Institutionalized Bodies and “Emerging” Literatures: Reconfiguring Confinement in the Works of Déwé Gorodé and Claudine Jacques Julia L. Frengs As celebrated Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa notes in the essay “Our Sea of Islands,” colonial discourse emphasizing the smallness of the Oceanic islands has transformed the manner in which many scholars and Oceanic peoples have conceptualized their communities for over a century.1 Hau’ofa observes that before the arrival of the “continental men” to the islands, Oceanic peoples viewed their world as an immense expanse of a universe, comprised not only of land surfaces, but also of the surrounding, navigable ocean, as well as the heavens, with specific cosmologies uniting the stars and the planets to the island communities. Hau’ofa insists that the view of the islands as small and remote is, rather, a European construct: “Nineteenth-century imperialism erected boundaries that led to the contraction of Oceania, transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific Island states and territories we know today. People were confined to their tiny spaces, isolated from each other . . . This is the historical basis of the view that our countries are small, poor, and isolated” (34). Certainly, the notion of small islands in a vast ocean limits the worldview and the freedoms of Oceanic communities, and essentially performs the role of reinforcing the neocolonial viewpoint [End Page 293] that the islands depend economically upon Western nations. Hau’ofa warns against the adoption of this perspective, however realistic it may seem, insisting that such a perspective leads to the eventual consignment and perpetual wardship of groups of human beings (31). He encourages Oceanic communities to return to a vision that is “a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships” (31). In this essay I argue that through both a critique and a reconfiguration of confining, or as Michel Foucault might define them, “disciplinary” spaces, both Kanak author Déwé Gorodé and French-born Caledonian writer Claudine Jacques succeed in contributing to “a more holistic perspective” of their communities, and facilitate the process of the liberation of Oceanic bodies from the hegemonic views and institutions that have attempted to regulate them for more than a century. Foucault explains in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison that through discipline, punishment, and surveillance, docile bodies, or subjected and practiced bodies, are produced. Schools, military organizations, prisons, and later hospitals thus become “disciplinary institutions” (139), organizations that practice the subjection of bodies through a “micro-physics of power” (139). Essentially, any institution in which a certain order is to be followed, where bodies are confined in a partitioned space and made to function in a productive and tractable manner, constitutes a “disciplinary space.”2 Gorodé and Jacques write confinement, ironically or perhaps subversively, in order to break free from the political and customary ideologies that circumscribe and define Oceanic bodies. Their varied representations of institutionalized bodies, quite different from Foucault’s ideas of docile or tractable bodies, enable a critique of these practices, and disentangle Oceanic bodies from limited and stereotyped perspectives. More importantly, the authors appropriate the notion of confinement in order to create an overture toward the Other, as well as to carve out a more open space for the reception of the “emerging” literature of the region.3 Gorodé and Jacques appropriate the confining spaces of such [End Page 294] colonial institutions to create spaces in their literary works in which an encounter with the Other is, while perhaps never perfectly harmonious, at least non-threatening and indicates a potential of entrance into dialogue between vastly distinct communities. When considering the notion of subjected bodies and “disciplinary spaces” as seen through Western perspectives, one might perceive the island communities of Oceania as markedly confined or institutionalized, due to the geographic and economic situations of the Oceanic islands and the history of colonialism and neocolonialism within the region. The history of the French-speaking Kanaky/New Caledonia, especially, is rife with stories of confinement.4 Annexed by the French in 1853, the Pacific archipelago became a penal colony, to which mainland France sent more than 200,000 criminals and political prisoners between the years of...
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May 23, 2024
Abraão Lincoln Ferreira Costa 
Open Access
