second being the interminable relationship
between the individual and the collective in BSWM already identified by
Stephan Feuchtwang (Gates 46).
 Narration in Frantz Fanon’s P E A U NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS 135

Fanon’s Historical-Universal Narrator

Our narrator remarks, “Je hélais le monde et le monde m’amputait de mon

enthousisame. On me demandait de me confiner, de me rétrécir” (Peau noire
92) [I had been shouting a greeting to the world, and the world severed from
me all inspiration. I have been instructed repeatedly to confine myself, to con-
tract my infinitude] [my translation] (see BSWM 114–15 for the English: “I
shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told
to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged”). I have worked substan-
tially with the English translation here. First, the use of the imperfect tense
becomes consequential to this historical narrative I have privileged. Here, the
theoretical historical-universal narrator and his struggles gain poignancy from
the long history of repeated crushing of the spirit. The alienated black man
with the inferiority complex is not one who was created from one day to the
next. Therefore, I have chosen to emphasize the long period of domination
(“had been shouting” and “have been repeatedly instructed”). Second, it is not
that white domination simply slashed at his joy; the situation is far worse. It
systematically cut off all connections he could make with his joyful self. Thus
it is agency at the primordial level of being in touch with oneself that is ampu-
tated. The reductive aspect of the words “confiner” and “se rétrécir” are not
conveyed properly in the translation by “stay within bounds” and “go back.”
These words and their meaning (in their connection to dismemberment, sev-
ering from wholeness, longing for the accomplishment of the potential for the
absolute) resonate throughout the chapter. It has been my aim to follow the
affect of this narrative and, here, to give greater amplitude within Fanon’s text
to the metaphor of dismemberment. Over and over in this chapter, Fanon
returns to the idea of a shrinking of the black man’s spirit by various machi-
nations of colonialism.
Next follows a passage that is characterized by its indignant tone but which
is also full of resolve to assume agency against the numbing, reductive, and gen-
eralizing white gaze. It ends with: “Since the other hesitated to recognize me,
there remained only one solution: to make myself known” (BSWM 115). But this
aggressive stance is short-lived. In contemplating Nineteenth-Century theories
of race that advocated racial separation to avoid “contamination,” the historical-
universal black narrator decides that the best reaction is to wait. “Quant à moi, je
saurais bien comment réagir. Et en un sens, si j’avais à me définir, je dirais que
j’attends” (Peau noire 96–97) [“For my own part, I would certainly know how
to react. And in one sense, if I were asked for a definition of myself, I would
say that I am one who waits” (BSWM 120)]. This is another well-known char-
acterization of Fanon—as the one “who waits.” But in following the narrative
136 Hybridity

thread of this chapter, it should be properly recognized as a specific tactic of the

black man in relation to the white man that Fanon is historically recounting.9
The clue that it is not an aside (quite common in Fanon’s writing), and there-
fore a more general statement of the characterization of the black man, is the
use of the conditional (saurais) that can be read as an anticipation (the future in
the past). Given these racial theories at the time, the narrator anticipates (in the
present of the narrative) what the reaction of the black man was going to be—
it would be to wait. My suggestion is that in taking this statement out of con-
text, one is discounting “waiting” as a provisional tactic of the black man at a
particular historical juncture. For the next sequence is important: with the end
of slavery he feels his “tenacity” (waiting and surviving) pays off as this histori-
cal-universal black “I” has gone forward (BSWM 121). But then he comes
crashing down with the realization that it was: “[t]rop tard. Tout est prévu,
trouvé, prouvé, exploité” (Peau noire 97) [“[t]oo late. Everything is anticipated,
thought out, demonstrated, made the most of ” (BSWM 121)]. Thus, waiting
has now made him “too late.” This situation, tracing the continuing impossibil-
ity of the position of the black man through a chronological narrative, is com-
pletely discounted by Bhabha when he remarks that “it is one of the original and
disturbing qualities of Black Skin, White Masks, that it rarely historicizes the
colonial experience”(Location 42).10 This chapter is all about historicizing the
experience of the black man; and of understanding the history into which he
must erupt as a subject. Confirming Fanon’s recognition of the use of the ideas
of négritude as a resistive tactic of survival, the narrator states: “On comprend que,
devant cette ankylose affective du Blanc, j’aie pu décider de pousser mon cri
nègre” (Peau noire 98) [In the face of this affective ankylosis of the white man,
it is understandable that I could have made up my mind to utter my Negro cry”
(my emphases) (BSWM 122)].
Specifically, Senghor and Césaire’s appropriation of blackness and fre-
quent return to pre-colonial richness of black culture, even if seen as an act of
“unreason” is ratified by the “necessities of the struggle”; in fact, this move is
also subsumed in the narrative of BSWM and assumed by the historical nar-
rator: “Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself
back toward unreason” (123). Of course one cannot miss the irony of the end
of the following quotation: “Out of the necessities of my struggle I had cho-
sen the method of regression, but the fact remained that it was an unfamiliar
weapon; here I am at home; I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irra-
tional. Up to the neck in the irrational. And now how my voice vibrates!”
(123). Still, the narrator couches his irony in the realization (from hindsight)
that this reaction was one of necessity and circumstance. His narration, after
all, assumes the folly of such a tactic.
 Narration in Frantz Fanon’s P E A U NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS 137

Next the narrator traces, through the voices of Senghor and Césaire, this
irrational step: a return to a good primitivism that shows that black culture
was independently rich and developed. The quotations are punctuated with an
ironic evocation of the excesses of négritude whose aim it is, nevertheless, to
“rehabilitate” the image of the black man (see 127). I must stress again that
this irony has to be put into the context of the present of the particular narra-
tive in its historical evocation of the different tactics for the survival of black
subjecthood within the constraints of colonial domination. In the introduc-
tion to Victor Schoelcher’s famous text, Césaire rejoices in precisely this reha-
bilitation of the black man by a white man; a white man who points out var-
ious specifics of the richness of the Africa that Europeans would then plunder
and destroy. It is in this context that the narrator proclaims: “Get used to me,
I am not getting used to anyone” (BSWM 131). Again, this quotation is often
used to characterize Fanon’s general stance toward white culture, when it is
actually one he dramatizes in recounting the processes by which blacks have
been subjugated in recent history.
Nevertheless, even this step has the black man cornered. It seems that
the white man then takes him at his word, and swallows his story about
rhythm and the occult, which can be associated with black culture: “Black
Magic! Orgies, witches’ sabbaths, heathen ceremonies, amulets. Coitus is an
occasion to call on the gods of the clan. It is a sacred act, pure, absolute, bring-
ing invisible forces into action” (BSWM 126)]. He has to accept, as well, the
bond between the earth and the black man: “Between the world and me a
relation of coexistence was established” (BSWM 128). Césaire’s poetry allows
the black man to claim, “I made myself the poet of the world” (BSWM 129).
All this is short-lived. The white man’s response is to instruct the black man
to study white history, where, he claims, he will find that all this fusion with
the earth has already been a stage in the white man’s own evolution. For the
white man, that is now a thing of the past (see 129). He’s been there, done
that! Faced with this, our black historical narrator can only weep: “My origi-
nality had been torn out of me. I wept a long time, and then I began to live
again” [my emphases] (BSWM 129). This sentence is another convincing
moment for the recognition of this chapter as being held together with a
specifically historical thread, as I have been arguing here.
What I hope to have shown above in highlighting some of the moves in
the narration is that Fanon’s text performs what we might call a hybrid read-
ing: on the one hand there is a universalizing “I” that stands in for “the” black
man—an implausible concept but one which is reclaimed by the individual
black man as a tactic before the stereotypes that precede him as he enters the
world. This is the sense of the term being “fixed.” It is against this fixing that
138 Hybridity

the agency of the black man has to be engaged. As Fanon writes later, “The
object of lumping all Negroes together under the designation of ‘Negro peo-
ple’ is to deprive them of any possibility of individual expression. What is thus
attempted is to put them under the obligation of matching the idea one has
of them” (Towards 17). Thus, agency is recognized by Fanon as having to do
first with the very basic step of asserting a subjectivity through thought,
speech, action—existence. As we have seen, it is asserted that this has to occur
at the level of the individual in his [sic] recognition of his self-as-body. Such
an assertion of the individual is proved impossible at each turn as the black
man is fixed as the stereotypical flesh-eating, white-toothed, grinning, big-
footed, earth loving, mother-fucking nigger. His very survival has therefore
necessarily depended on privileging a collective, strong, and positive image of
blackness; the narrative has necessarily unfolded under the aegis of the histor-
ical-universal black narrator. However, Fanon recognizes that there remains a
tremendously difficult task of reclaiming the existence of the individual, sen-
suous, original black man that he heroically (or tragically) wishes to under-
take. The tragic role in which the narrator is cast cannot be reconciled with
Bhabha’s reading of this text: this role implies a conscious understanding and
activation of this double role by a specific and specifiable subject, who envi-
sions for itself and for a particular collectivity an escape from precisely the
hierarchical situation in which it accomplishes such hybrid moves.
The struggle between the universal, collective, historical “I” and the
force of the more subjective personal and still-in-formation “I” makes for a
narrative process that can be recognized as hybrid. Hybridity, then, as it
emerges from the narrator’s project arises not only from simply negotiating
between white and black but also from a dramatic struggle with himself and
with a construction of his identity. The black narrator locates his selfhood in
the process of reconstituting his own body through experience. In this chap-
ter, the tension arising from this dual force is recorded in the irony with which
this “I,” although assuming the moves of négritude in granting a large part of
its narration the first person rather than the third person, still notates the “un-
truth” of négritude, according to the beliefs of the individual “I.” The move-
ment between the “I,” the “he,” and the “we” examined earlier also produces a
more expanded framework to the various statements, requiring greater care in
the extraction of the many that might stand in for a “Fanonism.”
This theoretical text rests on the authority of the narrating author. Here,
the author periodically abandons the authority of his investigative narrative
position to recuperate the general self of the experience of the black man
under colonialism. This makes it particularly important to follow the moves
undertaken in the fluidity of the narrating entity. Still, such a position is not
 Narration in Frantz Fanon’s P E A U NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS 139

assumed without reservation. These reservations are voiced through the iron-
ical considerations of the narrator that I have emphasized. They point to the
necessary solidarity in preserving the collective “I” even with the element of
dissent being figured within it. But it also shows the possibility to forge such
a discourse of political significance, which does not imply a simple, strategic
silencing of difference. Yet, the suggestion is that this collective self must
explode at some point in the individual’s existence in order to assert a true
agency.
The two passages I have pointed to earlier set out the premises and
specifications for a methodologically sound reading of interactivity, which is
central to the notion of hybridity. They also include a consequential articula-
tion of totality and suggest an ethics that can be tied to the self-as-body before
theorizing agency. Further specification included the assertion of the individ-
ual’s subjecthood as a point from where to re-know itself against colonial
stereotyping through its body’s interaction with the world. There is no doubt
that a certain delineation of colonial culture is taken as the limit that needs to
be exploded; but the moves of the narration and the negotiations of the nar-
rating entities occur within the structuring totality of the relationship of the
black man to white colonial culture. Fanon’s consciousness of totality is under-
scored by Eileen Julien’s examination of the speech he made at the 1956 “First
International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris.” Julien notes
in this context that “while Fanon on the whole privileges ‘national’ culture,
which is for him a culture born of political struggle, here he seems to admit
the vital capacity of ‘ethnic’ culture, before colonialism at least” (159).
Without proper recognition of these narrative moves in Fanon’s text, the
strong criticism of Sartre’s introduction to Senghor’s anthology that is fre-
quently commented on loses the sense of poignancy and the deep anguish I
wish to restore to it. Fanon expresses dismay that Sartre’s text takes away the
originality of the black man’s struggle in drawing a parallel between the black
man and the collective of the proletariat. Following Sartre, just as the struggle
of the proletariat is to reach a classless society, so too the authors of negritude
wish to render the category of race null and void. The period of negritude,
then, becomes a stage in this historical movement rather than an ultimate end.
From the reading above, it becomes quite clear that Fanon’s thinking does not
necessarily clash with such an interpretation. Fanon’s hybrid “I” has suffi-
ciently alerted us to the way in which this criticism of Sartre must be read: as
a necessary response, for all the veracity and perspicacity of Sartre’s analyses,
in countering the effect it has on the individual black man. In fact, the narra-
tor must attack Sartre, given the history he has just outlined and the position
from which he has outlined it. All this is clear because the irony noted in the
140 Hybridity

assumption of the rhythm-claiming “I” would acquiesce with Sartre’s assertion

of the transitory nature of this phase. The narrator himself has suggested that
this was a phase in the tactics of the strategic survival of the black man under
conquest, slavery, colonialism, and the subsequent pigeonholing through
stereotypes. It seems, then, following from this, almost an act of bad faith to
proclaim that “I needed to lose myself in negritude” (135), when our narrator
showed quite clearly that he was skeptical of its truth. This contradiction is
not really one, when we are able to validate the multiple functions of the nar-
rating entity, who both mitigated the “I” of negritude with ambiguity through
irony, and who now claims before Sartre that negritude needed to be an
absolute for the black man.11

