Sen on Redfield

Abstract

Reviewed by: Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana Satadru Sen Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (University of California Press, 2000) In this volume, Peter Redfield examines the relationship between geography, migrants and the imagination in colonial Guiana and European discourse. He asserts that the space center (from which the French Ariane rockets are launched) took shape within a political, economic and discursive landscape inherited from the now-defunct penal colony. Both “grand projects” redefined European perceptions of human limits, relocated bodies in space, and involved the restructuring of nature. Both established hierarchies of race and power. Nevertheless, Redfield points out, there are significant differences between the two uses and representations of tropical space. The penal colony was a closed world which ultimately represented the failure of Europeans to work effectively (i.e., as Europeans) in an alien geography. The space center, on the other hand, is open to those who possess certain ‘universal’ skills, and reflects a successful transformation of nature to suit the racialized European body. The major objective of Redfield’s analysis is to show how the European vision of Guiana underwent a series of incomplete transitions: from an initial optimism, to images of failure, death, and tropical horror, to a new triumphalism and images of a tropical paradise. His study of the space center describes the physical and biological taming of the tropical geography, and the arrival there of a cosmopolitan pool of European scientists, whose mobility is intimately related to a satellite’s-eye view of the ground, in which distances and boundaries are collapsed. He describes, also, the tensions that result from this space-age vision, which tends to convert tropical geography into a permanently endangered zone for metropolitan Europeans to own and protect, and which then denies the legitimacy of relatively earth-bound (“native”) perspectives on local development. The strengths of the study lie in an exceptional analysis of contemporary Guiana. Redfield convincingly demonstrates how the language of colonialism — especially the European assumption of “the destiny of mankind” — is applied to space exploration, and used to justify the extension of metropolitan space programs into tropical geographies. Even as overt colonialism winds down and one set of frontiers closes, others are opened, reopened, and reinvented. We are shown how the transformation of local space through colonial modernization, at the end of the twentieth century, can leave the native as the outsider, and the migrant expert as the insider: one wallowing in heat, torpor, and “authentic” poverty, the other inhabiting an air-conditioned world of privilege and purpose. The major weakness of the study has to do with the penal colony, in which the convicts all but disappear. (The exception is Dreyfus, whose stay on Devil’s Island is discussed at length.) “Listening” to non-literate prisoners is a notoriously difficult enterprise, but scholars like Anand Yang and Clare Anderson, who have worked on British penal colonies in the Indian Ocean, have managed nonetheless to extricate convicts from the colonial records. Redfield does not appear to have tried. This is connected to an apparent reluctance to acknowledge the relevance of non-European perspectives. Redfield tells us that there were substantial numbers of convicts in Guiana from other French colonies, but we are told nothing about how these prisoners may have envisioned the land of their exile. They are reduced, effectively, to the status of colored extras in Hollywood exotica: milling about in the background, but faceless and inarticulate. There are other regrettable lapses. Redfield must know that defining the cultural/racial Self through technology is not peculiarly European, and that colonized elites in “the tropics” have consistently linked technological expertise — including visions of space exploration — to their validity as nations and civilizations. He tells us nothing about medicine in the penal colony, which is surely relevant to a study of the relationship between bodies and geography. There is, moreover, a persistent confusion regarding the meaning of modernity. The culture of mobile, transnational scientists who flit in and out, shaping Guiana’s image as space without a place, is more post-modern than modern. Also, the intriguing distinction that Redfield makes between the purposeful...