SubStance

SubStance 29.1 (2000) 153-157

Book Review

Islands and Exiles:
The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

What is the most pressing question facing post-colonial writers today? For Chris Bongie it is that of knowing: "Who can speak for and/or as the Other?" (287). This question might be formulated other ways, and Bongie is the first to admit how problematic such terms as "Other" can be, especially when used in locutions about speaking as the Other. But by placing this question, with all the problems that it implies, at the heart of his book, Bongie makes an important attempt to work through the numerous problems, "both epistemological and ethical" (as he puts it), involved in thinking about culture, race, and identity in a post-colonial context. As V.Y. Mudimbe had already demonstrated in The Invention of Africa, his magisterial study on the problem of African gnosis, the very terms we use to speak of the post-colonial or non-Western Other (beginning with "Other," "non-Western," and "post-colonial") tend to imply a subsidiary, or at best oppositional role for all that is not Western. And this is true not only of those working within a European or American context, but also of those thinkers from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere most concerned with delineating non-Western identities strong enough to be able to dispense with the implicitly hierarchical "non-."

Islands and Exiles focuses primarily on the Caribbean, with special emphasis on the literature of and about the French Antilles, in its attempt to get beyond the "non-" in non-Western without falling back into the exclusionary, essentialist identity politics of the past. There are occasional forays into other literatures (e.g. J.M. Coetzee, from South Africa, and Keri Hulme, from New Zealand), but Bongie makes no secret of the fact that he sees the French Antilles, and in particular the cultural theory of Edouard Glissant, as having a strategic role to play in the attempt to establish a post-colonial theory of cultural identity. Thus Bongie presents his book as an attempt to "further Glissant's argument that 'ours is a creolizing world' and to promote the ongoing critique of an essentializing, roots-oriented identity politics" (10). The book examines a refreshingly eclectic variety of texts, held together mainly by the glue provided by Glissant's cultural theory and by Bongie's desire to trace the current cultural predicament of the West Indies [End Page 153] back to its historical and discursive origins. Although the book is primarily literary in orientation and heavily weighted towards the twentieth century, Bongie offers a meticulously researched overview of the nineteenth-century quarrel between the abolitionists Bissette and Schoelcher which has particular importance for the way it helps to flesh out his arguments about the question of race in the Americas. These focus on the figure of the Creole, a thread that runs through his extended analyses of such varied subjects as the French exoticist tradition (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Hugo's Bug-Jargal, and the more obscure Outre-mer, by Louis de Maynard), Alejo Carpentier's obsession with origins, the image of Haiti in Faulkner's Absalom Absalom, the evolution of Martinican identity in Glissant's novels, Daniel Maximin's second novel Soufrières, and the current debates surrounding Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and their theory of Créolité.

Ultimately, all of these analyses--both literary and historical--end up feeding back into the main theme of the book, which builds on Edouard Glissant's notion of creolization and the by-now canonical notion that cultural hybridity and cross-fertilization are definitive of the post-colonial condition. Glissant's work has sought to demystify traditional, essentialist notions of purity, origins, and ancestry as legitimizing components of individual and group identity by emphasizing the hybridity of all cultures (including those of Western Europe) and by studying the ongoing processes of creolization that can be observed today wherever different cultures...