Sartre’s Preface and Fanon’s Reaction: Another Look

The anger evident in the narrator’s confrontation with Sartre’s preface is an

emotion that we can pause to consider. As we have seen, at the level of the his-
torical-universal black subject, Sartre’s accounting is not altogether implausi-
ble. The narrator’s rage stems from a much more complex source. It is the rage
of the individual black “I” that has strained throughout this narrative to dis-
lodge the universal position, which was the only effective tool against the
totalizing discourse of colonialism or at least its totalizing ambition. The
poignancy arises from the fact that as readers we have already, if sporadically,
encountered the narrator’s deep desire to escape the historicity which frames
such an assumption of the universal “I,” and yet we encounter and follow the
moves made in the narration that take it on. This is a remarkable performance
of the struggle at the very heart of Fanon’s entire project, positioned resolutely
between reality and utopia.
Sartre’s claim that historical circumstance propelled the black French poet
of negritude to assume a position of poetic grace that made it superior to all
other poetic attempts of the time (qtd in BSWM 134), causes Fanon to protest
that: “and so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning
that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me. It is not out of my bad nig-
ger’s misery, my bad nigger’s teeth, my bad nigger’s hunger that I will shape a
torch with which to burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already
there, waiting for that turn of history” (BSWM 134). He turns on Sartre: “Jean-
Paul Sartre has destroyed black zeal. Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the
Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (BSWM 138).
Here, we must pay attention to the source of the voice that pronounces
Sartre’s sympathetic, enlightened engagement with the question of the black
man to be necessarily inadequate, even inaccurate. Such inadequacy and inac-
 Narration in Frantz Fanon’s P E A U NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS 141

curacy do not stem from any kind of essentialism but rather from over-deter-
mination by external factors.12 Fanon’s narrative voice speaks from a point in his-
tory when only a black man (of “epidermalized” blackness) can restore his sub-
jecthood through his own agency. He continues: “I defined myself as an absolute
intensity of beginning. So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I
put its machinery back together again” (BSWM 138). The repudiation of Sartre
has to be accomplished somehow from the point of view of this historical-uni-
versal black “I.” But within this repudiation also lies the despair of the individ-
ual black man who has been cut off from his joyous, individual self and who rec-
ognizes that négritude does indeed offer a miraculous weapon.
Given this over-determination, the narrator must turn on this existen-
tialist whom Fanon so greatly admires and whose work provokes a ceaseless
dialogue for his own intellectual reasoning. This narrative act underscores the
poignancy of the narrator’s tears. Sartre’s comments become, at the simple
level evident from the text, deeply offensive to this narrator. But the tears also
signal the other muted “I” whose discourse is as yet (at least in evoking this
historical, collective black experience) to be properly articulated. Fanon him-
self gives us a clue elsewhere: “[w]henever a man of color protests [proteste],
there is alienation. Whenever a man of color rebukes [réprouve], there is
alienation” (BSWM 60). The alienation of the black man from his own psyche,
the impossibility to escape the interiorization (specifically for the Martinican)
of white cultural values in which he himself is denigrated, and, in the end, the
difficulty of assuming an individual subject position, all channel dismay as his
required reaction as the historical-universal black man to Sartre’s pronuncia-
tion. Such an emotional response can be retraced to both the individual and
the universal identities of the narrator. This complexity is evident when we
recall that Fanon made great efforts to return to Sartre, this time in person,
for the preface to the Wretched of the Earth. Fanon will later explain why acts
of “love” at the individual level must be rejected because of the overarching
structure of colonialism in which the black man is denied his individuality.13
The gratefulness that we experience toward Fanon, then, despite his
oversights indicated by many, is for having somehow given us the experience,
through the narrative, of an affective encounter with the reality of the black
man’s history, but also of all the possibility of an individual “I” within it—a
possibility that, nevertheless, this narrative cannot actualize. The reasons for
this, of course, as we have already indicated, go well beyond the aesthetic of
this text and point to the realities that Fanon will more directly address in his
future work and life.
Movement to and fro between a recognition of reality (of the fixing of
the black man that is transformed into the historical-universal black “I”) and
142 Hybridity

a struggle for utopia (as the assertion of the singular, unique, original, “I” that
happens to be black) characterizes the impetus of the narrative in this entire
chapter. The narrative positions assumed correspond to historical moments
that specifically refer to the subjugation of the black man under colonialism
and the as-yet-to-occur full inscription of each individual black man (or at
least such a potential) in the societies Fanon describes. The frequent breaking
down of the narrative position through the interception of irony as well as ref-
erences to breaking down by the narrator (weeping), characterize this impos-
sible task of reclaiming black subjectivity that Fanon dramatizes for us in this
chapter. Such impossibility within the narrative exceeds the text in its corre-
spondence with the impossibility to express black subjectivity as credible
agents in colonial society. Fanon’s take on irony in the specific context of the
Antillean is an indication of the power of his unremitting analyses of culture.
It also confirms our reading of irony in BSWM.
In reflecting on the relationship between “West Indians and Africans”
in an essay published in Esprit in 1955, Fanon writes that while irony in
Europe “protects against existential anguish, in Martinique it protects against
the awareness of Negritude” (Towards 19). The Antillean’s cultural anxiety
plays out in his relationship with Africa and Africans, with reference to which
he constantly needs to reaffirm his difference. Whites, with whom the Antil-
lean (believed he) shared the same culture would, of course, never be mistaken
for Africans. “But what a catastrophe if the West Indian should suddenly be
taken for an African!” (Towards 20). It was Césaire who first articulated that
“it was fine and good to be a Negro,” which created a “scandal” ( see Towards
21). But a second event in 1939 would turn the tables on Césaire’s fate, which
seemed to indicate he would be dismissed for a lunatic. For four years, the
French sailors (of the Vichy government) from the ships Béarn and Emile-
Bertin flooded Fort-de-France at a time when the economy was already suf-
fering. The sailors, many who were accompanied by their families and brought
into contact with the Martinicans who resented their presence due to the par-
ticular, added strain of supporting them at this time, inaugurated a “racist”
encounter (Towards 22–23).
The Martinicans’ experience of these sailors’ racism allowed them to
exercise an interesting intellectual maneuver in order to cling to Frenchness.
Before the French racist sailors for whom he was a nigger, the Martinican rea-
sons thus: “Since these men did so consider him, this meant that they were not
true Frenchmen. Who knows, perhaps they were Germans?” (Towards 23)! If
in BSWM Fanon showed how it was through his own ethical lapse that the
black man could become a nigger, here he shows how he escapes being a nig-
ger by a maneuver that the narrator presents with scathing irony: “[. . .] [T]he
 Narration in Frantz Fanon’s P E A U NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS 143

West Indian felt obliged to defend himself. Without Césaire this would have
been difficult for him. But Césaire was there, and people joined him in chant-
ing the once-hated song to the effect that it is fine and good to be a
Negro! . . .” (Towards 23). The Antillean’s strategic valorizing or devalorizing
of his blackness continues to be a source of Moliéresque irony for Fanon:

Fifteen years before, [the West Indians] said to the Europeans, “Don’t
pay attention to my black skin, it’s the sun that has burned me, my soul
is as white as yours.” After 1945 they changed their tune. They said to the
Africans, “Don’t pay attention to my white skin, my soul is as black as
yours, and that is what matters.” (Towards 24)

It is at the close of this essay that we have a reflection on the irony of the his-
torical-universal black narrator from the specific positioning of the Antillean.
“It thus seems that the West Indian, after the great white error is now living
in the great black mirage” (Towards 27).
The frequent citations made from this much-read chapter of BSWM
that we have examined here, such as “I am the one who waits,” in postcolonial
criticism need to better account for the careful positioning of this “I” that pro-
nounces them within the text. The charge (or praise) that Fanon does not his-
toricize should be carefully reconsidered in that the entire chapter is an his-
torical evocation of the possibilities of the black subject dramatized in the
narrative position. The poetic evocation of the enthusiasm, individuality, orig-
inality, and vastness of the individual black soul who can assume the role of a
legitimate interlocutor is constantly cut down by the reality of his existence
within the totality of white colonial culture. The black man’s entry, through
assimilation, into white colonial culture occurs through a disavowal, an ethi-
cal slip, or, in properly Sartrean terms, an act of bad faith. It is in this way that
Fanon ratifies Sartre’s idea of responsibility. As we have seen, although it is
evident that it is colonial culture that steroetypes the nigger, Fanon is at pains
to reclaim and reassert the agency of the black man within that paradigm: it
is his ethical slip that allows himself to become a nigger, because it is the same
agency that will have to refuse niggerhood through an explosion—at the level
of the individual and also, theorized later, at the level of entire, socially coher-
ent totalities. Fanon’s engagement with the problem of the black man’s sub-
jectivity is revealed through a hybrid narrative where the terms between which
the hybrid appears are clearly stated but, as we have seen, an accounting of
both history and totality are properly figured within it. After the somewhat
ambiguous critique of the writers of negritude as well as of Sartre’s assessment
of them, the final lines of this chapter adjust this position by an oblique
homage paid to both:
144 Hybridity

I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly as souls as deep as

the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without
limit. [. . .] I wanted to rise but the disemboweled silence fell back upon
me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness
and Infinity, I began to weep. (BSWM 140)

The first sentence is an assumption of the language, rhythm, and spirit

of the Cesairean paradigm much as the last is a nod to Sartre’s text. The weep-
ing with which the chapter concludes evokes, in the same sentence, the revised
title of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. The struggle for transcendence plays
out in the first sentence, but it is cut short by the paralysis of silence: speech
is Fanon’s primary site of analytic operation. Fanon’s impossible desire to cre-
ate a subject without dialogism is related to a need to be without compromise
(suggesting a notion of “authenticity”) and precisely to escape this hierarchic
relationship with the white man. Yet, a fundamental understanding of the
dialogism of thought and existence itself is based in his training as a psychia-
trist. The primacy of speech for Fanon becomes a point of anguish because it
presumes a dialogic quality. The primacy of speech, and its bases in dialogism
on one hand, and the need to break out of a dialectical relationship with the
white man on the other characterize much of the tautness of the text of
BSWM. It is also with the negotiation of these two positions that an account
of Fanonian hybridity might proceed.
The full import of the end of the quotation above requires further
unpacking. We have examined the sense in which the black man is, first and
foremost, for Fanon, an ethical being whose responsibility includes a proper
recognition of who he is “outside of ” or despite white culture. Such recognition
would necessarily entail engagement with the structure of white culture within
which his lapse turns him into a nigger. Fanon looks back, in his letter of res-
ignation from Blida-Joinville, at the notion of individual enthusiasm that he
theorized in BSWM: “But what can a man’s enthusiasm and devotion achieve
if everyday reality is a tissue of lies of cowardice, of contempt for man?”
(Towards 52). This personal act is one that both ratifies individual agency as
well as records its insufficiency. Although Fanon recognizes that an individual’s
agency is not sufficient to oppose such a structure, he also realizes, as we have
shown, that it is essential for the individual to record an ethical stand in his
interactions at this level. Such ethical behavior has implications for the totality
within which it operates and without which it would have no meaning.14 It is
a lapse in such an ethical duty that allows the black man, and specifically the
Antillean, to succumb to an inferiority complex. This entire chapter has been
about the tactics of the universal-historical black “I” within an overarching
colonial structure. If the black man’s being has been under threat in this chap-
 Narration in Frantz Fanon’s P E A U NOIRE MASQUES BLANCS 145

ter, the latter ends by showing how he is not grounded in being, but rather
uncomfortably placed between Nothingness and Infinity. Because transcen-
dence presupposes immanence, the impossibility of the black man’s existence
within colonial culture renders absurd any aspirations to transcendence.
Figuring Fanon within the rhetoric of hybridity could be instinctively
rejected precisely because we have come to associate with him more revolu-
tionary ideals of anti-colonial struggle. If the many criticisms of the appropri-
ation of a hybrid Fanon in a dominant strain of postcolonial studies with a
strong influence of postmodern theory are to be taken seriously, I propose it
is time to do so in the name of this hybridizing text. It is my hope that the
reading I have provided here can suggest interesting leads into the rest of
Fanon’s work. I have also suggested, proceeding from an effective engagement
with Fanon’s text, some concrete theoretical adjustments and limits to the
notion of hybridity, specifically with regard to totality and the relationship of
the self/body to ethics and agency.
For Fanon, “[t]he characteristic of a culture is to be open, permeated by
spontaneous, generous fertile lines of force” (Towards 34). Yet, the importance
of the notion of “structure” in the identification of a culture is evident: “Exoti-
cism is one of the forms of [. . .] simplification. It allows no cultural con-
frontation. There is on the one hand a culture in which qualities of dynamism,
of growth, of depth can be recognized. As against this, we find characteristics,
curiosities, things, never a structure” (Towards 35). In this way, Fanon’s posi-
tive vision of cultural contact privileges the idea of confrontation within his-
torical specificity. Following his thought, viewing dynamism, expansion, and
depth in a culture is insufficient and simplistic if individual elements cannot
be connected to some kind of overarching logic or totality.
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 AFTERWORD

Why Hybridity Now?

