Chris Bongie is Professor and Queen's National Scholar at Queen's University, Canada. Previous publications include Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature (LUP, 2008), Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford UP, 1998) and Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de siecle (Stanford UP, 1991).
Chris Bongie's openly polemical volume is by turns profound in its insights, meticulous in its archival research, startlingly original in the boldness of its theorizing, and extraordinary in the breadth of its references. Friends and Enemies picks up where his previous major monograph, Islands and Exiles (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), left off, incorporating the dramatic events in Haiti's recent political history, the various self-serving French commemorative events for the bicentenary of Haitian independence, and the sesquicentenary of the abolition of slavery, the more recent work of 'canonical' francophone Caribbean writers (Rene Depestre, Maryse Conde, and Edouard Glissant), Bongie's new translation and edition of Victor Hugo's forgotten early novel on the Haitian revolution, Bug-Jargal, as well as debates of the last decade in postcolonial studies in terms of its problematic relationship to contemporary culture and political theory. Indeed, the polemical thrust of the book, taking its cue from Peter Hallward's own Badiou-inspired critique of postcolonial theory, and his radical political commentaries on Haiti, is directed most forcefully at the 'disastrous confusion' (p. 350, citing Hallward) of attempts to conflate culture and politics in much of what goes under the name of postcolonial studies. The place and status of literature becomes the key battleground of Bongie's text, and in expanding its reach beyond consensually recognized 'great' works of literature to include, for example, a fascinating discussion of the almost unknown French fonctionnaire Jean-Baptiste Picquenard's novels about the Haitian revolution, and the popular 'low-brow' Martiniquan novelist Tony Delsham, Bongie is doing more than simply challenging a certain literary elitism. One of his concerns is with the ways in which power is mediated through writing, in various colonial and postcolonial contexts, and particularly within the work of neglected 'scribes', such as Picquenard and Baron de Vastey, as well as supposedly lesser novels, where we read often the strongest expressions of commitment to revolutionary ideals of universal freedom and equality. The various ways in which those ideals are subsequently 'overwritten' (whether in literary/aesthetic, cultural, or even supposedly more generous political forms, such as humanitarianism, creolite, diversity, relationality, etc.) underpin Bongie's main thesis that postcolonial acts of commemoration work by a forgetting of the history of anti-colonial resistance, and seem to be inevitably caught up within processes of cultural commodification. This ambivalent process accounts for the tension of the book's title, and also fuels Bongie's rather strident critique, in which few intellectuals, writers, and critics (whom one might assume to be 'friends') are spared. The list is long (including Regis Debray, Derek Walcott, Paul Gilroy, Gayatri Spivak, and many more besides), and all might feel justifiably aggrieved at being dismissed with such gay abandon for failing to remain as true to radical political ideals as those who come across as Bongie's political and intellectual heroes (Eagleton, Jameson, Badiou, Zizek, and Hallward). Bongie's own commitment, however, ends up, by his own admission, wavering within a zone of critical uncertainty and indeterminacy, which does not even commit to the kind of radical philosophical positions articulated by Derrida, despite several claims of loyalty to deconstructive thinking. To this end, a more serious engagement with Derrida's Politics of Friendship, and his late writings on democracy and Messianicity, as well as a more reflective attention to the irony of his own continuous self-inscription and self-reference within the panoptical narratives he gives us, are perhaps what are missing from Bongie's otherwise very impressive study. There is a certain arrogance, it must be said, in wanting to out-theorize everyone else, and it would be a regrettable (political?) consequence if this book ended up making enemies of friends. Chris Bongie's openly polemical volume is by turns profound in its insights, meticulous in its archival research, startlingly original in the boldness of its theorizing, and extraordinary in the breadth of its references. This study is both meticulous in its readings and ambitious in its intellectual reach. Scholars in Caribbean and postcolonial studies have eagerly awaited the next volume from Chris Bongie and with Friends and Enemies they will not be disappointed...Challenging and often provocative, this book will be essential reading for all serious scholars in the postcolonial field. Friends and Enemies is well worth diving into for shrewd readings