PRICE and PRICE, 1997
Richard and Sally Price
Links to relevant CA essay lists: The Caribbean, History and Historiography, Memory, Narrative, Discourse, and Rhetoric
EDITORS' OVERVIEW
In the February 1997 issue of Cultural Anthropology, Richard and Sally Price offer an analysis of the central figures of the French Caribbean's créolité movement (among them Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Jean Bernabé) and their literature-driven cultural politics. In “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove” the Prices focus critical attention on this group of intellectuals' formulation of the meaning of the past in Martinique. They advocate a recontextualization of the créolistes' celebratory vision of Martiniquan history and read their political project against modernization imperatives in the still-politically-French département. The Prices examine the books and films produced by the créolistes, highlighting the various contradictions that emerge in their treatment of the past, of “culture,” and their silencing of women through masculinist (and heterosexist) strategies of authorization. They suggest that a broader engagement with the whole of the Caribbean (rather than a closed-circuit one with France and its empire) might move the créolistes' representations beyond the essentialisms that undergird their putatively radical anti-colonial politics. Given these themes, “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove” will be of particular interest to scholars in Caribbean, African diaspora, and French/Francophone studies, as well as scholars with interests in gender, memory, and cultural politics.
Richard and Sally Price divide their time between the Anthropology department at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and their home in Martinique. Specialists in the anthropology of Afro-America, they have been writing about ethnographic history, human rights, gender, and aesthetics since the mid-1960s. They are authors, both separately and together, of over a dozen monographs.
Cultural Anthropology has published another seminal article on the politics of creolization in the Caribbean: Aisha Khan's “Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as Master Symbol” (2001).
Cultural Anthropology has also published numerous articles on memory and the production of history. See, for example, Rosalind Shaw's “Displacing Violence: Making Pentecostal Memory in Postwar Sierra Leone” (2007) on Sierra Leonean youth's production of stories that re-narrate their memories of violence, William Cunningham Bissell's “Engaging Colonial Nostalgia” (2005) on the recasting of nostalgia in Zanzibar, seen through his analysis as a response to neoliberal restructuring, and Thomas Lyons' “Ambiguous Narratives” (2001) on the definition of authors, texts, and their narratives.
Cultural Anthropology essays can be accessed electronically through AnthroSource, http://www.anthrosource.net/, which is available through most research libraries and to all members of the American Anthropological Association. Journalists may request PDFs from Cultural Anthropology's editorial office: ea@culanth.org.
LINKS FROM THE ESSAY
On créolité and/or creolization
Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant. Eloge de la créolité/ In Praise of Creoleness (édition bilingue). M.B. Taleb-Khyar, trans. Paris: Gallimard, 1993
The Martinican concept of “creoleness”
General bibliography on creolization
Short biography of King Behanzin
Figures cited in the essay
Dany Bébel-Gisler
Principle works:
1976. La langue créole, force jugulée: étude socio-linguistique des rapports de force entre le créole et le français aux Antilles. L'Harmattan.
1994. Leonora: The Buried Story of Guadeloupe. Trans. Andrea Leskes. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press/CARAF.
Aimé Césaire
Principle works in translation:
1968. Return to my Native Land. (édition bilingue) Trad. Emil Snyders. Paris: Présence Africaine.
1968. A Season in the Congo. Trad. Ralph Manheim. NY: Grove.
1969. The Tragedy of King Christophe. Trad. Ralph Manheim. New York: Grove.
1972. Discourse on Colonialism. Trad. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.
1983. Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry. Trad. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley: U. of California Press.
1984. Non-vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire. Trad. Gregson Davis. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
1986. A Tempest. Trad. Richard Miller. NY: Ubu Repertory.
1990. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82. (Poetry and Knowledge; And the Dogs were Silent; Moi, Laminaire). Trad. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Charlottesville: CARAF.
1995. Notebook of a Return to my Native Land. (édition bilingue) Trad. Mireille Rosello. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe.
2001. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Trad. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Patrick Chamoiseau
Principle works in translation:
1997. School Days. University of Nebraska Press.
1998. Texaco: A Novel. Vintage.
1999. Solibo Magnificent. Anchor.
2003. Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows. University of Nebraska Press.
Maryse Condé
Principle works in translation:
1982. Heremakhonon. Trad. Richard Philcox. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press.
1988. A Season in Rihata. Trad. Richard Philcox. London: Heinemann.
1987. Segu. Trad. Barbara Bray. New York: Viking Penguin.
1990. The Children of Segu. Trad. Linda Coverdale. New York: Viking and Ballantine.
1992. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Trad. Richard Philcox. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
1992. Tree of Life (La vie scélérate). Trad. Victoria Reiter. New York: Ballantine.
1995. Crossing the Mangrove. Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: Anchor-Doubleday.
1997. The Last of the African Kings. Trad. Richard Philcox. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
1998. Windward Heights (La Migration des coeurs). Trad. Richard Philcox. London: Faber and Faber.
2000. Desirada. Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: Soho Press.
2001. Tales from the Heart; True Tales from my Childhood. Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: Soho Press.