Given the currency of the notion of hybridity today, it is first necessary to

make some basic distinctions and specifications pertaining to its usage in
postcolonial analyses. The first is the distinction between what I provisionally
termed diaspora and creolization, the former being linked in theoretical dis-
course to an “older” strategy for the terms in which identifications of groups
and individuals occur. The later notion of creolization involves a more
dynamic engagement with the question of the past, along with a loss in priv-
ilege of the affect of trauma. Still, as we have seen in all instances both dias-
pora and creolization as strategies are essential to any discourse of hybridity.
The characterization of a discourse as hybrid entails the proper recognition of
two poles such as diaspora and creolization. These poles are manifested in the
oscillation between the past and the present, the collective and the personal,
victimhood and heroism, or the national and the ethnic, for example. In each
case, the relationship to History as well as an articulation of Totality were
shown to be essential for a proper understanding of the generation of such
concepts and thus for a restoration of any of their radical possibilities. Fol-
lowing from this, a method of hybrid reading was adduced by carefully fol-
lowing such multiple sources of coherence within particular discourses.
Hybridization has been seen as the watered-down or even apolitical
course of action when faced with an encounter. According to this logic, a more
revolutionary choice is given as confrontation:

One of the necessary political tasks today is to rework the difference and
the inequality in hybridizations of the global and the local, to discover
how the old patrimonies of humanity and the new patrimonies of glob-
alization are at the same time specific modes through which local cultures
found themselves and had to decide if they would enter into war or into

147
148 Afterword

hybridization. [. . .] Perhaps the patrimonies that are worth keeping

formed not only of works in which a self-sufficient history (official or
popular) is sedimented or of products well tailored by the market so that
everyone is able to digest them, but also with those works in which beats
the imminence of uncertain encounter, when a collection of men and
women feels challenged by another culture and has to choose between
hybridization and confrontation. (Néstor García Canclini 50) [my
emphases]

I have shown throughout this book how hybridization as a process does not
occur without reliance upon the implicit notion of confrontation. Such an
understanding culminated in my reconsideration of Edouard Glissant and
Frantz Fanon. The method of hybrid reading that Fanon’s writing in Black
Skin,White Masks allows us to describe consisted of seeking out points of con-
frontation between the personal idiosyncratic narrator and the universal-his-
torical one, between the notion of aggression and love, between self-image
and stereotype, or between the dialogism essential to “speech” and the neces-
sity for independent originality that would fall outside the oppressive gaze of
the colonizer. Glissant’s theory of Relation, with the distinctions he makes
between creolization and métissage, allows us to configure this notion of con-
frontation from within a theory of hybridity as a development of the Marxian
concept of contradiction.
In my study of language and ethnicity in Mauritius as well as in the
notion of métissage in La Réunion, it was evident that within the particular
hybrid society in question, a history of precisely such confrontation is impli-
cated. For this reason, History and Totality were found essential to a proper
understanding of hybridity. Social manifestations of readable hybridity as well
as theoretical methods of hybrid analyses come together, in this way, to pro-
vide a more coherent model for hybridized reading, both within a theoretical
framework of hybridity and within a societal example of it. It is only what I
would call an incomplete notion of hybridity (with the two shortcomings I
have consistently elucidated in both theoretical and political/cultural dis-
course) that can present such a choice of either hybridity or confrontation.
The idea of “choice” within the hybrid is most productive in a different
context. In both Fanon and Glissant, it is connected to the type of dialectic
posited between reality and utopia and it is called up at the moment of an eth-
ical decision made by a “free” subject, thus evoking the Sartrean concepts of
both freedom and choice. Such estimation calls on individuals to enter into a
conscious ethical engagement in their orientation with otherness, in this way
disqualifying the activation of simplistic notions of difference without an eth-
ical evaluation of its significance.
 Why Hybridity Now? 149

Insistence upon the individual might seem somewhat incongruous

when speaking of two intellectuals such as Fanon and Glissant, whose work
and life are so deeply committed to the idea of the collective. But as we have
seen, both consistently return to the individual as the authentic site for work-
ing out an ethics of freedom within the larger project of the self-emancipation
of groups of people. When hybridity is relocated, as I have done in this book,
to its relationship to contradiction and totality, it emerges as fairly robust
forms of politics in processes connected to decolonization, diasporization, and
globalization. It also becomes the very ethics of forms of cognitive mapping.
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 Notes

Chapter 1

1. I am not going to engage in discussion of the delineation of this field. For

such questions, see Michel, Bahri, Li, Appiah, Dirlik, McClintock, and Shohat and
Stam, for example. Suffice it to say, it is not merely to the “periodization” (i.e., after
colonialism) that the term “postcolonial” refers; and the centrality of colonialism is also
indeed debatable. However, drawing from such discussions, I refer to the complex sit-
uation of particular regions in relation to world economics, culture, and politics, as it
has been inherited after the vigorous period of official colonialism coinciding with the
activation of newer dominating forces, many of which stem directly or indirectly from
the colonial venture, from both within and without these regions.
2. See Fludernik and Stewart for a discussion of such terminology.
3. I mean quite seriously that this is provisional even in the context of this book.
For this chapter, I am separating the notion of diaspora from that of creolization and
assigning them somewhat contradictory meanings. In the chapters that follow, termi-
nology involving hybridity is specified either for the societal context, or for the partic-
ular theorist being examined.
4. Still it is important to keep in mind that the idea of diaspora does not imme-
diately imply a homogenization of the diasporic group in question. Consider, for exam-
ple, Tejumola Olaniyan’s sensitivity precisely to the conflicts within notions of diaspora
in his Scars of Conquest / Masks of Resistance. In fact, the modified use of “diaspora” in
the last three decades by Gilroy, for example “is introduced in large part to account for
difference among African-derived populations [. . .].” (Edwards 30). In this way, his
usage places itself postdiaspora, as described above by the term creolization.
5. Among other revisions to this view, see, for example, the pieces in Yiddel and
Kemp’s Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature.
6. With perhaps less success, Jonas Rano, more recently suggests the term
“créolitude” in his book of the same title.
7. Gilroy also wants to resuscitate a revised notion of diaspora, placing it with
“creolization” as described in this chapter: “With its biblical force somewhat diluted,
the idea of diaspora can be useful again here. [. . .] Diaspora allows for a complex con-
ception of sameness and for versions of solidarity that do not need to repress the dif-

151
152 Notes to Chapter 1

ferences within a dispersed group in order to maximize the differences between one
‘essential’ community and others. [. . .] Identity conceived diasporically resists reifica-
tion in petrified forms even if they are indubitably authentic” (252).
8. The Gilroy quotation in the previous note also emphasizes this point.
9. Lionnet’s second book, for example, in examining a range of postcolonial
women writers from Martinique to Egypt shows how they “have been redefining tra-
ditional conceptions of history and culture, literature and identity. They create new
paradigms that represent, through innovative and self-reflexive literary techniques,
both linguistic and geographic exile, displacements from margins to a metropolitan
center, and intercultural exchanges” (Postcolonial Representations 7). In her earlier work,
“renewed connections to the past can emancipate us, provided they are used to elabo-
rate empowering myths for living in the present and for affirming our belief in the
future” (Autobiographical Voices 7). Similarly, Hall indicates that in the second and more
desirable way of thinking of cultural identity, difference is crucial just as is a more
strategic relationship to the past rather than the acceptance of an “essentialised past”
(see “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 394).
10. I am considering its impulse as one of creolization in the most elementary
way (here postnégritude). Glissant himself will accuse the créolistes of a new essen-
tialism (Caribbean Discourse 90). For the emerging idea of métissage in early African
Francophone writing, see Lüsebrink. Despite Senghor’s ideas of métissage in the sense
of a way of being “negro” within a more interactive framework or his conception of
négritude as a form of humanism, René Depestre’s Bonjour et adieu à la negritude shows
the way in which such a conception played into the colonial paradigm (see especially
81–82). Abiola Irele rightly points out how a critic of Senghor’s negritude such as
Soyinka is not as far removed from Senghor as Soyinka would like in his reliance upon
some kind of African essence (12). Gilroy himself, as we will see, speaks of such an
experience of being black. These points serve to indicate how both impulses described
here as diasporic and creolizing characterize many strategies of resistance.
11. This echoes, for example, Deleuze and Guattari’s general idea in Anti-Oedi-
pus that world-modernity isomorphizes rather than homogenizes.
12. Apart from the discussion here, Bhabha’s theory figures further in the fol-
lowing chapters, particularly chapter 3 and later when discussing Glissant and Fanon.
13. The women writers Lionnet examines are characterized by her as cultural
“métis, créoles” (Autobiographical Voices 21).
14. For an excellent critical study of the Latin American context and move from
transculturation to hybridity, see Trigo.
15. It is important to bear in mind that Lionnet’s views on métissage and inde-
terminacy are to be understood within the specific framework of her literary project in
which she has a “somewhat utopian [] view of writing as an enabling force in the cre-
ation of a plural self, one that thrives on ambiguity and multiplicity, on affirmation of
differences . . .” (Autobiographical Voices 16). Elsewhere Lionnet notes that “writing [to
break out from colonizing languages] becomes the only key to the (utopian?) creation
of a different, heterogenous, and multicolored future [. . .]” (Autobiographical Voices 27).
 Notes to Chapter 2 153

Endorsing completely the utopian visions of writing, I find, however, that there is a
central contradiction in the conception of métissage, which is not resolved theoreti-
cally. The idea of métissage as transculturation via Nancy Morejón (where there is rec-
iprocal influence and no single element dominates) (Autobiographical Voices 15) is not
really compatible with the image of métis who employs an “esthetics of the ruse” (Auto-
biographical Voices 18) because the latter indicates a struggle against domination in a
way that the former does not. In Autobiographical Voices, the thrust of métissage
becomes an “emancipatory metaphor for the inevitably relational and interdependent
nature of peoples, nations, and countries [. . .]” (29).
16. See, for example, Hall “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 394–96 for a very
forceful statement of this notion of difference.
17. But this is not to privilege the subaltern as the site of some authenticity. It
is rather to understand in what ways hybridity is of interest in subaltern contact, strug-
gle, and negotiation with outright domination or hegemony.
18. This task is admirably accomplished by Nick Nesbitt in his Voicing Memory.
Nesbitt argues, for example, that Hegel’s notion of Entfremdung informs not just the
dialectical thought of Marx and Kojève but is equally rethought by Glissant, Fanon,
and Césaire.
19. I am, of course, referring to the sentence: “All third world texts are necessar-
ily [. . .] allegorical . . .” [my emphases] (“Third World Literature” 69).
20. This suggestion was previously made in Prabhu and Quayson.
21. My interest is to work out more specifically the ideas of transnational and
translational hybridity that Bhabha suggests (see Location 172–75 in particular).

Chapter 2

1. Axel Gauvin shows how so-called illiterates, with minimal instruction in a

simple script for Creole, can demonstrate reading competence in Creole, though not
in French (Du créole opprimé). This problem of the relation of a local language to the
colonial one, particularly in the context of education, is not unique. See, for example,
Rasool and Alexander for a discussion of this issue with regard to the African conti-
nent, Rughoonundun (“Les langues”) and Chaudenson with regard to Mauritius, and
Giraud and Manesse, Bentolila, and Damoiseau with regard to the French Caribbean.
As in some of the cases mentioned above, the fact that the writing of Creoles has had
to be hastened within such a structural position, of course, has added consequences.
2. For a study on métissage in the literature of La Réunion, see Jean-Claude
Carpanin Marimoutou’s “Ecrire métis.”
3. All translations of Boyer’s text are my own.
4. See Nietzsche 102–06.
5. See Nietzsche 96–102.
6. On Chinese immigration to La Réunion see Chane-Kune Aux origins.
154 Notes to Chapter 2

7. See Nietzsche 106–08.

8. Whites who moved to the highlands and black maroons who escaped to the
mountains can be seen in a similar position, structurally, within the economic system
of La Réunion. They all farmed their own land and raised cattle, selling the excess in
the plains. However, they did not participate in an ongoing way in the larger economic
system of the island-colony: i.e., both groups existed outside of plantation slavery, even
if slavery gave birth to them in different ways: the ex-slaves through escaping it and
the poorer whites because they did not have access to slaves. Monique Agenor’s Be-
Maho explores this historical reality in a fascinating story.
9. Fanon sharply critiques Mayotte Capécia’s autobiographical Je suis martini-
quaise for her constant efforts at what he calls “lactification.” He fails to read the posi-
tion from which this desire is generated as well as what benefits of this “lactification”
the character/author seeks (see Black Skin, White Masks 41–62).
10. We shall discuss the full meaning of the sense of Relation when discussing
Glissant in chapter 6.
11. The production of an important study in Creole, entitled Lanseyeman la
Réunion in plan kolonialise, by a group of five teachers at different levels, including two
“zorèys” or metropolitans, under the name of “Sarcemate” (the name of a famous
maroon or runaway slave) marks a pertinent point. This study or evaluation of the sys-
tem was done entirely in Creole, using a simple phonological graphic code, thus prov-
ing that Creole could be used for serious purposes, as well as providing an analysis of
“letoufeman kiltirele” [cultural stifling] that the educational system was accomplishing.
12. While this is beyond the scope of this chapter, ideas about the functioning
of the world and herself in it are rendered with some reference or recourse to Creole.
For quick example for Creolophone and/or Francophone readers, the family’s entry
into the middle class through their occupation of their newly built house: “Cyclone à
ou dehors, ‘éclair à ou dehors, nous: en’dans. C’était cela bâtir” (16); or her identity as
a “mixed-blood,” to her, “bâtard-chinoise” (18). There are also various specifications in
the text that the conversation takes place in Creole (18, for example).
13. Further discussion of the Mauritian situation follows in chapters 4 and 5.
14. See Prabhu “Mariama Bâ’s” 245–46.
15. In a different way, Frantz Fanon also sees the individual’s crisis as being that
of Martinican society’s itself. “Antillean society is a neurotic society, a society of ‘com-
parison.’ Hence we were driven from the individual back to the social structure. If there
is a taint, it lies not in the ‘soul’ of the individual but rather in that of the environment”
(BSWM 212).
16. The term signal indicates the type of signifying process that eschews ambi-
guity and has a universal currency, while a sign, especially in the formulation of
Charles S. Peirce, implies interactions between the object, the representamen, and the
interpretant in an ongoing process, where each of the three elements in the sign rela-
tion “shifts roles as further determinations and representations are realized” (Para-
mentier 29).
 Notes to Chapter 4 155

Chapter 3

1. All translations of the novel are my own.

2. Interestingly, the term “noir” at this time suggests any racial group that was
not white.
3. A number of my former graduate colleagues, now Francophone scholars “at
large” in the U.S. academy, will recall this ambiguity as having been presented and dis-
cussed through an excellent history of progressive French thinkers from Montesquieu
to André Gide by Elisabeth Mudimbé-Boyi in her seminar on Francophone Studies
at Duke University in the mid-1990s.
4. It is significant that Jameson chooses the term “antinomy” rather than “con-
tradiction” because for him, contradiction can be resolved. An antinomy remains a par-
allel reality that cannot even be brought into dialogue with its other (see Seeds of Time
see 1–8). Antinomy, as a textual articulation of social contradiction demands a more
narrative process for its reformulation, if its resolution remains impossible. The iden-
tification of antinomy in cultural objects is seen, in Jameson’s dialectical criticism, as a
symptom of social contradiction (see “On Interpretation” in Political Unconscious
15–102).
5. My translation, based on Gauvin’s French translation.
6. In the first group he names: “le prolétariat réunionnnais, les colons (dans le
sens de métayers), les petits propriétaires, les petits commerçants, etc.”1 and in the sec-
ond: “les fonctionnaires, les cadres des entreprises métropolitaines, les importateurs, les
usiniers, les membres des ‘professions libérales’”2 (Gauvin Du créole opprimé 68). [1. The
réunionese proletariat, the colonizers (in the sense of farmers), small proprietors, small
merchants, etc. 2. The functionaries, employees of metropolitan businesses, importers,
factory owners, members o the “liberal professions.”]

