Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (review)

Abstract

Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage. FRAN(;OISE VERGES. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999. xx + 394 pp. Frangise Verges concludes her Monsters and Revolutionaries by referring to her object of study, the French Overseas Department of Reunion, as small island. This is an ironic conclusion to an innovative work that places Reunion squarely on the map and its author clearly among the ranks of leading scholars of postcolonial studies. Blurring genres of history, criticism, ethnography, and autobiography, this study tacks back and forth between the Indian Ocean, metropolitan France, and Indochina. Verges unravels more than a century of Creole emancipatory politics, from the abolitionist movement of the mid-nineteenth century, to the call for assimilation and equality of a century later, to the Cold War confrontations of the 1960s. In analyzing this micropolitical history through the language of psychoanalysis and feminist theory, Verges demonstrates how studies of colonizer-colonized relations must take into account a third category: the metis or mixed-race subjects who make up the majority of Reunion's population and serve as anathema to discourses of racial purity and degeneration. A political scientist by training, Verges has followed Lynn Hunt and Michael Rogin in incorporating a psychoanalytic framework into discussions of state power and political movements. In particular, she translates Freud's formulation of a romance into an analytic of the colonial family romance. In the former, as is well known, a child imagines a new set of parents, who are replaced in his [sic] imagination by persons of better birth (p. 4). In the latter, according to Verges' translation, the colonizers invent a single parent, the French state or La Mare-Patrie (that is, the mother-fatherland), to replace the subject's actual mother and father (pp. 4-5). Verges traces how such a myth, with its implications of unpayable debt and dependence, was perpetuated through the medium of revolutionary ideologies of fraternite (brotherhood) and how it was adopted into the various emancipatory discourses of Reunion's Creole abolitionists and assimilationists. As an effect of this paternalist myth, Verges argues, Reunion's mothers and sisters have been the silenced and erased from political discourse. Conversely, the interrelated facts of metissage and France's history of slavery have been disavowed. One must question the applicability of such a set of psychoanalytic theoretical apparati based on an individual ego's development to larger collectivities, beyond its use as allegory or through some mediating theory of a collective unconscious. Neither of these is Verg?-,s' approach. Instead she slides between agentive individuals and abstract totalities attributing to the latter concrete hopes, fears, and anxieties: The narrative of the m6tis as monster and revolutionary was about the fear of the French father dreading, as in a nightmare, the return of an avenging son whom the father might not even recognize at the moment of being struck. …