2004. Who Slashed Célanire's Throat? Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: Atria Books.
2007. The Story of the Cannibal Woman. Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: Atria Books.
Raphaël Confiant
Principle works in translation:
1999. Eau de Café. Trad. James Ferguson. London / New York: Faber and Faber.
2000. Mamzelle Dragonfly. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Édouard Glissant
Principle works in translation:
1981. Monsieur Toussaint. Trad. Joseph G. Foster & Barbara A. Franklin. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press.
1985. The Ripening (La Lézarde). Trad. Michael Dash. London: Heinemann.
1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trad. Michael Dash. Charlotte: U. Press of Virginia.
1992. The Indies (édition bilingue). Trad. Dominique O'Neill. Toronto: Editions du GREF.
1997. Poetics of Relation. Trad. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press.
1999. Black Salt: Poems. Trad. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press.
1999. Faulkner, Mississippi. Trad. Barbara Lewis & Thomas C. Spear. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
2001. The Fourth Century. Trad. Betsy Wing. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press.
2005. Monsieur Toussaint; a play. Trad. J. Michael Dash. Boulder, Colorado: Rienner.
2006. The Collected Poems of Édouard Glissant. Trad. Jeff Humphries. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press.
Simone Schwarz-Bart
Principle works in translation:
1982. The Bridge of Beyond. (Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle) Trad. Barbara Bray. London: Heinemann.
1992. Between Two Worlds. (Ti Jean l'horizon) Trad. Barbara Bray. London: Heinemann.
MEDIA LINKS
To hear various authors mentioned in this article read their work, see the City University of New York/Lehman College's Île en Île website
ORGANIZATIONAL LINKS
Édouard Glissant's Institut du Tout Monde
RELATED SCHOLARLY WORKS
Arnold, A.J. 2004. Créolité: Power, Mimicry, and Dependence. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 37, no. 68:19-26.
Burton, Richard D. E. 1993. KI MOUN NOU YE? The Idea of Difference in Contemporary French West Indian Thought. New West Indian Guide 67, no. 1-2:14.
Conde, Maryse. 1996. Sketching a Literature from the French Antilles: From Négritude to Creolité. Black Renaissance 1, no. 1:138.
Condé, Maryse, and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage. 1995. Penser la Créolité. Paris: Karthala.
Kundera, Milan. 1991. The Umbrella, the Night World, and the Lonely Moon. New York Review of Books.
Levesque, Katia. 2005. La créolité: Entre tradition d'oraliture créole et tradition littéraire française. Nota Bene.
Lionnet, Françoise. 1993. Creolité in the Indian Ocean: Two Models of Cultural Diversity. Yale French Studies no. 82:101-112.
CLASS DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
*Might the “absence of ruins” problematic that the Prices cite have resonance with other experiences of history in other culture areas? In what ways? In what sense does it stand apart (as a Caribbean exception), if it does at all?
*The Prices evoke the tensions between the literary production of what they call a “museum-ified Martinique” and the island's rapid modernization. How, in the Prices analysis, do notions of heritage and the picturesque serve particular political ends? What are the contradictions inherent in the production of those images?
*How do the Prices view the relationship between history and literary/cinematic production, and between anthropology and an analysis of these forms? What methodological “take-aways” do their analyses in this article provide for other researchers?
CLASS ACTIVITIES AND ASSIGNMENTS
*Read a novel written by either Raphaël Confiant or Patrick Chamoiseau (see the bibliographies above). Evaluate the construction of its narrative given the critiques levied by Richard and Sally Price in “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove.” Pay particular attention to the meaning of the past deployed in the narrative, the tropes activated (i.e. that of the conteur), the treatment of gender, and the meaning of diversity and/or creolization as it is (implicitly or explicitly) addressed in the text.
*To take this assignment one step further, read Maryse Condé's Crossing the Mangrove (1995) and analyze it against one of Confiant or Chamoiseau's novels. How/does Condé's work avoid “old-fashioned, neatly separable categories based on race, nationality, and origin” (as the Prices describe them)? What work does the metaphor of the mangrove do for both Condé in her novel and the Prices in this essay?
SYLLABI THAT INCLUDE ESSAY
Professor Ann Delehanty, French 363: La littérature francophone des Caraïbes
AUTHORS' WEBSITE
Richard and Sally Price
AUTHORS' OTHER (co-authored) WORK
1980. Afro-American Arts of the Suriname Rain Forest. Berkeley: University of California Press.
1991. Two Evenings in Saramaka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1992. Equatoria. New York: Routledge.
1994. On the Mall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
1995. Enigma Variations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
1999. Maroon Arts: Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora. Boston: Beacon Press.
2003. The Root of Roots: Or, How Afro-American Anthropology Got Its Start. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press/ University of Chicago Press.
2006. Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
