coldhearted scientist وداد

Now I am supposed to be at a festival but it is raining I am still cleaning out my bookcases and files. I would like to be reading:

1. Richard Serrano, Against the Postcolonial: “Francophone” Writers at the Ends of the French Empire (Lexington Books, 2005). The publisher’s blurb says:

Richard Serrano begins his provocative new work with the bold statement that Francophone Studies is mostly a mirage, while postcolonial studies is mostly a delusion. He argues that many attempts to use postcoloniality to account for Francophone writers tell us more about the critics’ assumptions than about the writers’ works. Furthermore, he asserts that postcolonial studies, with its antecedents as an Anglophone Indian project that emerged in response to the weakening British Raj, is but one sort of narrative of colonialism into which writers of French expression do not neatly fit.

In an insightful exploration of the work of five writers from lands formerly or currently ruled by France—Algeria, Cambodia, Guiana, Madagascar, and Mali—Serrano demonstrates the rewards of research that engages in textual analysis within its historical and literary context. He deftly argues against the relevance of a homogenizing critical practice; considering these writers postcolonial, he claims, is to misunderstand their aesthetic strategies for survival in the face of French colonialism and modernism.

2. Shireen Lewis, Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité (Lexington Books, 2006). There is an interesting interview of Lewis on this book at SistersMentors. She says:

[T]his book also brings up the question about dark-skinned people. How does color play into all this? Well, that’s the last part of the evolution of black consciousness that I deal with in my book — this whole question of Creole — of Creoleness — of Créolité, of Creole language and culture. Writers like Patrick Chamoiseau talk about the people of the Caribbean as multicultural, multiracial, and multireligious. But indeed this Creole movement is fundamentally about the recognition for the first time of the validity of Creole language and culture, and therefore, a validation of those poor and rural and dark-skinned people in the French speaking Caribbean who speak almost exclusively Creole. This is in large part a recognition of who they are and this is indeed very empowering for them.

3. Two books on Robespierre and the Terror, namely Ruth Scurr’s Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution and David Andress’ The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France. They have been reviewed by Lynn Hunt in an article entitled For Reasons of State.

Hunt points out that the Terror at least did conduct public trials: people were not taken away and secretly murdered in the night. She says we should not be seduced by Robespierre’s colleagues, who attempted to blame him for policies for which they also bore heavy responsibility.

Her final sentences refer to current undemocratic U.S. policies in its “war on terror.” She writes: Since the decline and fall of Communism, scholars and commentators have tended to reject any explanation of the Terror that pointed to the circumstances in which the French republican found themselves. Current events are casting a different light on the question. […] If the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world can react in this fashion to the threats, albeit real, of small cells of terrorists financed by foreign powers, is it really so hard to imagine that the French responded as they did?

4. Leo Damrosch’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius and Roger Pearson’s Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom. David A. Bell, who does not really like these books, has a review of them entitled Profane Illuminations, so fascinating that it still convinces me I should read them.

Axé.