Chapter 4

1. In the colonial period the term “Creole” first meant whites born in the colony
and later came to encompass all aspects of culture and society taking root in the colony.
However, reference to “Creoles” as individuals or the group means for colonial refer-
ence, whites of the colony, as in the novel treated in chapter 3. Closer to independence,
the notion of the Creole population whose votes were being vied for from different fac-
tions includes the lighter skinned mulâtres and the darker skinned créoles. What seems
like such a crude descriptor was used commonly and is understood in Mauritian cul-
ture even today. Although the term morisyen has been proposed to replace Creole (lan-
guage) in this chapter I retain the use of Creole because it is the collusion between lan-
guage and ethnicity/race that I am treating and it is in this complicity that I examine
this term. Each use is specified by the context in which it is evoked and clarifications
are provided when needed.
2. For a detailed historical introduction to the area, see Dieter Braun.
156 Notes to Chapter 4

3. On language competence in Mauritius, see Peter Stein.

4. For a more general statement that linguistic antagonisms represent conflicts
of interests among different groups of people in the African and Caribbean contexts
see Nzepa.
5. For a more detailed discussion of the introduction of “Oriental” languages in
the Mauritian school curriculum, see Hookoomsing and Rughoonundun “Les
langues.”
6. Regarding non-African slaves in the Mascarenes, see Gerbeau.
7. For a discussion of this comparative aspect, see Nathalie Melas especially
277–78.
8. See Boisson and Louit.
9. The term “public discourse” encompasses speeches and other pronounce-
ments made by government officials (some examples are Ministers, Members of Par-
liament, or the lawyer for the indentured Indian laborers) as well as individuals who
have some connection with the administration of the island (for example, Bernadin de
Saint-Pierre, a high-profile French visitor introduced to the colonial administrators
upon his arrival). The point is that this excludes less formal but no less important
milieus from where one might examine other types of representation of the same ques-
tions, such as jokes, proverbs, music, or dance. This is not an exhaustive examination
of any particular source of public discourse. However, the examples studied are
emblematic of the tendencies in official language that is intrinsically related to the
administration, be it colonial or postcolonial.
10. An anthropological analysis of these groups is provided in Ericksen Com-
municating.
11. For more details on the electoral process in general, see Centre d’études et
de recherches sur les sociétés de l’océan indien (1984).
12. The creation of an independent organization, Ledikasyon pu Travayer, in
1975 and its ongoing activities are still important steps in acknowledging Mauritian
Creole and its valorization in the daily life of monolingual Creole speakers. This orga-
nization works with adults and is committed to rendering all Mauritians literate.
13. See Alladin 110.
14. See, for example, the Mauritius Legislative Council Debates No: 46 of the
year 1948–49: 24 June and 19 July 1949 for strong speeches by Ramgoolam in favor of
the government adjudicating the sale of farmland and the fixing of prices of such sales.
Needless to say, the bulk of such sales were occurring between the whites who owned
the land and Indians who had toiled over it for generations.
15. These three texts have been recently published together as Ile de France: voy-
ages et controverses.
16. Most recently, and after submission of this manuscript, Megan Vaughan’s
very welcome Creating the Creole Island sheds light on slavery in Mauritius in the eigh-
teenth century.
 Notes to Chapter 5 157

17. However, the performance of séga music and dance at five-star hotels,
although attracting some “locals” as well, becomes primarily a showcasing of Maurit-
ian culture for tourists and tends to be closer to what Edouard Glissant might disap-
provingly call “folklore” or an artificial reproduction of an aspect of culture that is not
naturally created from within it as he cautions against the revival of Creole language
in Martinique that he observed (Caribbean Discourse xxv).
18. Since writing this piece, Bérenger’s coalition lost the 2005 elections to Navin
Ramgoolam’s Alliance-Sociale.

Chapter 5

1. In this chapter the term “Creole” is used to indicate all parts of what we have
understood to be the “general population” except whites. I have chosen to use Creole
rather than distinguish métis or mulâtre, which are the terms used for those of lighter
skin, because my aim is to consider the ways in which precisely the distinction works
against any kind of solidarity of all those of light and dark skin whose efforts to enter
white culture are barred even if differentially. Solidarity within this group and between
this group and Indians becomes impossible when the distinction between lighter and
darker nonwhites is upheld. Terms such as métis or mulâtre are used when required due
to their use in the literary texts or when the distinction is being discussed. Unless oth-
erwise specified, Creole refers to all those not considered white or Asian (Chinese or
Indian). I have also captialized the “c” to match terms such as Indian or Chinese rather
than white, thus setting up a Creole ethnicity or cultural group rather than a racial
combination. While the reach of such an effort remains quite evidently tied to this aca-
demic discussion, I hope to show that the type of thinking it allows might in fact have
greater scope.
2. All translations of Humbert’s and de Souza’s novels that follow are my own.
3. The relationship of Yolande with André functions much like that described
in Métisse ; André, however, is able to “pass” while Lucien does not have this possibil-
ity.
4. Lionnet makes a comparison between Sassita and Mme Morin on the basis
of passivity (see Autobiographical Voices 214).
5. See Joubert and Joubert and Raminadrasoa for references to the history of the
literature of this region. More recently, see the edited volume by Issur and Hookoom-
sing.
6. In 1807, the British Parliament’s Abolition of the Slave Trade Act posed a
threat to the French colonialists in Mauritius. The planters rebelled and there were
periods when there was no British ship allowed into Mauritius during this period.
However, in 1835 the act came into effect; slaves were forced to work for four years as
paid laborers. In the mean time, labor was being imported primarily from India.
7. Unlike La Réunion, there is no hilly retreat for many maroons to have sur-
vived. The hilly regions are far more easily accessible on Mauritius.
158 Notes to Chapter 5

8. The “monstrousness” of the mixed-blood has been studied (see Stepan, for
example), although this is less of an issue in the Mauritian context. I am referring more
to how this group began to be seen, and could see itself, in a new role in the colonial
framework as the educated (and thus privileged) intermediary group that would enter
the administration in large numbers.
9. See, for example, Wallerstein’s discussion of this in “The Bourgeois(ie) as con-
cept and Reality.” in Race, Nation, Class (especially 138–39).
10. This negative view of the intermediary is echoed not only in postcolonial
theory but also by various writers, notably Morocco’s Driss Chraïbi. See my “Theoriz-
ing” on this subject.
11. It is true that old ethnic alliances are gradually coming to be seen as insuf-
ficient. But a more sustained and overt recognition of this fact would radically change
the very availability of both the older racial and newer ethnic classifications.
12. This is a citation from the novel.
13. Parallel to the French (to French language and France), Biharis (to Bho-
jpuri/Hindi and India), Muslims (mostly to Urdu or Gujerati and India), Tamils
(Tamil and India), Telugus (Telugu and India), Chinese (Mandarin or Hakka and
China).
14. “[ J]e m’habillais plus sagement de jupes et de chemisiers bien fermés, je
renonçais à la verroterie et aux rubans de couleur vive. Je copiais les petites jeunes filles
de bonne famille” (113) [I] dressed more appropriately in skirts and blouses that were
well closed, I gave up costume jewelry and brightly colored ribbons. I copied the little
girls from good families].
15. See also p. 453 for a similar interrogation of Anne.
16. Although Lionnet remarks that this moment of the denunciation of the
fetus “is the immolation of the métis, the créole, as symbol, product and (pro)creation
of Western colonialism . . .” the thrust of the moment, for her, is that Anne “aim[s] the
insult at her sister but thereby amputating herself, deprivileging otherness as radically
other in order to co-opt it, to abort it” (Autobiographical Voices 212). In her larger frame-
work, Lionnet is concerned with the move to claim “specificity,” especially by the
woman (writer). In this novel, she reads the portrait as undermining the traditional
“heroine” to reconstruct that of the female writer (see especially Autobiographical Voices
221–22).
17. See especially Ahmad; also, more recently Bensmaïa.
18. Originally a dance of the dead performed by Africans.
19. Referring quite simply to those who wanted it and those who did not.
20. “Should the study of race relations, in this meaning of the word, be distin-
guished from the study of ethnicity or ethnic relations? Pierre van den Berghe [. . .]
does not think so, but would rather regard ‘race’ relations as a special case of ethnicity.
Others, among them Michael Banton [. . .], have argued the need to distinguish
between race and ethnicity. In Banton’s view, race refers to the categorization of
 Notes to Chapter 6 159

‘them’ [. . .]. However, ethnicity can assume many forms, and since ethnic ideologies
tend to stress common descent among their members, their distinction between race
and ethnicity is a problematic one, even if Banton’s distinction between groups and
categories can be useful [. . .]. I shall not, therefore, distinguish between race relations
and ethnicity” (Eriksen Ethnicity and Nationalism 5).
21. Wallerstein is talking of the period following World War II, and referring less
to “Third World” areas here. I should qualify that in using this terminology in the con-
text of Mauritius, the “placement” of this new bourgeoisie would still be intermediate
rather than top level. This would still be reserved for the small minority of whites who
today have diversified from sugar to include such institutions as banks, for example.
22. Religion is not an entirely distinct category from ethnicity. The languages
spoken/claimed also are able to communicate religion. For example, Bhojpuri, Tamil,
Telegu, and Hindi speakers are Hindus; Gujarati speakers and claimers of Urdu (Arab
in early census) tend to be Muslim; Tamils who claim French tend to be converted
Christians.
23. Most actions relating to Africa have been actions of the State: through del-
egations, organization of the African Unity Conference (1976). Ramgoolam was
notably Chairman of the Organisation of African Unity in 1976. Far more recently,
writers, for example, Ananden’s Rue la Poudrière, look to African publishers as well.
24. Personal communication, Dev Virahsawmy, August 1999. Dev Virahsawmy
is Mauritius’ famous playwright (in Creole), whose most recent international success
was Toufann. Once a prominent member of the radical MMM discussed in chapter 4,
Virahsawmy has turned more toward artistic production.
25. Maunick, the poet who overtly paid homage to the négritude movement.
Léopold Senghor wrote the preface to his Ensoleillé vif.
26. Wallerstein notes concerning this group that “these civil servants were not
bourgeois at all in the sense of playing any of the traditional economic roles of the
bourgeois as entrepreneur, employer of wage labor, innovator, risk taker, profit maxi-
mizer. Well, that is not quite correct. Administrative bourgeois often played these clas-
sic economic roles, but when they did, they were not celebrated for it, but rather
denounced for corruption!” (140).