of a splendidly varied corpus and an insightful, comprehensive elucidation of contemporary postcolonial perspectives. Examining commemorations of the French Revolution's aftermath in Haiti and Martinique, Chris Bongie questions why the relationship between literature and politics in postcolonial scholarship is viewed as an irreconcilable dispute between friends and enemies. He uncovers a conflicted memory - of the political as the expression of a disavowed commonality in a distorted ideal of humanism - in the scribal work of feuding factions. His compilation of previously published works explores the epistemic dialogue between colonial and postcolonial discourses to ponder the future of Francophone postcolonial studies. Bongie promotes a cultural-studies approach embracing the "desacralization of 'charismatic' authors and their textual productions" (p. 258) whose commodification he believes has stifled the postcolonial field. His antagonistic stance denounces an elitist bias against scribes or "lesser authors" for a "metonymic fetish": the "great writer" or "great intellectual." In so doing, he hopes to offer a new perspective but demonstrates rather how biases in postcolonial theory occult mimetic rivalries between the anticolonial struggle and the participation of writers in institutional discourses of power. The introduction announces the consecutive sections of the book and sets the tone. Bongie sharply criticizes scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Robert Young for their take on literature and politics and further questions their supposed biases by an analysis of literary representations of the double political memory of Haitii/Hayti and les freres ennemies, Petion and Christophe. Part One then probes intriguing shifts between friendship and enmity in French and Haitian "overinvestment" in commemorative events while examining their antagonistic relationship through the entanglement of politics in the preservation of memory. Setting Regis Oebray's ideas against those of Edouard Glissant, Kwame Appiah, and others, Bongie analyzes conflictive and reductive humanist and humanitarian concepts, considering the latest expression of the "white man's burden" inherited from the Enlightenment. A close reading of Jean-Baptiste Picquenard's overlooked novels and versions of Victor Hugo's Bug-Jargal further critiques the intertwining of humanist and humanitarian ideals. Chapter I discusses Picquenard's political ambiv--alence in preserving and erasing the memory of revolutionary violence. Chapter 2 explores the rewritings of Bug-Jagal, particularly Leitch Ritchie's The Slave-King (1833), challenging the original text's authority and suggesting the importance, in the British abolitionist movement, of scribes such as Ritchie or the Haitian Baron de Vastey. Part Two exposes the devoir de memoire, supported by antagonistic figures such as Regis Oebray and Edouard Glissant, as the treacherous expression of the interplay between memory and nostalgia. Chapter 3 uses the bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution to denounce Oebray's governmental report in 2004, Haiti et la France, which indicated a nostalgic neo-colonialism born out of what Bongie calls a disturbing ideal of "universal humanism," and which led to Aristide's removal from Haiti. Chapter 4 broadens this issue through Martiniquan political debates concerning the sesquicentenary celebration of the abolition of slavery. Squabbles over the "dates" of abolition and the problematic figure of Cyrille Bissette illustrate how the interconnection of memory and nostalgia prevents an accurate reconstruction of the past. Using George Yudice's examination of the American culture wars, Bongie sees these Martiniquan quarrels as coming from the same hegemonic discourse inherent to the devoir de memo ire. Finally, Chapter 5 is the "less than reverent account of the literary nostalgia ... for 'literature'" (p. 152) in Oerek Walcott's play, The Haitian Trilogy. Bongie chides Walcott for his misrepresentations of Christophe's mulatto secretary, which erase de Vastey's anticolonial dis-course. Walcott's "'sceptical humanist' representations of History, his cynical disengagement from social movements" (p. 250) betray The Haitian Trilogy as a mere repackaging of three plays: a commodified object of consumption. Part Three further desacralizes the commodified literary object and "the great writer" as a metonymic fetish. Bongie rails against an elitism that deni--grates popular - lowbrow - culture, "perpetuates a watered-down version of canonical thinking and only bothers to give a voice to the 'people' when they say, do, and consume the 'right' thing" (p. 291). Examining the marginalization of the political in the works of Oavid Scott and Peter Hallward, Bongie claims that severing cultural practices from political agendas in novels by Maryse Conde and Glissant feeds middlebrow popularity. Chapter 6 examines popular authors, such as Tony Oelsham, to probe the mechanics at play behind the construction of Conde's so-called