Narrating (Post) Colonial Caribbean Spaces: Geographies of Power and Resistance in Martinique and Guadeloupe

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Narrating (Post) Colonial Caribbean Spaces: Geographies of Power and Resistance in Martinique and Guadeloupe Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2012 Narrating (Post) Colonial Space: Geographies of Power and Resistance in Martinique and Guadeloupe Randolph Turnbull III Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES NARRATING (POST) COLONIAL SPACE: GEOGRAPHIES OF POWER AND RESISTANCE IN MARTINIQUE AND GUADELOUPE By RANDOLPH TURNBULL III A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2012 Randolph Turnbull III defended this dissertation on October 29, 2012. The members of the supervisory committee were: Jose Gomariz Professor Directing Dissertation Rafe Blaufarb University Representative Alec Hargreaves Committee Member Aimée Boutin Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii For all those who’ve loved and supported me through this process. A special word of gratitude to Verna Araujo. You were the one who changed my life by instilling in me a love for the French language. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The writing of this dissertation is without doubt the single most significant academic accomplishment I have ever achieved. This would not be possible without the love, support, guidance, and patience of many people. Special thanks are extended to Dr. Gomariz, my major professor, and to my other committee members for their patience and words of encouragement during this process. I would like to offer a special word of thanks and love to the family and friends who supported me through this project and especially to my wife Sharisse for her patience during this isolating process. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 1. CHAPTER ONE: THE GEOGRAPHY OF COLONIAL POWER ........................................4 2. CHAPTER TWO: THE GEOGRAPHY OF RESISTANCE ................................................45 3. CHAPTER THREE: POWER AND RESISTANCE; URBAN GEOGRAPHY IN THE CARIBBEAN ................................................................................................................................83 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................110 NOTES .........................................................................................................................................113 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................114 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................120 v ABSTRACT This work analyzes the intersections between the notions of geography, power, and resistance, specifically focusing on how these concepts produce and are productive of one another within Francophone Caribbean narratives. Focusing on the works of authors such as Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre and Édouard Glissant while drawing upon the insights offered by Michel Foucault’s discussion on Power, this project analyzes the role of geography and space, from a colonial and post colonial perspective, in shaping and facilitating the colonial domination and exploitation of subaltern groups for economic gain in plantation society. The study then continues to identify the extent to which particular geographic spaces are represented in the narratives as enabling subaltern groups to resist colonial power structures. These geographies of resistance, as argued in this study, function as the spatial antithesis of the Caribbean plantation. Finally, the study concludes by seeking to understand the manner in which the narratives analyzed here represent geographical space as permitting and approach to equilibrium with regards to the manifestations of the notions of power and resistance. vi INTRODUCTION The concepts of place, geography, power, and resistance occupy a central role in the literature of early missionary settlers and contemporary fiction writers from the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Through their multi-volume works, missionaries such as Père Labat (1663-1738) and Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre (1610-1687), and contemporary authors such as Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) and Marie-Noëlle Recoque present these notions as being of considerable significance to the development and evolution of life in these islands societies. It is the purpose of this study to examine how the literary perspective of the colonial authors and post-colonial writers represent the connections between notions of power, resistance, and geography within the plantation societies of the French Caribbean. Each sides of the same coin, the perspectives of colonial and post-colonial authors are valuable in forming a complete understanding of the colonial venture. A number of works by a variety of researchers have helped to both shape and inform the approach that this research has taken. Richard Phillip’s Sex, Politics and Empire: A Postcolonial Geography (2006), for example, elucidated many aspects of French plantation society while suggesting that the connections between geography and post colonialism may be more significant than they appear. Works such as Lucien Pétraud’s Slavery in the French Antilles before 1789 (1897), Gabriel Debien’s Slavery in the French Antilles in the 17th and 18th Centuries (1974), and Robert Stein’s The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century (1988), have helped to clearly define the historical context in which plantation societies evolved while offering additional insight into socio-cultural, juridical, religious, and economic factors that impacted that evolution. Richard Price’s Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1979) provided important research that helped to further link the notions of geography and resistance in a Caribbean colonial context. Pedro Welch’s Slave Society in the City: Bridgetown Barbados 1680-1834 (2003), though it treats slave society within the British Caribbean, contributed a general framework for understanding the differences between urban and rural contexts of slavery while Anne Perotin-Dumon’s Island Cities (2000) narrowed these considerations down to a specifically French Caribbean context. While this research draws upon the works of the author’s mentioned above, it builds on their work by using a multidisciplinary approach in reading colonial and postcolonial 1 Francophone narratives in order to gain greater insight into the importance of where in how the French Caribbean is imagined and conceived. This work draws upon the discipline of Human Geography to the extent that this field provides certain considerations for how to imagine both physical and metaphorical space. It then uses a theoretical framework that reaches across the centuries to combine the insights of Hegel (1770-1831), Foucault (1926-1984), Bentham (1748- 1832), and Fanon (1925-1961) in advancing its arguments. French Caribbean space, it is argued, can be seen across the selection of narratives analyzed in this work to correspond to Hegel’s notion that life and its various aspects can be understood as either corresponding to the notion of the thesis (the principal or primary), the antithesis (the opposite of the principal), and the synthesis (a union of the two). This research then applies Michel Foucault’s insights to establish the notions of power (thesis) and resistance (antithesis) as the distinguishing factors between the French Caribbean geographies of the plantation, forests/mountains, and cities. This examination of spatial representation will reveal that in both the colonial perspective of missionary settlers and the imagined perspective of postcolonial authors the three categories: plantations, forests/mountains, and island cities are depicted as enabling, producing, and facilitating dynamics of either power or resistance. That is to say, both power and resistance are demonstrated by texts analyzed here to be produced by and productive of geographies. The first chapter of this work will argue that the literature of early settlers and postcolonial fiction writers represent the geographical space of the plantation as the thesis, being produced by, and productive of French colonial power. As a space, the origins of which were intimately connected to the French colonial goal of economic gain, the plantation is definitely a space of power and production. In addition, certain infrastructure and practices that were unique to the plantation served as structures or mechanisms of power; reinforcing French domination and producing the discourse of social superiority of white French settlers over other cultural groups, namely peoples of African descent. The plantation brought into play relationships between groups such as laborers (French engagés, Carib/Arawak natives, Africans) and plantation masters/owners and created situations where power was put into action, exercised by some on others. With regards to the notion of resistance,
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