Chapter 6

1. In the francophone context, both Chris Bongie and H. Adlai Murdoch draw
substantially from Glissant’s work. In tracking Edouard Glissant’s work, primarily
from his fiction but also through his theoretical texts, Celia Britton, more recently, pro-
vides us with various points of contact between this Caribbean and French theorist and
other influential theorists of postcoloniality. The authoritative work of Glissant’s first
translator, J. Michael Dash, addresses the difficulty of Glissant’s early reception and the
coming of his later accolades in an historical view of this intellectual’s long career. Few
working outside the field of “French studies” turn to his work in much detail.
160 Notes to Chapter 6

2. Nick Nesbitt makes a cogent connection between historical experience

and dialectical relation in Glissant (see 175), concentrating on Glissant’s novel
Malemort and citing his Traitée du Tout-monde. I am interested in pursuing, here,
the definition and processes quite specific to Relation, which are laid out in Poé-
tique. In the end, I find Nesbitt’s conclusion that Glissant’s call for biological ecol-
ogism for Martinique is really based in the logic of the Enlightenment (186) less
convincing (at least in the way he presents it) in that this logic is not really pur-
sued nor explicated in the analyses of Glissant’s work. If a specific reference were
being made to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, it did not
become obvious to me.
3. Although there are various differences among these theories, I will restrict my
comparison to Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity discussed in the introduction.
4. See Prabhu and Quayson for a discussion of these Glissantian terms.
5. When Chris Bongie writes that he will be (even if “strategically”) “isolating
some of [Glissant’s] political conjectures in ‘Discours antillais’ from the context of his
work as a whole and putting them into question from the perspective of a postmod-
ernism that can no longer credit the imperative of self-possessions that undergrids
them” (354), it is to undo the very basic characteristic of his writing—the circularity,
the nonexplosive quality, the repetitiveness . . . the whole story of his work, which I
believe, at this point, cannot be understood outside the postcolonial. What I am point-
ing to as the inscription of the functional/instrumental and utopian impulses in Glis-
sant’s work are rendered impossible within Bongie’s assessment of so-called progres-
sive and regressive tendencies. A similar type of separation is suggested by Peter
Hallward’s reading of Glissant.
6. This aspect is eloquently considered in Cailler (especially 104).
7. See, for example, the early Marxism and Form 383, 385. Jameson’s writing
consistently seeks to chart the theoretical with and through the social. This is evident
in his ideas about the national allegory in third world literary texts through to his
analyses of cinema or architecture.
8. One cannot fail to be struck by the similarity between progression from
métissage to Relation with the following formulation: “When we turn now to a prop-
erly Marxist literary criticism, it will be through a similar epistemological shock that we
will be able to identify its presence: for such a shock is constitutive of and inseparable
from dialectical thinking, as the mark of an abrupt shift to a higher level of conscious-
ness, to a larger context of being” ( Jameson Marxism and Form 375).
9. See Caribbean Discourse 187–91. When the push to standardize and make
official creole language as a more authentic alternative to French for Martinique
came from Martinican intellectuals Glissant was strongly opposed to it. The créolité
movement, spearheaded by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamomiseau, and Raphaël Con-
fiant, had its own influential manifesto entitled Eloge de la créolité [In Praise of Cre-
oleness].
10. On the other hand, for one critic, “[. . .] Glissant’s work is, from start to fin-
ish, committed to any number of ideological errors made in the name of structuring
 Notes to Chapter 6 161

resistance; these errors stem, for instance from a questionable (which is certainly not to
say wrongheaded) belief in the reality of such things as national identity and cultural
alienation . . .” (Bongie 143).
11. Dash notes that Glissant, early on, identified Césaire’s work as being of a
particular moment and therefore foresaw a datedness that it was bound to acquire
(Dash 31, 36). In fact, Dash remarks that “already one has the feeling in Glissant’s
work that negritude would one day be little more than a period style” (38), recording
the distance he explicitly takes from his Martinican compatriots and other African
francophone poets.
12. See Kojève especially 227–33.
13. Glissant himself comments that “[i]t is difficult for a French Caribbean
individual to be the brother, the friend, or quite simply the associate or fellow coun-
tryman of Fanon. Because, of all the French Caribbean intellectuals, he is the only one
to have acted on his ideas, through his involvement in the Algerian struggle” (Caribbean
Discourse 25). Glissant sees both Fanon’s revolutionary work and Césaire’s revolution
in/through poetry as forms of “diversion” which for him are “versions of the return to
Africa” (Caribbean Discourse 24). But for him, this act of diversion is necessary before
a return to what he calls “the point of entanglement” (Caribbean Discourse 26), which
perhaps neither of his compatriots accomplished—Fanon owing to his early death, and
Césaire due to the decisions made in his political career.
14. For Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
ways; the point is to change it” (in Marx and Engels 145).
15. “Cultural diversity is an epistemological object—culture as an object of
empirical knowledge—whereas cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of
culture as ‘knowledgeable’ authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cul-
tural identification. If cultural diversity is a category of comparative ethics, aesthetics
or ethnology, cultural difference is a process of signification through which statements
of culture or on culture differentiate, discriminate and authorize the production of
fields of force, reference, applicability and capacity. Cultural diversity is the recognition
of pre-given cultural contents and customs; held in a time-frame of relativism it gives
rise to liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange or the culture of human-
ity. Cultural diversity is also the representation of a radical rhetoric of the separation
of totalized cultures that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their historical loca-
tions, safe in the utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique collective identity. Cul-
tural diversity may even emerge as a system of the articulation and exchange of cultural
signs in certain early structuralist accounts of anthropology” (Location 34).
16. Glissant’s belief in, indeed requirement of, an ethical engagement at the level
of the individual echoes Sartre’s call for responsibility. The idea that a productive
encounter with otherness implies action, and that the terms of such action cannot be
given in advance would certainly be in keeping with Sartre’s notion of existence pre-
ceding essence, even if Glissant does not cite Sartre. These moments in Glissant reveal
him to be a radical thinker who nevertheless drew heavily from the tendencies and
intellectual climate of his formative years.
162 Notes to Chapter 7

17. Murdoch notes the parallel discontinuity Glissant “draws between the ver-
bal act of expression and the physical act of marronnage,” and which “demonstrates the
simultaneous importance of rupture and of the transmission and transformation of tra-
dition” (202) characteristic of the Caribbean from its very conception in the slave ship.
Such discontinuity transforms the time itself of political action that cannot, then, be
pinpointed in a narrative moment precisely because its time is not linear.
18. Young defends Bhabha against critics who find the latter’s theory to be non-
materialist. When he asserts that Bhabha’s work is not incompatible with a less restric-
tively “textual” criticism (163) in effect he affirms that the theory itself remains most
appropriate for textual criticism despite its more ambitious aims.

Chapter 7

1. Among others, Gautam Premanth has noted that in glossing the importance
of nationalism and national consciousness to Fanon’s theoretical endeavors, especially
in his later work, the notion of struggle becomes decontextualized into a principle of
negotiation rather than retaining any connection to organized movement in the
process of decolonization (see especially 65). See also Parry’s criticism of this tendency
in postcolonial criticism (especially “Problems” 35).
2. Ato Sekyi-Otu, for example, takes to task Christopher Miller’s reading of
Wretched of the Earth, and shows that Miller quotes Fanon too simplistically. He argues
that Miller lifts sentences on violence out of context, thereby losing the subtlety with
which Fanon analyzes the new national culture and lodges his criticism of its darker
side (42–43).
3. See especially Bhabha “Interrogating Identity” 40–65 in Location and Hall
“The After-life.”
4. See Location 176–177 for a discussion of the language metaphor. The lack of
analytical distinction between interpretation and other forms of agency is suggested in a
sentence such as: “There is the more complex possibility of negotiating meaning and agency
through the time-lag in-between the sign [. . .] and its initiation of a discourse or narra-
tive [. . .]” [my emphasis] (183). But the idea that “the question of agency [. . .] emerges”
(182) rather than that agency itself is created through individual struggle does not help to
illuminate how something located outside the sentence, and which is “not quite experi-
ence, not yet concept” (181) becomes translated into action by sentient human actors.
5. The translation reads “will erect a value-making superstructure on my whole
vision of the world.” Rather, I want to emphasize here that this superstructure cradles,
validates, and gives coherence to every moment of a particular vision of the world and
that it sanctions the two movements of aggression and love.
6. Fanon’s ironic lack of attention to such a totality in his vituperative arguments
against Mayotte Capécia in this chapter can be seen as a demonstration of an improp-
erly conducted analysis as per his own indications, which we have just examined. What
played out there methodologically, as well, was the erasure of the black woman as a
 Notes to Chapter 7 163

complete sensuous subjectivity in that it is only an amputated version of the black

woman as well as one severed from an engagement with a larger reality that are framed
in Fanon’s analyses of Capécia.
7. For David Macey, this unfortunate translation betrays Fanon’s text, by mis-
taking a lived experience for a fact, “to such an extent as to make it almost incompre-
hensible” (29). While it is evident that the translator has taken some liberty in chang-
ing the title of the chapter, I found it quite persuasive in following this narrative. In
this chapter, Fanon illustrates how, through the black man’s lived experience, he is his-
torically faced with his blackness, which is presented to him as a “fact,” by white cul-
ture and eventually becomes validated by his own internalization of white culture.
8. Fanon’s remarks, although made here on heterosexual love between a man and
a woman, will be taken up in the context of a wider sense of love, one for which Bhabha
feels called upon to apologize for its humanist tendency. Fanon’s version of love
between “men” is not a bland love of easy brotherhood. Like all Fanonian affect, it is
demanding and ethical. His essay, The North African Syndrome” that was published
in Esprit and then included by Maspero in Pour une révolution africaine ends with: “If
YOU do not demand the man, if YOU do not sacrifice the man that is in you so that
the man who is on this earth shall be more than a body, more than a Mohammed, by
what conjurer’s trick will I have to acquire the certainty that you, too, are worthy of my
love?” (Toward the African Revolution 16).
9. Other examples of the narrator’s preoccupation with an historical account can
be evoked: “With enthusiasm, I set to cataloguing . . .” “As times changed . . .” “After
much reluctance, scientists had conceded. . . .” “I put all the parts back together. But I
had to change my tune” “That victory played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me.”
“But on certain points the white man remained intractable” (see 119–120). This is fol-
lowed by a quotation taken from Alan Burns who quotes a certain Jon Alfred Mjoen’s
presentation on Race Crossing at the Second International Congress of Eugenics. At
this point, the historical-universal black narrator is able to anticipate what the strategy
was to such a discourse.
10. Although J. P. Riquelme tries to resuscitate this remark of Bhabha’s that has
been critiqued by E. San Juan Jr. through a proper resituation of the remark within
Bhabha’s Location of Culture (see Riquelme 566), I remain unconvinced of the mind-
fulness of Bhabha’s reading. “Fanon is not principally posing the question [What does
a black man want?] of political oppression as the violation of a human essence,
although he lapses into such a lament in his more existential moments. He is not rais-
ing the question of colonial man in the universalist terms of the liberal-humanist. [. . .]
Fanon’s question is addressed not to such a unified notion of history nor to such a uni-
tary concept of man. It is one of the original and disturbing qualities of Black Skin
White Masks that it rarely historicizes the colonial experience. There is no master nar-
rative or realist perspective that provides a background of social and historical facts
against which emerge the problems of the individual or collective psyche” (Location
42). First, it is not Fanon who lapses into lamenting the violation of a human essence.
However, in narrating the history of “the” black man, this narrator is confronted by this
phase in the black man’s tactics, a tactic his narrator assumes in dramatizing the
164 Notes to Chapter 7

anguish of the black man of his day in the face of white culture. It is clear that Fanon
does not believe in the existence or the unquestioned need for the idea of “the” black
man—yet, his historical narrator assumes such an entity as it has been created through
the unfortunate reality of colonialism. What is disturbing is that a critic of the sophis-
ticated intelligence of Homi Bhabha fails to note the “historicity,” which has been
bequeathed to the black narrator and that Fanon has the courage to assume, with the
idea of changing it. There is a master narrative into which Fanon’s narrator is forced to
enter. Black Skin, White Masks is all about reclaiming the right to enter the field of dis-
course created by colonial culture in the era in which he writes, and which was con-
structed as History even before the height of the colonial period. Such entry is com-
plicated by the desire of the narrator as an individual black subject to forsake this
collective narrative position for a properly individual “I.” The hybridity of the text, as
we have seen, arises, in part, due to the tension between such an idiosyncratic, personal,
unique narrative position, and one that is already oriented, making it respond to a uni-
tary, stifling reality in which the black man can be nothing but a generic nigger.
11. In his later writing (and, no doubt, referring specifically to négritude), Fanon
writes: “No neologism can mask the new certainty: the plunge into the chasm of the
past is the condition and the source of freedom” (Towards 43).
12. Of the various comments upon Fanon’s critique of Sartre, I found most per-
suasive Sonia Kruk’s subtle analysis.
13. “The racist in a culture with racism is therefore normal. The idea that one
forms of man, to be sure, is never totally dependent on economic relations, in other
words—and this must not be forgotten—on relations existing historically and geo-
graphically among men and groups. And even greater number of members belonging
to racist societies are taking a position. They are dedicating themselves to a world in
which racism would be impossible. But everyone is not up to this kind of commitment.
One cannot with impunity require of a man that he be against ‘the prejudices of his
group.’ And, we repeat, every colonialist group is racist” (Towards 40).
14. “Psychologists, who tend to explain everything by movements of the psyche,
claim to discover [racist] behavior on the level of contacts between individuals: the
criticism of an original hat, of a way of speaking, of walking . . . Such attempts delib-
erately leave out of account the special character of the colonial situation” (Towards 33).
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 Index

