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SubStance 29.3 (2000) 138-142



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Book Review

Discours sur le métissage, identités métisses:
en quête d'Ariel


Kandé, Sylvie, ed. Discours sur le métissage, identités métisses: en quête d'Ariel. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999.

Can rabbits have interracial sex? This question, posed in the title of Werner Sollors's contribution to Discours sur le métissage, could serve as a screening question for potential readers of the book. The progressive (or politically-correct) but too-hasty reader, making the cognitive jump from rabbits to humans, might respond heatedly that yes, rabbits, like humans, should be allowed to have sex with the partner of their choice, regardless of race. But a more reflective respondent will understand that this question is as much about the definition of the term race as it is about regulating repro-duction. After all, don't all rabbits belong to the same race (i.e. species)? Under what circumstances does it make sense to distinguish between, say, black and white rabbits? By projecting the idea of interracial sex onto rabbits, Sollors's question acts as a kind of reductio ad absurdum encouraging us to consider the mutability and social nature of the concerns that govern racial categorization. In this way, his question opens up the problem that is at the heart of the twelve essays that make up Discours sur le métissage.

For those following the field of postcolonial studies in the French-speaking world, a new book on the theme of métissage will come as no surprise. Indeed, for some, this term, which translates (roughly) into English as "hybridization" or "cross-fertilization," might even be off-putting, evoking as it does the current trend glorifying everything that shows signs of cultural mixing, multiculturalism, contact zones, and hybridity. The notion of métissage--whether as a militant response to the reactionary politics of purity and exclusion or as part of a larger attempt to theorize cultural evolution in general--has become a cliché, easily misused and abused, by its proponents as well as its opponents. This is precisely why this collection of essays, edited by Sylvie Kandé, should be read. It is not an evangelical book (i.e. an attempt to spread the good news of métissage and hybridity), but rather an attempt to reevaluate the meaning and significance of current debates about cultural mixing by reexamining their origins and development in the colonial and post-colonial eras. The record of an international conference held at New York University in 1997, this collection contains essays by several of the most notable representatives of contemporary Francophone literature, including Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and Henri Lopès, as well as a multidisciplinary assortment of essays by sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and literary critics. [End Page 138]

One common thread that runs through these essays, and this is a point of consequence for the future of postcolonial cultural theory, is the observation that some of the proponents of métissage and cultural hybridity may share more than they realize with their enemies in the racist, exclusionary, and pro-purity camps. Indeed, several of the essays suggest that the pro-métissage position risks to unwittingly play into the hands of the exclusionists by reinforcing the very same distinctions between us and them that the processes of métissage are meant to overcome. At the risk of oversimplifying, the problem might be summed up this way: although their attitudes toward cultural mixing are opposed, both groups define their positions in relation to the same kinds of reified identitarian labels (since there can be no intermixing without at least two distinct groups to mix). And so, it could be argued, progressives might do better to engage in a frontal assault on racial and ethnic thinking of all kinds, rather than trying to work with race through such correlate concepts as métissage.

Having identified this potential objection to the pro-métissage position, however, there are a number of possible responses to it, and the contributors to this volume show a...

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