Patrick Chamoiseau and the Limits of the Aesthetics of Resistance

Abstract

It would seem paradoxical to situate work of Patrick Chamoiseau, militant Martinican writer, in context of French regionalism, a conservative cultural movement in France that defended languages and traditions from French provinces. First, a long period separates French regionalism from creolite movement, French Caribbean literary movement that emerged in wake of publication of Chamoiseau's 1986 groundbreaking work Chronique des sept miseres. As a literary movement, French regionalism was known for its patriotism and its aim to celebrate customs, landscape, and languages of regions. Its heyday, which extended from belle epoque to entre-deux-guerres, roughly from 1920s to 1930s, came some forty years before creolite. Seemingly, no historical continuity can be drawn between these two literary movements. Arguably, it would be equally difficult to draw any intellectual continuity between these liter - ary schools. The underlying ideology of French regionalism and creolite could not, on face of it, be more different. The former expressed desire to purify and renew nation by grounding French identity in soil (terroir). It found literary inspiration in rural space of heartland (petit pays), in ancestral way of life, or in psychology of popular classes. For French regionalist writers, true Frenchness could be found only in old moral values and untarnished local traditions of people of France. The emphasis on native traditions was so strong in regional- ism that many considered it to be the official doctrine of National Revolution, cultural reform of France undertaken by reactionary Vichy Regime led by Marechal Philippe Petain.