Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T18:53:36.333Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Locating History within Fiction's Frame: Re-presenting the Epopée Delgrès in Maximin and Lara

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2015

H. ADLAI MURDOCH
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay examines contrasting but complementary narrative and filmic representations of the Guadeloupean resistance to Napoleon's attempt to reimpose a slavery regime in the French colonies. This underrepresented and under-analyzed event, one of landmark importance in the Caribbean tradition of rebellion and self-liberation, focuses our attention more closely on the extended arc of liberatory acts – inscribed in a variety of locations but always espousing the same goal – that mark the identitarian activities of Caribbean slaves almost from the inception of the colonial moment to the act of emancipation. In a large sense, the resistance to Napoleon's invading forces, although ultimately doomed to failure in Guadeloupe, emerged from and was shaped by the specificities of social, economic, and political structures that transformed Guadeloupe during this critical period, and was driven by principles of liberation and self-emancipation emerging from the path adopted by Guadeloupe's governor, Victor Hugues, and the various communities over which he presided. Resistance in Guadeloupe was a fight to preserve a way of life. Analyzing this resistance compels us to acknowledge individual and collective expressions of the idea and practice of freedom that were originally erased by those charged with constructing the colonial script, and draws attention to the still-marginal inscription of these events in contemporary culture.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 241 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Inglis, Tom, “Empowerment and Emancipation,” Adult Education Quarterly, 48, 1 (1997), 3–17, 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 West, Michael O. and Martin, William G., “Introduction: Contours of the Black International,” in West, Michael O., Martin, William G., and Wilkins, Fanon Che, eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1–46, 2Google Scholar.

3 Saint-Ruf, Germain, L’épopée Delgrès: La Guadeloupe sous la révolution française (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1988)Google Scholar, 14.

4 Ibid., 21.

5 Ibid., 31–32.

6 Christopher Miller 31.

7 Miller, Christopher L., The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 59.

8 Ibid., 59–60.

9 West and Martin, 4.

10 Saint-Ruf, 48–49.

11 Dubois, Laurent, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar, 146.

12 Saint-Ruf, 51.

13 Ibid., 53.

14 Ibid., 56.

15 Ibid., 57.

16 Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 7–8Google Scholar.

17 Ibid., 11–12.

18 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995)Google Scholar, 73.

19 Inglis, “Empowerment and Emancipation,” 4–5.

20 Saint-Ruf, 86–7.

21 Ibid., 87.

22 Ibid., 88.

23 Ibid., 89.

24 Ibid., 92.

25 See the chapter “L'isolé soleil/Soufrières: Textual Creolization and Cultural Identity,” in Murdoch, H. Adlai, Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001)Google Scholar, 104–41.

26 Maximin, Daniel, “Entretien,” Les nouvelles du sud, 3 (1986), 35–50, 35–36Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., 36.

28 Hall, Stuart, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Rutherford, Jonathan, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222–37Google Scholar, 225.

29 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar, 136, emphasis in the original.

30 Susan Stanford Friedman, “‘Border Talk,’ Hybridity, and Performativity: Cultural Theory and Identity in the Spaces between Difference,” Eurozine, 7 June 2002, 6.

31 Maximin, Daniel, L'isolé soleil (Paris: Seuil, 1981)Google Scholar, 10. The work is translated by Clarisse Zimra as Lone Sun (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1989).

32 Scharfman, Ronnie, “Rewriting the Césaires: Daniel Maximin's Caribbean Discourse,” in Condé, Maryse, ed., L'héritage de Caliban (Pointe-à-Pitre: Editions Jasor, 1992), 233–45Google Scholar, 242.

33 Maximin, L'isolé soleil, 11.

34 Erickson, John D., “Maximin's L'isolé soleil and Caliban's Curse,” Callaloo, 15, 1 (1992), 119–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 123.

35 Scharfman, 238.

36 Todorov, Tzvetan, Introduction to Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981)Google Scholar, 53.

37 Maximin, L'isolé soleil, 27.

38 Inglis, “Empowerment and Emancipation,” 7.

39 James Berger, “Trauma and Literary Theory,” Contemporary Literature, 38, 3 (1997), 569–82, 573.

40 Ann Kaplan, E., “Fanon, Trauma, and Cinema,” in Alessandrini, Anthony C., ed., Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1999), 145–58Google Scholar.

41 Erica L. Johnson, “Unforgetting Trauma: Dionne Brand's Haunted Histories,” Anthurium, 2, 1 (Spring 2004), 81–91, 85.

42 Davis, David Brion and Hinks, Peter P., “Atlantic Revolutions and the Age of Abolitionism,” in Bender, Thomas, Dubois, Laurent, and Rabinowitz, Richard, eds., Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2011), 91–114, 110Google Scholar.

43 Thomas Bender, “A Season of Revolutions: The United States, France, and Haiti,” in Bender, Dubois, and Rabinowitz, 13–42, 15.

44 Vincent Brown, “A Vapor of Dread: Observations on Racial Terror and Vengeance in the Age of Revolution,” in Bender, Dubois, and Rabinowitz, 177–98, 194.

45 Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Lewin, Jane E. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, 232, emphasis in original.

46 Maximin, “Entretien,” 35.

47 Ibid., 36.

48 Inglis, “Empowerment and Emancipation,” 8.

49 Maximin, “Entretien,” 37.

50 Murdoch, Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel, 112.

51 Silverman, Kaja, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, 158.

52 Murdoch, 113, 115.

53 Maximin, L'isolé soleil, 40–41, 47.

54 Ibid., 51.

55 Ibid., 51–52.

56 Mercer, Kobena, “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination,” in Cham, Mbye and Andrade-Watkins, Claire, eds., Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 50–61, 57Google Scholar.

57 Cottenet-Hage, Madeleine, “Introduction,” in Cottenet-Hage, , Penser la créolité (Paris: Karthala, 1995), 11–20Google Scholar, 20.

58 Scharfman, “Rewriting the Césaires,” 233.

59 Ibid., 237.

60 Ibid., 234, 236.

61 Maximin, L'isolé soleil, 7.

62 Scharfman, 235.

63 Maximin, L'isolé soleil, 235.

64 1802: L’épopée Guadeloupéenne (Les Films du Paradoxe, dir. Christian Lara, 2004).

65 Monaco, James, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 160.

66 Ibid., 162.

67 Robin Blackburn, “The Achievement of the Haitian Revolution, 1791–1804,” in Bender, Dubois, and Rabinowitz, Revolution!, 115–38, 127, 129.

68 van Sijll, Jennifer, Cinematic Storytelling: The 100 Most Powerful Film Conventions Every Filmmaker Must Know (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2005)Google Scholar, 148.

69 Monaco, 197.

70 Van Sijll, 148.

71 Ibid., 150.

72 Ibid., 162.

73 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar, 6.

74 Ibid., 7.

75 Catherine A. Reinhardt, Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 151.

76 Ibid., 151–2

77 Bonilla, Yarimar, “The Past Is Made by Walking: Labor Activism and Historical Production in Postcolonial Guadeloupe,” Cultural Anthropology, 26, 3 (2011), 313–39, 319CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Ibid., 316.