Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature by Chris Bongie

Abstract

258 Reviews enough' family, and shows how contemporary fictions play an important role in processing changes in family structure that have largely been beneficial, at least forwomen. In Nigel Saint's study Pascal Convert's art is shown to represent, in movingly graphic and tactile form, the family's vital intermediary role between the personal and the collective. Almost inevitably in a large and diverse edited book, a few chapters seem slightly marginal to the central question, and some compellingly interesting themes (e.g. the specifically French relationship between Republican values and family) tantalizingly appear but are never developed. Overall, though, this is a valuable book on a subject that is of lived as well as academic concern to most of us, and one thatprovides many fine thematic studies of particular genres, artists, and individual works. University of Leeds Diana Holmes Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. By Chris Bongie. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2008. xv+412 pp. ?25. ISBN 978-1-84631-142-0. Chris Bongie's openly polemical volume isby turns profound in its insights,meti culous in itsarchival 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), leftoff, incorporating the dramatic events inHaiti's recent political history, the various self-serving French commemorative events for the bicentenary ofHaitian independence, and the sesquicentenary of the abolition of slavery, themore recentwork of canonical' francophone Caribbean writers (Rene Depestre, Maryse Conde, and Edouard Glissant), Bongie's new translation and edi tion ofVictor Hugo's forgotten early novel on theHaitian revolution, Bug-Jargal, as well as debates of the last decade inpostcolonial studies in terms of itsproblematic 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 inmuch ofwhat goes under the name of postcolonial studies. The place and status of literaturebecomes thekey 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 theHaitian revolution, and thepopular Tow-brow' Martiniquan novelist Tony Delsham, Bongie is doing more than simply challenging a certain literary elitism. One of his con cerns iswith the ways inwhich power ismediated through writing, in various colonial and postcolonial contexts, and particularly within thework 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 revolu tionary ideals of universal freedom and equality. The various ways inwhich those MLR, 105.1, 2010 259 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, inwhich 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 byDerrida, despite several claims of loyalty to deconstructive thinking. To this end, a more serious engagement with Derrida's Politics ofFriendship, and his latewritings on democracy andMessianicity...