The Author as Cannibal: Rewriting in Francophone Literature as a Postcolonial Genre, 1969–1995. By Felisa Vergara Reynolds

Abstract

In this monograph, Felisa Vergara Reynolds develops a compelling framework for analysing postcolonial francophone literature — ‘literary cannibalism’ — to foreground the political dimensions of novels that explicitly rewrite canonical works from hegemonic cultures. Through Vergara Reynolds’s new theoretical lens, the pejorative label traditionally used to justify colonization and denigrate indigenous peoples is transformed into a mode of critique, through which authors may absorb and assimilate imperial canonical works to subvert them and destabilize their supposedly inviolable status. For Vergara Reynolds, the postcolonial text that devours another literary work constitutes a form of ‘postcolonial revolt’ (p. 31) that surpasses the dialogic relation of intertextuality underpinning all literary creation. While this gesture of re-inscription raises the question of colonial mimicry, Vergara Reynolds convincingly argues that literary cannibalism is no mere submissive imitation but, rather, ‘an act of menace’ (p. 27; original emphasis) that actively seeks to upend dominant power relations within a canonical text to restore agency to marginalized or oppressed characters. This is exemplified by Aimé Césaire’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623) as Une tempête (1969), in which the author empowers the most oppressed character, Caliban, who vomits out the colonizer in his first act as a free man — an apt metaphor for the liberating effect of literary cannibalism itself. The remaining chapters explore similar instances of literary cannibalism in works from across the former empire — Senegal, Algeria, and Guadeloupe — that all grapple with the implications of writing and publishing in the language of the colonizer, and also contribute distinct approaches to literary cannibalism. For example, Boubacar Boris Diop’s cannibalization of Prosper Mérimée’s Tamango (1829) in Le Temps de Tamango (1981) parallels Césaire’s critique of departmentalization to denounce the residual colonialism in post-independence Senegal, but Vergara Reynolds contends that Diop’s method of literary cannibalism also decolonizes the novel. In L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), Assia Djebar shifts our focus to imperial historiography as the source of literary cannibalism, constructing her novel as a means of restoring silenced female voices and writing women of colour back into history. Finally, a distinct aspect of this book that sets it apart from traditional literary criticism is the fact that Vergara Reynolds has drawn her theorization from a close working relationship with Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé, which has allowed for a more collaborative development of the concept of literary cannibalism. The last chapter draws on personal interviews with Condé on the rewriting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) into La Migration des cœurs (1995), during which the author reflects on literary cannibalism’s emancipatory potential within the narrative. While this monograph focuses on francophone authors of the former French colonial empire, Vergara Reynolds’s elaboration of literary cannibalism will certainly be of interest to other scholars of global postcolonial literatures: as Oswald de Andrade declared in the Manifesto antropófago (1928), ‘Only cannibalism unites us.’