consecrated and fetishistic status in Francophone and postcolonial spheres by literary critics. Bongie asks scholars to examine both her texts and popular success. In Chapter 7, Bongie discusses Nick Nesbitt's Voicing Memory and its exploration of the popular reception of Edwige Danticat's wqrk as a guilty pleasure for literary critics and in harshly critiquing Glissant's recent works. For Bongie, Glissant reiterates ideas that sell and betray their author's skepticism and cynicism. In addition, Bongie affirms that Glissant's scribal work for Jacques Chirac's government evokes the intellectual as a janus-figure both distant and close to power. Bongie argues with passion for the reconciliation of several freres ennemis: literature and politics, the great writer and the scribe, cultural studies and postcolonial studies. His rigorous reworking of previous essays challenges the controversial overview of debates concerning postcolonial scholarship and he calls for a reassessment of the field. Although he relentlessly shares his expertise and his aspiration for the future of Francophone postcolonial scholarship, he does not offer a clear definition of the latter. Indeed, the thoroughness of this deconstructive study may frustrate some readers, since his antagonistic stance may appear questionable. For instance, Bongie's criticism of the way Walcott and Glissant repackage their previous work as a means to reassert their cultural authority might be undermined by his own repackaging. Nevertheless, his valuable contribution, for those unaware of his scholarship, has opened a Pandora's box that will generate stimulating conversations among scholars. Perhaps these discussions will allow new voices to be heard. his valuable contribution, for those unaware of his scholarship, has opened a Pandora's box that will generate stimulating conversations among scholars. Perhaps these discussions will allow new voices to be heard. Friends and Enemies is concerned primarily with exploring a possible future for postcolonial studies, with a specific focus on its 'sibling' discipline, Francophone postcolonial studies. For Bongie, among others, postcoloni-alism has reached a point of exhaustion, its initial hopefulness in its own politically transformative potential having been betrayed by its gradual absorption into the same hegemonic institutionalizing discourses that it had once claimed to stand vehemently against. This trend is demonstrated nowhere more clearly than in the vacuous state-led emphasis on the 'duty to remember' (devoir de memoire) surrounding post-colonial commemora-tive events, such as the sesquicentenary celebrations of the abolition of slavery in 1998. Situated within a context where resistance politics have been transformed into consensus politics, Bongie calls upon advocates of postcolonialism to begin confronting some difficult 'truths' about their field, while foregrounding the importance of bringing it into dialogue with cultural studies and, in dOing so, to find a possible way out of its impasse. Four interconnected problems are identified as facing this discipline. First, its complicity with the more traditional field of literary theory and its elitist privileging of 'high/middlebrow' postcolonial literature over anything deemed to be populist or 'lowbrow'. Second, its resultant ineffec-tuality or its lack of a 'properly political value' (Hallward) in the face of global neo-liberalism, leading certain academics (Young. Lazarus) to call for postcolonialism to turn away from its literary focus and back towards the 'properly political': the legacy of anti-colonial struggle. Third, its refusal to acknowledge the extent to which the label 'postcolonial' has become an effective marketing tool used to vulgarize that very same 'good' literature that was once the revered property of the academic elite. Finally, the extent to which the authors of those 'good' texts are implicated in state discourse, acting at one and the same time as 'exalted ecrivain and mere ecrfvant [or state scribe] [ ... ] whose identity cannot be detached from the institutional contexts in which such beings circulate [ ... ], nor from the media outlets through which they publicize themselves' (p. 360). Part 1 of its three-part structure, 'Humanitarian Interventions: The Haitian Revolution in Translation, 1793-1833', lays the foundation for a discussion of the above issues by considering how best to engage with universal values, namely humanitarianism, that not only have their roots in the kind of Enlightenment thinking that justified colonial expansion. but have also become divorced from their (necessarily) violent revolution-ary origins. Standing between Gilroy's hopeful reaching towards a renewed humanitarian agenda and ZiZek's uncompromising calls for a Jacobin-style response or 'radical break' to neoliberalism and its humanitarian-sanctioned military interventions, Bongie traces the processes by which the memories of hardline revolutionary violence, namely in Haiti. are erased and/or marginalized by violent-less