“Griffus ou non griffus”: Naming, baptism, and global racialized capitalism in Césaire’s La tragédie du roi Christophe

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article extends scholarly analysis of race in imperial capitalism by examining the naming and baptism of formerly enslaved Black people in Aimé Césaire’s 1963 La tragédie du roi Christophe. King Christophe, the protagonist, attempts to give his people a foothold in a world system based on their exploitation by giving names – or griffes (meaning both “claws” and “signatures”) – to his aristocracy in order to bind them and their land to him. The article argues that Christophe resorts to tropes of naming and baptism as sacralizing gestures to establish power structures that will anchor his state against the flow of European-dominated capitalism. The term griffe, however, also refers to a person of mixed race; in a context where both whiteness and racial admixture are suspicious, the pun on griffe problematizes Christophe’s reliance on the power of naming. Christophe’s tragic fallacy is to trust language at the expense of other considerations.