Racial France, or the Melancholic Alterity of Postcolonial Studies
A certain amount of anxiety seems to dominate all the essays in this special issue. Jean-François Bayart’s is obviously the most polemical. Even as he acknowledges the heterogeneity of the field — indeed, berates it as careless — he is nonetheless intent on characterizing postcolonial studies in fairly homogeneous fashion. It is an irresponsible, confused, and feminized adolescent — a bridesmaid, no less — who never acknowledges that all it says of value has been thought by the French generations before. It is promiscuous in its lack of discipline, and it homogenizes a heterogeneous history. He gives the field an identity, indeed, even a personality, and then accuses it of being invested in an identitarian logic. Postcolonial studies merges with cultural studies for Bayart, and this produces a notion of the colony that is an invented tradition. The formerly colonized are apparently reconstituted in relation to this and made destitute as a result. Paradoxically, it is the social sciences in this translation for Bayart that offer a potential solution to this problem by producing good history, sound discipline, and properly French perspective. Enfranchised by the “right to history,” as Aimé Césaire puts it, they will be matured and cured of the disabling delusions created and sustained by the invented traditions of postcolonial studies.1 Or are we running into a problem of translation from one national institutional context to another? Les sciences humaines does not divide humanities and social sciences in the way the anglophone world does.
For Ann Laura Stoler, the French reveal themselves to be aphasic. Rejecting one pathology — collective amnesia — for another — aphasia, Stoler claims that this
is of course not an appeal to organic cognitive deficit among “the French.” Rather, it is to emphasize both loss of access and active forgetting. In aphasia, an occlusion of knowledge is the issue. It is not a matter of ignorance or absence. Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things. Aphasia in its many forms describes a difficulty retrieving both conceptual and lexical vocabularies and, most important, a difficulty comprehending what is spoken.2
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Notes
- Jean-François Bayart, “Postcolonial Studies: An Invention of Tradition?” in this issue, 84.
- Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France,” in this issue, 125.