notions of human rights and abolitionism. The active revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Jacques Picquenard's translation of the Haitian Revolution into anodyne literary form (in Zoflora [1804], and Adonis [1836]) and Leich Ritchie's English translation of Hugo's lukewarm Bug-Jargal into an unequivocally abolitionist text, The Slave King (1833). both serve as vehicles for exploring the Theridorean tendency to convert 'violence into a more palatable, classroom-friendly form of discourse' (p. 100). It is the transformative and amnesiac processes evident here that provide the basis for Bongie to turn a critical gaze upon postcolonial studies itself, suggesting that its 'ideological burden' may have amounted to little more than attenuating and 'humanizing' the inherent violence of anti-colonial struggle, exemplified by the Haitian Revolution. Part 2, 'Between Memory and Nostalgia: Commemorating Post/ Colonialism, 1998-2004', broaches the difficult issue of just how (in)effec-tive postcolonial memory has been as a counter-narrative to hegemonic nation-centred history, by focusing on the 1998 sesquicentenary of the abolition of slavery and the 2004 bicentenary of Haitian independence. In particular. Bongie considers the processes by which the resistant origins of memory have metamorphosed into a state-led devoir de rnemoire that have come to function as little more than a Glissantian 'nostalgic lament' (p. 150). The 'bad faith' of the academic-turned-state scribe is epitomized by the transformation of Regis Debray from author of the subversive Que vive la Republfque (during the 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution) to the government-sanctioned author of the nostalgic neo-colonial report. Hafti et la France (during the 2004 Haitian bicentenary). The debates between academics in Martinique and France during the sesquicentenary of the abolition of slavery are similarly emptied of their oppositional content by showing both sides to be working from the same nation-centred 'bad script' that demands 'certain types of performances' be acted out in a benign guerre de memoires (p. 221). Finally, even visionaries such as Derek WaIcott are shown to be little more than actors in this same post-postcolo-nial drama. the repackaging of his three earlier plays under the new head-ing. The Haitian Trilogy (2002), demonstrating less his transition towards greatness than his scribal endorsement of national consensus. With increasing stridency, the final part of this text. 'Exiles on Main Stream: Browsing the Franco-Caribbean Canon', develops explicitly the links between so-called 'great' writers and their unacknowledged complic-ity with consensualized discourse, In contrast with the tendency to over-look the extent to which both postcolonial texts and their authors are embroiled in liberal marketing strategies, as well as the proclivity of post-colonial studies to endorse, rather than deconstruct, the western canon. Bongie takes a less than reverential look at the works of Maryse Conde and Edouard Glissant. In the first instance, a levelling of middle and lowbrow novels is conducted by showing the equivalent marketing tools used to promote the works of an 'authentic' postcolonial writer such as Conde and a rejected lowbrow writer such as Tony Delsham. In drawing such parallels, Bongie calls for an approach to literature that, following cultural studies, factors in the populist appeal and consumer potential of 'its rhetoric of resistance' (Huggan, quoted on p, 309), In the second instance, the decidedly highbrow works of late Glissant are analyzed for their deliberate turn away from the 'principled politics' that earned Glissant's place as a postcolonial author par excellence and towards the post-political world of 'utopian poetics', The marketing of late Glissant as a transcendental literary figure. particularly in Cohee de Lamartine (2005), is challenged by recalling his direct engagement in contemporary politics, with the government-sanctioned report, entitled Memoires des esc/avages (2007), It is this inconsistent oscillation between politics and poetics that allows Bongie to demonstrate the extent to which the seemingly different figures of the 'exalted ecrivain' and 'mere ecrivant' are just 'versions of one and the same being, the scribe' (p. 360). In the end. Bongie's response to the 'bad faith' of both academics and their revered authors is neither to jettison literature nor to look back nostal-gically and hopelessly to an imagined past when postcolonialism equated to resistance politics, Instead. he calls for 'a more self-aware [and self-criti-cal] dialogue' (p. 10) between postcolonial studies and cultural studies that moves away from elitism and towards a more transnational. 'democratic' approach, while retaining a sceptical. but ultimately understandable. belief (a la Spivak) 'in the value of the literary as the troubling other of more contemporary academic enterprises such as cultural studies' (p. 14).
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