Abolition, 32, 36, 38, 40, 58, 89, 157n6 Ambiguous, 43, 98 (un-), 93
(Boyer on), 23 Ananden, Ananda Devi, 159n23
Administration, xv, 32, 37, 40, 57, 59, Antagonism/antagonistic, 3, 52, 111,
68, 75, 77, 90, 101, 102, 103, 156n9, 117 (Lacalu and Mouffe on), 112
158n8 (Bhabha on), 121
Administrator(s), 16, 90, 156n9 Anthropology, 6, 40, 161n15
Adorno, Theodor, 109–110 Anthropological, 14, 16, 90, 99, 104,
Affect, xv, 12, 34, 124, 163n8 (ive), 141 156n10
Africa (includes Madagascar), 30, 61, Appiah, Anthony K., 151n1
63, 64, 67, 81, 137, 142 (-n[s], see also Armand, Alain and Gérard Chopinet,
Creole[s], Black[s]), 3, 35, 51, 60, 67, 47
68, 69, 70, 71, 79, 80, 84, 90, 91, 101, Assimilate, 85
103, 142, 152n10, 156n4, 158n17, Assimilation, 4, 7, 12, 18, 38, 39, 42, 68,
159n23, 161n11 (non-), 156n6 (-n 93, 127, 131
diaspora), 3 (-n continent), 3, 56, 63, Assimilatory, 20, 92
68 (s), 3, 5, 13, 63, 82 (-ness), 15, 51,
52, 66, 69, 70, 71, 77, 82, 84, 91 Bâ, Mariama, 33
Agency, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 12, Bahri, Deepika, 151n1
13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 43, 45, 47, 69, 104, Balibar, Etienne, 59, 70
105, 106, 111, 117, 118, 119, 122, Barber, Karin, 113
124, 130, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, Baucom, Ian, 7, 10
141, 144, 145 (Bhabha on), 69, Beaton, Patrick, 54, 57, 61, 103–104
162n4 Benjamin, Walter, 84
Agenor, Monique, 154n8 Bentolila, Alain, 153n1
Ahmad, Aijaz, 17, 158n17 Bensmaïa, Réda, 98–99, 158n17
Alienation, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 119, Bérenger, Paul, 71, 72, 74, 81, 83,
141, 161n10 157n18
Alladin, K., 156n13 Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and
Allegorical, 93, 98 Raphaël Confiant, 4, 30, 160n9
Allegory, 31, 98–99, 160n7 Bhabha, Homi K., xiii, 4, 5, 10, 13, 17,
Althusser, Louis, 114, 120 45, 52, 116, 117, 118, 122, 124,
Ambiguity/ambivalence, 37, 38, 45, 51, 130, 152n12, 160n3, 163n8
59, 130, 140, 152n15, 154n16, 155n3 (Riquelme on), 163n10 (Young on),
(Bhabha on), 43 125, 162n18 (on Hall), 43 (on

175
176 Index

Bhabha, Homi K. (continued) Capital, 2, 5, 18, 57, 92, 111, 113, 120 (-
Fanon’s BSWM), 136, 138 ist/istic), 18, 91, 108, 112, 113 (-iza-
(Location), 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 43, tion), 109 (Bourdieu on), 49 (Fanon
44, 47, 69, 119, 121, 125, 130, 136, on), 92
153n20, 161n15, 162n2, 162n3, Capitalism, xii, 120, 123 (global), xv, 2,
162n4, 163–164n1 (Nation and 8, 9, 42
Narration), 68, 99 Césaire, Aimé, 4, 114, 115, 136, 137,
Bhojpuri, 32, 54, 55, 56, 79, 158n13, 143, 144, 153n18, 161n11, 161n13
159n22 (Fanon on), 142
Bihari, 90, 101, 102, 158n13 Centre d’études et de recherches sur les
Black(s), xiii, 20, 22, 24, 26, 29, 33, 36, sociétés de l’océan indien, 156n11
39, 45, 67, 69, 71, 77, 79, 83, 123, Champdemerle, Paul, 60
124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, Chane-Kune, Sonia, 54, 153n6
132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, Chaudenson, Robert, 153n1
139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, China/Chinese (includes Mauritian
154n8, 155n1, 162–163n6, 163n7, Chinese/Sinomauritian), 16, 23, 24,
163n9 31, 34, 35, 36, 54, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63,
Blackness, 25, 27, 29, 32, 52, 132, 138, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 90, 99, 101, 103,
143, 163n7 (Gilroy on), 11 153n6, 157n1, 158n13
Blanckaert, Claude, 40–42 Citizenship, 25, 27, 29 (French), 31, 46
Boisson, J-M, M. Louit, 58–59, 61, 67, Civil service, 32
156n8 Claim (to hybridity), xv (to agency), 7
Bongie, Chris, 159n1, 160n5, (s/ed), 1, 9
160–161n10 Class(es), 20, 30, 33, 36, 40, 42, 52, 56,
Bourbon. See La Réunion. 58, 71, 89, 90, 91, 103, 109, 110, 112,
Bourdieu, Pierre, 19, 48, 49 (on educa- 115, 117, 120 (middle-), 29, 36, 46,
tion), 32 92, 154n12 (working-/proletariat), 5,
Bourgeois (-ie), 6, 17, 21, 25, 28, 29, 90, 20, 21, 24, 25, 29, 33, 109, 139,
91, 95, 102, 159n21, 159n26 (-ifica- 155n6 (-less), 139
tion), 26 Code noir. See slave.
Boyer, Monique, 15–34, 36, 42, 43, 44, Colonial, xii, xiv, xv, 14, 16, 26, 28, 31,
97, 153n3, 157n3 35, 43, 44, 47, 57, 59, 60, 62, 67, 77,
Braun, Dieter, 155n2 79, 92, 102, 124, 125, 127, 130, 137,
Britain, 1, 75, 90 142, 144, 155n1, 163–164n10,
British, 10, 53, 54, 57, 61, 67, 75, 77, 81, 164n14 (Bhabha on), 9 (administra-
89, 90, 101, 102, 157n6 (colonial- tion), xv, 37, 40, 59, 90, 158n8 (cul-
ism), xi, xii, 17 ture), xv, 127, 143, 145 (enterprise),
Britton, Celia, 159n1 15 (exploitation), 3 (hybridity), 15,
38, 41 (novel), 34, 35, 37, 41, 42, 43,
Cabon, Marcel, 64, 65 44, 46, 89 (system), 88, 90 (world),
Cailler, Bernadette, 160n6 41 (pre-), 136 (anti-), 145 (-ist), 18,
Callikan-Proag, Aslakha, 64 (on 67, 157n6, 164n13 (-ism), xii, xiv, 1,
Cabon), 65 3, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 27, 30, 32,
Canclini, Nestór García, 147–148 35, 42, 46, 51, 59, 65, 92, 115, 126,
Capécia, Mayotte, 33, 129, 162–163n6 133, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141,
(Fanon on), 25–26, 154n8 142, 151n1, 158n13
 Index 177

Colonization, xiii, 47, 109 (de-), 149, 116, 117, 121, 122, 147, 151n3,
162n1 151n4, 151–152n7, 152n10
Colonized (ex-colonized), xii (colonizer- Creolizing, 91
colonized), xiii (world), 6 Critical, 22, 23, 25, 29, 98 (history), 20,
Colonizer/colonialist, xii, 57, 58, 62, 90, 26, 27, 30
124 (ex-colonizer), xi (colonizer-col- Critique/criticism, 27, 112, 124, 139,
onized), xiii 164n12 (of new theories of hyridity),
Colony/colonies, xii, 6, 37, 38, 39, 40, xv (of capitalism), 2, 98 (of modern-
41, 71, 75, 81, 90, 101, 102, 124, ization /development), 6
154n8 (post-), 52, 79 Culture(s), xi, 11, 16, 17, 18, 31, 34, 35,
Collective, 31, 89, 120, 130, 132, 138, 46, 52, 67, 73, 79, 80, 104, 112, 113,
139, 147, 149 115, 132, 139, 142, 145, 147, 148,
Collectivity/collectivities, 47, 59, 60, 151n1, 157n17, 157n1, 163n7
119, 133 (Lionnet on), 152n9 (Williams on),
Communist, 5, 10, 86 (Manifesto), 5 20 (hybrid), xiii (colonial/white), xv,
(Party), 114 2, 130, 137, 139, 143, 145
Confiant, Raphaël, 115 Cultural, 7, 12, 31, 41, 42, 44, 46, 57, 65,
Conflict/conflictual/conflicting, xiv, 68, 71, 73, 90, 99, 102, 104, 121 115,
156n4 (confrontation), 145, 147 119, 123, 129, 133, 142, 145,
Contradiction, xv, 11, 13, 15, 17, 34, 35, 152n13, 154n11, 157n1 (-ally), 129
109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 117, 120, Curriculum (see education)
122, 140, 148, 149, 153n15 ( Jameson
on), 155n3 (contradictory), 14, 104, Damoiseau, Robert, 153n1
108, 110, 151n3 Dash, Michael, 8, 106, 115, 159n1,
Coolie(s), (see also indenture[d]), 54, 90 161n11
Creole(s), xii, 16, 17, 18, 19, 36, 37, 38, Deleuze, Gilles, 114
39, 44, 54, 58, 60, 61, 64, 67, 68, 71, Deleuze Gilles and Félix Guattari,
72, 79, 80, 85, 87, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98, 152n11
100, 102, 152n13, 155n1 (islands), xi Depestre, Rene, 152n10
(language/morisyen), ix, x, 15, 19, 21, Derivative(s), xii, xiii, xiv, 1, 15, 16, 17
29, 31, 32, 34, 43, 45, 46, 48, 54, 55, De Mann, Paul, 99
56, 57, 60, 61, 66, 68, 69, 73, 80, 101, De Souza, Carl, 61, 87, 88, 157n2
112, 154n11, 154n12, 155n1, Department, 1, 17, 19, 30, 51, 112 (-al),
156n12, 159n24 (Gauvin on), 49, 29, 47 (-alization), 27, 45, 46
153n1 (Rasool, Alexander, Diachronic, 4 (-ally), 26
Chaudenson, Rughoonundun, Diachrony, 5
Giraud, Manesse, Bentolila, Dialectic(s), 5, 52, 106, 109, 122, 148
Damoiseau on), 15n1(specificity), xi (Fanon on), 133 (-al), 73, 107, 108,
Créolie, 48 114, 119, 120, 144, 160n2, 160n8
Creolist(s), 5, 30 Dialogue, xii, 4
Creolité, 2, 4, 48 (Eloge de la-), 4, 30, Diaspora, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 18, 34, 42, 70,
160n9 71, 83, 84, 105, 147, 149, 151n3,
Créolitude, 151n6 151n4, 152n10 (Hall on), 4
Creolization, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, (African), 3, 5, 70, 84 (Indian), 5
14, 18, 20, 22, 25, 27, 34, 42, 52, 70, Chinese), 5 (Hall on), 9 (Gilroy on),
71, 84, 92, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 11, 70, 151–152n7
178 Index

Diasporic, 10, 83, 84, 91 (discourse[s]), 133, 139, 142, 144, 145, 149,
3, 5, 10, 52, 73 (-s), 4 161n15, 161n16, 163n8 (Glissant
Difference(s), xiv, 2, 4, 6, 7, 17, 29, 30, on), 116 (Fanon on), 126
31, 40, 41, 43, 44, 52, 90, 99, 101, Ethnic, 52, 55, 57, 59, 60, 70, 73, 74, 75,
104, 106, 109, 111, 116, 117, 120, 92, 102, 139, 147, 158n11 (-ity), x,
122, 125, 127, 139, 142, 147, 152n7, 16, 18, 24, 66, 71, 74, 85, 90, 99, 100,
152n9, 152n15 (alterity), 116 (diver- 101, 104, 123, 148, 155n1, 157n1,
sity), 116, 125 (heterogeneity), 108 159n22 (Eriksen on), 158–159n20
(otherness), 117, 118, 125, 127, 148 Ethnified, 95
(Bhabha on), 43, 68, 161n15 (Hall Etienne, Pauline, 72
on), 153n15 (Melas on), 62
Dirlik, Arif, 151n1 Fanon, Frantz, xii, xiii, 12, 13, 97, 98, 114,
Discourse(s), 5, 12, 30, 37, 41, 46, 49, 123, 126, 127, 130, 134, 148 (Baucom
54, 64, 80, 81, 84, 99, 124, 134, 140, on), 7 (Bhabha on), 162n3 (Hall on),
141, 162n4, 163n9 (communist), 10 162n3 (Kruks on), 164n12 (Melas on),
(diasporic), 3, 10 (of hybridity), 3, 62 (Premnath on), 162n1 (Sekyi-Otu
147 (political), 4, 66, 68 (public), 52, on), 162n2 (Glissant on), 161n103 (on
71, 73, 74, 77, 80, 91, 156n9 (post- Capécia), 25–26, 154n8 (BSWM), xiii,
colonial), 11 (theoretical), 4 (nation- xiv, xv, 25–26, 27, 62, 95, 123, 124,
al[ist]), 62, 70, 81 125, 126, 128–129, 131, 132, 133, 134,
Dominance, 115 135, 136, 137, 139, 142, 144, 148, 149,
Dominant, 11, 52, 109, 121, 145 152n12, 153n18, 154n8, 153n20,
Dominating, 151n1 162–163n6 (Wretched of the Earth), 92,
Domination, 5, 6, 125, 135, 137, 153n15 141 (Towards), 138, 142, 143, 144,
Dubois, Laurent, 40, 124 145, 164n11, 164n13, 164n14
Ducroq (abbé), 78, 79 Fonctionnaire/functionary, 25, 29, 40,
155n6
Economic(s), 7, 16, 92, 151n1, 154n8, France, 19, 39, 41, 48, 115, 124, 158n13
159n26 (crisis), 35 Francophone, xi, 2, 4, 48 152n10,
Economistically, 25 154n12, 155n3, 159n21, 161n11
Economy, 72, 91, 119 French, 18, 19 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30,
Education, xii, 19, 20, 36, 48, 67, 91, 34, 35, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 51, 53,
102, 103, 112, 154n11 (Bourdieu 57, 59, 60, 62, 69, 72, 73, 74, 77, 80,
on), 32 (school/curriculum), 32, 36, 81, 89, 90, 91, 101, 107, 112, 113,
57, 73, 156n4 114, 127, 142, 156n9, 157n6,
Edwards, Brent Hayes, 151n4 158n13, 159n1 (language), x, 20, 31,
English, 53, 68, 131 (language), x, 17 56, 32, 49, 68, 69, 72, 73, 79, 112, 113,
57, 73, 79 (translation), 127, 133, 129, 155n3, 159n22, 160n9 (colo-
134, 135 nialism), xi, xii, 17, 22, 32 (citizen-
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 16, 99 ship), 31 (theories), 2
(Communicating), 65, 91, 156n11 Fludernik, Monika, 151n2
(Ethnicity and Nationalism), 100, 101,
102, 103, 158–159n20 (Us and Gandhi, Indira, 62, 63
Them), 104 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand
Ethic(s)/ethical, 45, 47, 96, 107, 109, (Mahatma), 63, 68 (Institute), 61,
117, 118, 119, 120, 126, 127, 130, 62–63, 64
 Index 179

