Education, Assimilation and Identity: The Literary Journey of the French Caribbean

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Reviewed by: Education, Assimilation and Identity: The Literary Journey of the French Caribbean Lisa Connell (bio) Léticée, Marie. Education, Assimilation and Identity: The Literary Journey of the French Caribbean. Coconut Creek, FL: Caribbean Studies Press, 2009. The Caribbean Basin occupies a central place in postcolonial studies as an emblem of the brutalities of the slave trade and colonization, as well as a privileged locus of strategies of resistance. Within the context of the francophone world, the history of Martinique and Guadeloupe reads as a linguistic, cultural, and historical crossroads, where the legacy of French colonial rule converges with the instruments of subversion deployed by the descendants of slaves. However, while the current inhabitants of the islands navigate the enduring effects of slavery and colonization, Marie Léticée claims that they have yet to overcome the French educational system. In writing Education, Assimilation and Identity: The Literary Journey of the French Caribbean, Léticée assesses the political, psychological, and cultural impact of colonization on the production of identity. Using an interdisciplinary cultural studies perspective, the author’s primary goal is to examine how educational practices in the French Antilles create an “unbalanced sense of self” as they sustain the racial and cultural hierarchies of the colonial era (xi). According to the author, educational curricula imported from France represent a contemporary civilizing mission that prevents Martinicans and Guadeloupeans from achieving “an authentic Caribbean self” (64). Indeed, for Léticée, educational practices that are first and foremost designed by the French for students in France resonate with the racist and paternalistic attitudes that provided the philosophical justification for imperial expansion. She first grounds her argument in the works of psychiatrist and anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, poet and politician Aimé Césaire, and novelists and theorists Patrick Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant. She then adds close readings of works by Joseph Zobel, Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Michèle Lacrosil to examine how the theories of Negritude, Antillanité, and Créolité—all of which are defended as key concepts in the quest for a “true” Caribbean identity—play out in literature. After examining the literary tropes of the “Creole garden,” the journey home, and food as markers of both assimilation and resistance, Education, Assimilation and Identity concludes by reflecting on France’s recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity and the movement to teach Creole in school as political gestures that highlight the ongoing tensions between the affirmation of a Caribbean identity and the islands’ political, economic, and cultural dependence on France. Thus Léticée writes from a philosophical position that promotes a “genuine” Caribbean identity. The clarity of her prose is matched by the lucidity of her central argument: education in the French Antilles remains an inherently colonizing practice that “cloaks” Martinicans and Guadeloupeans with “a sense of unfulfilled destiny” (178). Whereas the text’s structure, which follows the chronology of the Negritude, Antillanité, and Créolité movements, as well as the author’s readings of these theories, elucidate strands of thought in key scholarship and literature from the French Caribbean, they also expose Léticée’s conviction in the enduring alienation of Guadeloupeans and Martinicans and the avowedly essentialist position from which she writes. The first instance represents some of the greatest strengths of Education, Assimilation and Identity. Léticée draws from a variety of resources that illustrate a rich assembly of Caribbean writers and thinkers. Her inclusion of several women writers is particularly effective because it positions them alongside their more widely read male counterparts as equal participants in the cultural and literary [End Page 546] production of the French West Indies. Moreover, she compellingly puts to use historical, legal, and cultural artifacts to reinforce the connection between the legal assimilation of the islands into France’s body politic and the colonial dynamics of power that continue to play out there. Her analysis of the laws that govern education in France, including the French Overseas Departments, offers a compelling inroad into the neocolonial status of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Léticée makes a connection between the 2005 law that would have stipulated that colonization be taught as a benevolent...