Beyond Francophone postcolonial studies: exploring the ends of comparison

Abstract

ostcolonial studies has the potential to assemble new communities and networks of people who are joined by the common political and ethical commitment to challenging and questioning the practices and consequences of domination and subordination. Anyone can do it. We all come to things from our own positions, of course, and we are each of us enabled and blinkered by the location of our standpoint; but we all have something to learn from, and contribute to, postcolonial studies. 1 Postcolonial studies is inherently comparative. The institutionalization of postcolonial studies in places like the US, UK and Australia, with all its Anglophone emphasis, often ends up erasing postcoloniality's comparative dimensions. But a course on postcolonial literature taught in an English department can read Aimé Césaire's uncompromising theoretical and biographical engagement with colonialism and imperialism and show how francophone postcolonial studies resonates and differs from an Anglophone model that starts with Edward Said's Orientalism. That same course could juxtapose Caribbean writers like

Introduction: New Dialogues with Breton Literature and Culture

“…36 A substantial engagement with the neglected stateless cultures of the Hexagon, we would argue, has much to contribute to these debates, moving towards active engagement with what Forsdick has called a model of 'non-hierarchical interdependency' between cultural producers at global, national and local levels. 37 This is the model adopted by Gosetti and Paul Howard in their study of Italian 'dialect' poets: 'a transregional approach, comparing these poets' productions in their hybrid interconnections, without settling on a stable cultural centre, but focussing on intertextuality and possible networks'. 38 It is not a question of doing away with the centre entirely, but rather, as Heike Scharm and Natalia Matta-Jara argue in their study of postnational Hispanic literature, of identifying 'the interrelations between the local and the global, while recognizing the continuing ties to the nation', of reading in a way which encourages 'a questioning of the nation as a defining category'.…”