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 134 Hierarchical, 14, 28, 138 (non-), 8, 112
Gauvin, Axel, 20, 48 (Du créole opprimé), Hindi, x, 54, 65, 66, 79, 85, 158n13,
31, 48, 49, 153n1, 155n5 159n22
Gellner, Ernest, 99 Hindu(s), 59, 67, 71, 74, 75, 93, 100,
Gerbeau, M., 156n6 101, 102, 159n22
Gilroy, Paul, 4, 10, 71, 151n4, 152n8, History (histories), xii, xiii, 5, 6, 10, 11,
152n10 (Small Acts), 11, 123 14, 20, 21, 22–23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31,
(Between Camps), 70, 72–72 (Black 33, 42, 43, 44, 47, 51, 52, 60, 63, 65,
Atlantic), 71, 80, 83, 84, 151–152n7 68, 69, 77, 79, 80, 82, 87, 91, 98, 99,
Giraud, Michel and Danièle Manèse, 104, 105, 112, 113, 119, 134, 135,
153n1 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 147, 148,
Glissant, Edouard, xii, xiv xv, 12, 13, 17, 163–164n10 (Bhabha on), 6, 125
33, 44, 96, 97, 113, 116, 119, 120, (Hall on), 152n9 (Lionnet on),
121, 148, 149, 152n12, 153n18, 152n9 (Fanon on), 140 (Ramgoolam
154n10, 159n1, 160n2, 161n16 on), 62 (critical-), 20, 26, 27, 30
(Dash on), 115 (Murdoch on), Historical, xv, 13, 22, 27, 74, 102, 104,
162n17 (Nesbitt on), 160n2 (on 111, 115, 117, 136, 140, 159n1,
Fanon), 161n13 (‘s conception of 163–164n10 (-universal), 130, 134,
Relation), xiv, 8 17, 105, 106, 107, 135, 138, 140, 141, 144, 148, 163n9
108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 116, 117, (-ly), xiv, 26, 27, 28, 30, 42, 43, 57,
120, 121, 122, 148, 154n10, 157n17, 77, 88, 89, 113, 132, 137, 139, 145,
160n2, 160n8 (Caribbean Discourse), 155n2
34, 119, 152n10, 160n9, 161n13 Homogenize, 111, 152n11
(Poétique de la Relation/Poetics of Homogenizing, xii
Relation), 105–122 Homogenization, xiii, 12, 101
Global (-ized), 2 (-ism), 16 (-ization), Hookoomsing, Vinesh, 156n5
16, 17, 18, 147, 149 (capitalism), xv Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno,
Goa, 53 160n2
Goldmann, Lucien, 111 Humbert, Marie-Thérèse, 58, 85, 86, 87,
Graham, Gerald, 53, 54 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 157n1
(Lionnet on), 92, 157n4
Hall, Stuart, 10, 12, 13, 124 (Bhabha Hybrid, 2, 9, 10, 17, 22, 104, 105, 113,
on), 43 (“Cultural Identity and 119, 121, 124, 138, 139, 147, 148
Diaspora”), 4, 5, 6, 9, 152n9, 153n16 (location), xv (nation), xi (culture),
(“Deviance”), 9 (“The After-Life”), xiii (occurrence), xv (non-), 117
162n3 Hybridity, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 1, 2, 6, 7,
Hallward, Peter, 160n5 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20,
Hazareesingh, K., 61, 102 22, 24, 25, 27, 34, 35, 38, 40, 41, 42,
Hegel, Georg W., 17, 105, 107, 108, 43, 44, 51, 52, 60, 71, 91, 96, 104,
109, 114, 117, 121 (-ian), 116 106, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124,
Hegemonic, 66, 118, 121 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 138, 139,
Hegemony, 7, 8, 43, 56, 112, 115, 121, 143, 145, 147, 148, 149, 151n3,
133, 153n17 160n3, 164n10 (Fludernik on),
Heterogeneity. See difference. 151n2, 153n17 (Stewart on), 151n2
Hierarchy, 32, 41, 61, 85 (Dubois on), (Trigo on), 152n14 (avatars of ), 3
40 (postcolonial theories of ), xiii, xiv, xv,
180 Index

Hybridity (continued) Jameson, Fredric, ix, 111, 119, 120

113, 117, 119 (new theories of ), xiv, (“Cultural Logic”), 120–121
xv, 7, 35 (versions of ), xv (related (“Globalization and Political”), 13, 45
terms), 1, 2, 5, 152n2, 152n14 (Marxism and Form), 107, 108,
Hybridizing/hybridization, 2, 33, 145, 160n7, 160n8 (Political Unconscious),
147 44, 112, 155n4 (Seeds of Time), 155n4
Hyppolite, Jean, 114 (“Third World Literature”), 98, 99,
153n18
Identification, 83, 93, 110, 126, 127, Jordan, Z. A., 108
147, 161n15 Joubert, Jean-Louis, 157n5
Identity/identities, 5, 23, 28, 29, 32, 46, Joubert, Jean-Louis and Jean-Irénée
56, 59, 61, 65, 69, 79, 82, 89, 90, 92, Raminadrasoa, 157n5
93, 95, 97, 103, 108, 113, 138, 141, Julien, Eileen, 139
152n7, 161n10 (Lionnet on), 152n9
(Hall on), 4, 5, 152n9 (Nancy on), Kaul, Suvir, 31
70 Kojève, Alexandre, 114, 153n18,
Ile-de-France. See Mauritius. 161n12
Immigrant(s), 23, 28, 42, 57, 59, 60, 68,
71, 101, 102 Labor, 27, 42, 54, 58, 69, 80, 90, 102,
Immigration, 4, 10, 16, 23, 42, 58, 71, 103, 108, 110, 111, 113, 119, 157n6
90, 101, 153n6 (Balibar on), 59 (work), 112 (slave-), 6, 10 (-er/work-
Indenture(d), 6, 16, 17, 23, 27, 42, 58, er), 23, 58, 74, 75, 80, 90, 91, 101,
67, 69, 77, 102, 156n9 (coolie), 54, 102, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 156n9,
90 157n6, 159n26
Independent/independence, 1, 49, 52, Labourdonnais, Mahé de (Hazareesingh
55, 59, 67, 71, 74, 79, 80, 100, 155n1 on), 61, 102
India, x, 10, 53, 56, 70, 72, 81, 90, 102, Lacan, Jacques, 46, 114, 118, 119
157n6, 158n13 Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe,
Indian(s) (includes Mauritian Indians, 112
Indo-Mauritians), ix, x, xi, 5 16, 32, Language(s)/idiom[s], 19, 21, 27, 29, 31,
35, 36, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 32, 34, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 54,
64, 66, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77, 55, 56, 61, 65, 66, 68, 70, 73, 79, 80,
79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87, 90, 91, 100, 85, 91, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 112,
101, 102, 156n9 156n14 113, 116, 119, 124, 148, 156n3,
Indianness, ix, x, 71, 73, 91 156n5, 156n9, 159n22, 160n9
Indian Ocean, xi, xii, 12, 54 (Gauvin on), 49 (Spivak on), 33
Indo-Mauritians. See Indian[s]. (Williams on), 20 (Bhabha on), 44
Inequality/inequalities, xiv, 1, 2, 12, 13, (Lionnet on), 57, 66, 152n15
120, 123, 147 (Rughoonundun on), (Ramgoolam
Irele, Abiola, 152 on), 55 (-metaphor), 47, 125, 162n4
Island/islands, xi, xv, 1, 15, 16, 18, 25, La Réunion, xi, xiv, 1, 17, 19, 23, 25, 26,
28, 30, 32, 51, 55, 62, 84, 97, 112, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 42, 45, 46,
154n8 (Mascerenes), 53, 156n6 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 53, 148, 154n8,
Issur, Kumari and Vinesh 155n6, 157n7
Hookoomsing, 157n5 Lazarus, Neil (Nationalism), 122
Ithier, J., 32 (“Disavowing Decolonization”), 123
 Index 181

Leblond, Marius-Ary, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 36, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63,
39 64, 66, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 73, 75,
Li, David, 151n1 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87, 90, 91,
Lionnet, Françoise, 5, 10, 11, 13 (on his- 100, 101, 102, 156n9 156n14
tory), 152n9 (on language), 57 (Indianness), xi, 91
(Autobiographical Voices), 8, 9, 92, (Mauritians/Mauritian people), x,
152n9, 152–153n15, 157n4, 158n16 67, 71, 72, 100 (politics), xv, 60, 65,
(Créolité in the Indian Ocean”), ix, 75, 77 (society), 52, 70, 73, 83, 84,
xi, 57, 66 (Postcolonial 87, 88, 91, 93, 97 (-ness), xi, 99
Representations), 5, 6, 152n9 Mauritius, ix, x, xi, xiv, xv, 1, 15, 16, 17,
Lukácks, Georg, 119–120 42, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 63,
Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen, 152n10 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 79,
80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 89, 90, 99, 100,
Macey, David, 163n7 101, 103, 148, 156n3, 156n16,
Madagascar. See Africa. 157n6, 157n7
Mahatma. See Gandhi. Mauritius Legislative Council, 75, 76,
Mahatma Gandhi Institute, ix 80, 156n14
Marcus, George E. and Michael M. J. Mbembe, Achille, 13, 104
Fischer, 6, 7 McClintock, Ann, 151n1
Marimoutou, Jean-Claude Carpanin, Melas, Nathalie, 62, 156n7
153n2 Memory/memories, 10, 21, 58, 67, 102,
Markman, Charles (see also Fanon 118
BSWM), 162n4 Métissage, xiv, 1, 2, 9, 15, 20, 21, 22, 24,
Maroon(s). See slave(s). 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 34, 42, 43, 45, 46,
Martinican(s), 33, 112, 113, 114, 129, 52, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 116,
141, 142, 154n15, 161n11 117, 119, 122, 152n10 (Lionnet on),
Martinique, 33, 112, 114, 115, 127, 9
160n9 Métis(se), 19, 20, 22, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72,
Marx, Karl, 14, 112, 113, 153n18 (-ian/- 85, 92, 101, 103, 130, 152n13,
ist), xiii, xiv, 3, 12, 17, 105, 106, 107, 153n15, 155n1, 157n1, 158n16
108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, (mulatto/mixed-blood), 37, 38, 87,
117, 120, 121, 122, 160n8 (-ism), 3, 91, 158n8 (Lionnet on), 158n16
17, 105, 115, 117, 122 (Capital), Michel, Martina, 151n1
108–109, 110, 111, 112–113 Minh-Ha, Trinh T., 99
(Economic and Philosophical Minority, 4, 11, 79, 104, 159n21
Manuscripts), 111 Modern, 80 (-ity), 12
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, 105, Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 7
107, 115, 161n14 (Communist Morisyen. See Creole language.
Manifesto), 5, 6 Motherland/mother country, 4, 5, 10, 89
Mascarenes, 53, 156n6 Mother tongue, 31, 56
Masson, Loys, 53–54 Mouvement Militant Mauricien
Maunick, Edouard, 68, 103, 159n25 (MMM), 66, 73, 76, 81, 82, 159n24
Mauritian, 73, 79, 154n13, 156n12, Mudimbé-Boyi, Elisabeth, 155n3
157n17 (context), 54, 58, 70, 74, Mulatto. See Métis/se.
158n8 (exceptionalism), ix Murdoch, H. Adlai, 159n1, 162n17
(Indian[s]), ix, x, xi, 5 16, 32, 35, Muslim(s), 59, 67, 71, 73, 101, 159n22
182 Index

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 70 Political, xv, 2, 13, 14, 16, 30, 31, 48, 54,
Nation, xv, 17, 22, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 59, 61, 66, 68, 102, 104, 115, 126,
34, 43, 46, 52, 58, 62, 63, 68, 71, 72, 130, 133, 139, 148,
73, 74, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 90, 91, 92, Pondichéry, 53, 102
99, 102, 103, 104, 153n15 (Bhabha Population(s), 2, 4, 11, 34, 54, 56, 59,
on), 68 (postcolonial), xi, 65, 123 60, 61, 66, 68, 69, 75, 77, 79, 89, 90,
(hybrid), xi (-al), 4, 17, 59, 66, 90, 98, 91, 97, 101, 102, 104, 155n1 (“gener-
99, 103, 139, 147, 160n7, 161n10, al”), 56, 58, 59, 60, 67, 72, 79, 80, 85
162n1 (-alism), 15, 16, 19, 21, 89, 90, (immigrant), 28 (subaltern), xv
99, 100, 102, 104, 123 (-alist/-alis- Portugese, 53
tic), 49, 62, 70, 81 (-hood), 19, 29, Postcolonial, xv, 17, 35, 43, 95, 113, 119,
46, 51 120, 122, 123, 124, 157n1, 158n10,
Native, xii, 31, 124 160n5 (Michel, Bahri, Li, Appiah,
Négritude, 4, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, Dirlik, McClintock, Shohat and
140, 141 (Dash on), 115, 161n11 Stam on), 151n1 (canon), xi (con-
(Fanon on), 164n11 (post-), 152n10 text), 14, 16 (discourse[s]), 11, 13,
Nesbitt, Nick, 153n18, 160n2 14, 26 (hybridity), xii, xiii, 15, 42,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20, 21, 24, 153n4, 104 (locations), xiv, 7, 13 (nation), xi,
153n5, 154n7 65 (praxis), 14 (regions), 7, 98 (soci-
Nigger (/ Negro/cafre/nègre), 40, 44, 45, eties), xiv (studies), xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 1,
46, 47, 97, 127, 129, 132, 134, 136, 2, 4, 6, 13, 113, 126, 145 (texts), xiii
138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 164n10 (theories of hybridity), xiii, xiv, xv, 14,
(Boyer on), 27, 30, 32 (Fanon on), 17, 27, 47, 108, 113, 117, 119
127, 128, 131, 140 (women), 33 (world), xiv, 114
Noël, Karl, 79 Postcoloniality, xii, 13, 17, 70, 159n1
Nzepa, Zacharie Petnkeu, 156n4 Power, 1, 9, 17, 27, 28, 30, 65, 94, 99,
111 (Bhabha on), 43
Olaniyan, Tejumola, 151n4 Prabhu, Anjali (“Creolization”), ix
Opacity, 108, 109 (“Interrogating Hybridity”), viii
Opposing, 3 (“Mariama Bâ”), 155n14
Opposite, 108, 110 (“Narration”), xviii
Opposition, 108, 125 (“Representation”), xviii
(“Theorizing”), 158n10
Parry, Benita, 12, 119, 162n1 Prabhu, Anjali and Ato Quayson, 106,
Particular, xv, 3, 4, 55, 100, 109, 110, 153n19, 160n4
111, 115, 117, 119, 121, 133, 147, Premnath, Gautam, 162n1
151n3 (-ity), 134 Proletariat. See class, working-.
Peirce, Charles S., 154n16 Prosper, Jean-Georges (“La place”), 48
Pitot, Thomi, 78, 89 (Histoire), 62 (Histoire), 89
Plevitz, Adolphe de, 74, 75 Purity, 37, 38
Plural, xv,71, 72, 83 (-istic), 73 (-ity), 99,
115 Queneu, Raymond, 114
Politics, 2, 3 12, 16, 27, 31, 38, 43, 49,
52, 70, 92, 97, 103, 115, 125, 134, Race, xii, xiii, 16, 18, 21, 25, 27, 29, 30,
151n1 (radical), xiv (Mauritian), xv, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 46, 52, 90, 117,
60, 65, 70, 73, 75, 77 124, 130, 135, 139, 155n1,
 Index 183

158–159n20, 163n9 (Blanckaert on), Séga, 67, 80, 99, 157n17

40–41, 124 Sekyi-Otu, Ato, 162n2
Racial, x, xii, xiii, 25, 40, 42, 43, 66, 68, Self, 126, 127, 134, 135, 138, 139 (indi-
73, 100, 134, 155n2, 157n1 (inter-), vidual[s]), 127, 138, 139, 141, 142,
28 (multi-), xv (-izing), 28 144, 147, 148, 149, 154n15, 155n1,
Racism, 45, 123, 142, 164n13 156n9, 164n10
Racist, 59, 92, 142 (Fanon on), 164n13, Selfhood, 31, 97, 128, 134, 138
164n14 (ideologies), 3 (remark), 28 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 136, 137, 139,
(signs), 43 (tendencies), 20 Radical 159n25
47, 115, 158n11, 161n15, 161n16 Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam, 151n1
(agency), 104 (conception), 2 (differ- Singh, Manmohan (or Indian Prime
ence/otherness), 111, 116, 117, 127 Minister), 71, 72, 83
(hybridity), 60 (métissage), 24, 26 Sino-Mauritian. See Chinese.
(politics), xiv (-ly), xiv, 106, 158n11, Skepticism, 2, 31
158n16 Slave(s)/maroon, 22, 57, 61, 67, 70, 77,
Ramasehsan, Radhika, 71 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 90, 101, 103, 115,
Ramgoolam, Navin, 74, 157n17 119, 157n6, 90, 154n8, 154n11,
Ramgoolam, Seewoosagar, 51, 52, 55, 156n6, 157n7, 162n17 (labor), 6, 11,
61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 73, 75, 80, 99, 69, 71, 81, 82 (-ry), 3, 17, 22, 23, 27,
100, 103, 156n14, 159n23 41, 42, 52, 58, 62, 64, 66, 71, 77, 79,
Rano, Jonas, 151n6 80, 82, 84, 89, 124, 136, 140, 154n8,
Real reality/realities, xv, 1, 2, 14, 17, 20, 156n16 (Code Noir), 77, 78, 79
23, 24, 31, 34, 37, 44, 55, 56, 64, 73, Social, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 2, 7, 8, 18, 27, 95,
76, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 97, 111, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120,
115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 131, 140, 148, 153n20, 154n15, 155n4, 160n7
141, 144, 148, 163n6, 164n10 (equality), 61 (-ly), 95
Relation, xiv, 17, 29, 97, 106, 115 Societal, 1, 119
Renan, Ernest, 85 Society/societies, xi, xv, 2, 14, 22, 25, 26,
Réunion/Réunionness/Réunionese, 28, 30, 37, 52, 60, 53, 69, 70, 82, 83,
Bourbon. See La Réunion. 84, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 103,
Revolution, 12, 92, 109, 117, 119, 120, 104, 110, 111, 112, 115, 139, 142,
122, 127 ( Jameson on), 44 (ary), xiv, 154n15, 155n1
41, 92, 107, 111, 114, 122, 145, 147, Solidarity, 3, 4, 10, 42, 91, 139, 151n7
161n13 (Baucom on), 7 (Lionnet on), 8
Riquelme, J. P., 163n10 Specific, xv, 3, 5, 99, 105, 125, 138, 147
Robillard, D., 56 (-ation[s]), 15, 124, 147 (-ity/-ities),
Rughoonundun, Nita (“Créolophonie”), xi, 2, 51, 82, 107, 129, 145, 158n16
57 (“Les langues”), 153n1, 156n5 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 14, 125
(“Thinking Cultural”), 33 (Gates on),
Said, Edward, 31, 125 134
Saint-Pierre, Bernadin de, 77 (Pitot on), Stein, Peter, 156n3
78 Stepan, Nancy, 158n8
San Juan, E. Jr., 163n10 Stereotype(s)/stereotyping/stereotyped,
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 115, 128, 131, 132, 130, 132, 133, 137, 140, 148
139, 140, 143, 144, 161n16 (Fanon Stereotypical, 138
on), 140 Stewart, Charles, 151n2
184 Index

Stoler, Anne, 26 Theory, xi, xiii, 2, 7, 8, 17, 18, 43, 95,

Structure(s), 26, 29, 59, 79, 83, 85, 87, 106, 107, 111, 115, 120, 145,
100, 102, 104, 113, 116, 144, 45 158n10, 162n18 (Lacan on), 118 (of
(Fanon on), 145, 153n20, 154n15 (of hybridity), 10, 14, 125, 128, 130,
feeling), 12, 15, 19, 21, 29, 31, 34 (of 160n3
structures), 120 (-al), 28, 37, 38, 49, Theories, 10, 16, 43, 105, 112, 122, 135
104, 153n1 (-ed), 60, 131 (-ing/re— (of hybridity), xiv, 2, 7 (postcolonial
ing), 46, 99, 133, 134, 139 (sub-), 20, theories of hybridity), xiii, xiv, xv, 17,
125 (super-), 162n5 27, 47, 117, 119
Subaltern, 121, 122, 153n17 (agency), Tosquelles, François, 114
xiii, 1, 7, 9, 12, 105, 117 (popula- Totality, xiii, xiv, xv, 11, 15, 17, 20, 26,
tions), xv (subject[s]), xii, xiii, 3, 8, 29, 34, 46, 84, 99, 100, 104, 105, 108,
126 (ity), 11, 121 109, 110, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121,
Subject(s), 14, 46, 108, 110, 113, 117, 119, 122, 125, 126, 127, 134, 139, 143,
124, 125, 134, 136, 138, 141, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 162n6 (Bhabha
148, 164n10 (Lionnet on), 6 (Bhabha on), 121 (Fanon on), 127
on), 6, 43, 125 (Hall on), 9 ( Jameson Transculturation, 1, 2
on), 120 (Lacan on), 118 (subaltern), Transnational, 4
xii, xiii, 3, 8, 126 (-hood), 128, 129, Trauma, 5, 10, 13, 91, 147 (-tic), 22, 118
130, 134, 137, 139, 141 (-ive), 33, 108, Trigo, Abril, 152n14
111, 119 (-ivity), 4, 31, 44, 106, 109,
112, 113, 125, 129, 130, 131, 142 United Nations, 70
(inter-ive), 126 (de-ification), 130 Universal, 100, 109, 110, 138, 140, 141,
Suez Canal, 36 154n16 (-historical), 130, 134, 135,
Sugar, 35, 57, 71, 75, 90 (-cane), 35 138, 140, 141, 144, 148 (-ism), xiii (-
Swahili, 103 ity), 70, 115 (-izing), 17, 137 (-ly), 60
Synchronic, 21, 22 (-ally), 26 Universal suffrage, 75, 81
Synchrony, 5 Unnuth, Abhimanyu, 65
Synthesis, 22, 106, 116 (Glissant on), Utopia, xv, 34, 106, 122, 140, 142, 148 (-
106 n), x, 2, 20, 29, 10, 111, 115, 119,
Synthesized, 30 122, 152–153n15, 160n5 (-nism),
14
Tamil, x, 32, 54, 55, 66, 79, 90, 101, 102,
158n13, 159n22 Vaughan, Meghan, 156n16
Telugu, 54, 55, 66, 79, 101, 158n13, Venugopal, K., 72
159n22 Vergès, Francoise, xiv, 12, 13, 22, 28
Theoretical, 111, 117, 124, 135, 138, (“Post-Scriptum”), xiv–xv (Monsters
148 (concept), 2 (evaluation), 84 and Revolutionaries), 15, 27, 42
(formulation), 4 (framework), 10 Virahsawmy, Dev, 159n24
(need), 4, 5 (positioning), 15 (pro-
ject), 121 (process), 116 Wallerstein, Emmanuel, 102, 103,
Theorist(s)/theoretician(s), xi, xiii, 2, 4, 158n9, 159n21, 159n26
6, 7, 9, 123 Williams, Raymond, 12, 15, 19, 111
Theorize(d), 96, 105, 134, 144 (Culture and Society), 20 (“Film…”),
Theorizing, xi, 35, 125, 139 (theoriza- 34 (Marxism), 26, 29, 34 (“Thomas
tion), 122 Hardy”), 29
 Index 185

White/whites/whiteness, x, xi, xii, xiii, 163n7, 163n9 (race), xii, 16, 35, 36,
24, 2. 38, 42, 46, 56, 58, 59, 67, 68, 46
71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 79, 85, 87, 89, 92, Worker. See laborer.
93, 94, 95, 97, 103, 123, 124, 126,
127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, Yiddel, Janice and Belinda Kemp, 151n5
135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, Young, Robert J. C., 124–125, 130,
142, 143, 144, 154n8, 156n14, 162n18
 SUNY series,
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Emmanuel C. Eze and Arif Dirlik, editors

Natascha Gentz and Stefan Kramer (eds.), Globalization, Cultural Identities,

and Media Representations

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Writers of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora

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186
CULTURAL STUDIES / LITERARY CRITICISM

HYBRIDITY
Limits, Transformations, Prospects
Anjali Prabhu

This critical engagement with some of the most prominent contemporary

theorists of postcolonial studies reevaluates recent theories of hybridity and agency.
Challenging the claim that hybridity provides a site of resistance to hegemonic
and homogenizing forces in an increasingly globalized world, Anjali Prabhu
pursues the ways in which hybridity plays out in the Creole, postcolonial societies
of Mauritius and La Réunion, two small islands in the Indian Ocean, and offers
an introduction to the literature and culture of this lesser-known region of
Francophonie. She also reconsiders two major theorists from the Francophone
context, Edouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, through a provocatively Marxian
framing that reveals these two writers shared more in common about agency
and society than has previously been recognized.
“This remarkable contribution to debates about the relations between hybrid-
ity and society in postcolonial studies will make a dramatic impact on the
field. Nowhere have the notions of hybridity and diaspora been discussed so
thoroughly. It will be very useful as both a productive theoretical resource and
an instrument for teaching and should be of interest to scholars and students in
literary studies, anthropology, history, and social theory.”
— Ato Quayson, author of Calibrations: Reading for the Social
“While the field of postcolonial studies is by no means new, and varying readings
and interpretations of its core concepts of hybridity and métissage have been
added to the literature over time, few have done so in such length, breadth, and
depth, problematizing competing sets of current approaches to critical theory
and drawing on the resulting conclusions to stage new readings of fiction and
criticism from a variety of geographical locations. The caliber of the writing
and the analysis make this book a welcome and necessary addition to the canon
of postcolonial criticism.”
— Adlai Murdoch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Anjali Prabhu is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at
Wellesley College.
A volume in the SUNY series,
Explorations in Postcolonial Studies
Emmanuel C. Eze and Arif Dirlik, editors

State University of
New York Press
www.sunypress.edu