Uses and Misconceptions of Caribbean Thought

translated from the French by Rebecca Arnold

My final prayer: O my body, always make me a man who questions!
(Mon ultime prière : O mon corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge!)
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs)

these thoughts are also a cargo. they migrate without ever arriving at a store. thoughts know no store
are unsure and sometimes dissemble. . . . the letters syncopate atop the screen but are backspaced. The             is rewritten
—Kaie Kellough, Magnetic Equator

To imagine the future of Black communities, despite everything, beyond the devastation of the Middle Passage, is to me a matter of looking to the past, to the archive of their thought and creativity, in which time and again their humanity has been inscribed, all too often under circumstances in which it had been denied or erased. This resilient imaginary and thought, this literature, is the precious legacy—a textual body, a speculative body encompassing all inquiries—that authorizes us to consider ourselves subjects in the face of history, to articulate the triumphant struggle for our freedom or to repatriate our ancestral memories, rich in their self-determining potential. At a time when minority Black studies are rightfully beginning to occupy space in North American and European institutions, perhaps it is time we also reflect on the future of our archive and what it will become.

Using the Caribbean Canadian poet Kaie Kellough’s verses above as a pretext, I would like to linger for a moment on these cargo thoughts, thoughts in migration, that disassemble.¹ It is this sense of movement and disassembly that interests me insofar as I would like to propose, with a certain urgency, a reflection that articulates itself at a particular moment in intellectual history, in which not only are racial issues and antiracist activism proliferating in the West with some agitation, but imaginaries and reflections originating in the Caribbean are being invoked, in an uncertain movement which disarticulates them on the stage of these discourses, distancing them, at times grievously, from their circumstances of origin.² My desire to revisit these thinkers now stems from an explicit intent to recall, in the following essay, the contexts of their reflections, to repatriate towards its profound intention a sumptuous thought, of great breadth, which today is commonly dissociated from its source of incarnation and concrete purposes. In this context of reclaiming the body and mind, I believe it is pertinent to begin with a discussion of Fanon, who explored the body, its movement and its place in his writing. When I speak of the body, I am of course referring to the Black body, a body which is also my own as I write these lines; and when I speak of the Caribbean, it is certainly not in a peripheral manner, but as the decisive point of origin of my speech, of my chaos and personal dissent; in other words, I speak from Haïti.

These distinguishing traits are not trivial. They do not constitute a mere indication of origins—nor would that be inconsequential in and of itself—but rather a meaningful epistemological position, in the sense that Caribbean thought is deeply connected to its history and to attempts to transcend this history branded by the irons of colonization and slavery, in which the radical resolution of these abuses and conflicts resulted, at least in our case (the Haitian case), in the epistemological rupture that constituted the creation of the Haitian nation-state, elevating Black bodies from nonhuman to human and founding the nation on such an acknowledgement. As such, these defining elements shape my origin story yet also emerge as a series of sturdy anchor points on which to moor my argument. They offer me a center and a fulcrum. Though I have lived in Quebec for many years, it was Haitian schools and universities that formed me; Haitian intellectuals, some of them highly esteemed professors, were among my earliest reading. It is clearly from this intellectual tradition—which includes, among others, Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Stéphen Alexis, Magloire-Saint-Aude, Virginie Sampeur, Jean Price-Mars, Marie-Thérèse Colimon Hall, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, Thomas Madiou, Yanick Lahens, Marie Vieux Chauvet, and Laënnec Hurbon—that I originate. My own intellectual work, in which, drawing on the contemporary Haitian literary corpus, I encourage a reflection on literary theory and creation, observing what these disciplines or practices teach us about the contemporary world, is undoubtedly rooted in this precious heritage.³

This being said, it is not as “the bearer of absolute truths” that I write today but rather from a place of tentative uncertainty.⁴ Drawing on this predefined foundation, I conversely propose here ideas that gradually convene, but are not as of yet fully formed, reflecting an uneasiness that would not be repudiated by the proponents of critical inquiry or trace thought.⁵ These reflections stem from a contemporary phenomenon that provokes in me a sense of surprise, of concern, each time it occurs in public discourse. It involves the appropriation, the hijacking, of Caribbean thinkers—particularly those from the French Antilles, such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Édouard Glissant, to name but a few—in rhetoric that seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the struggles of those who, for the sake of brevity, I will refer to as their descendants. Fanon to disparage Black youth daring to define themselves, virtue signaling via Césaire to defend the unrestricted use of the word nègre, moral panic draped in Glissant surrounding notions of “communitarianism”: examples abound in both Quebec and France. While I can identify the seeds of these ideas in the works of the illustrious thinkers, each time such appropriation occurs I grapple with a profound sense of dismay. These are important ideas that I studied closely during the period when I was forming my identity as an undergraduate student, and I must say that, from the non-Western vantage point that Haïti allowed, I never would have imagined that they could be applied in such ways, re-interpretations that unflinchingly turn them against the communities whose emancipation or liberation they had, each in their own imperfect way, tirelessly thought, envisioned, and dreamed of.

How could this be? Why do these ideas invert themselves so, in a radical turn against their own objectives? Why is this happening with such regularity? Are these theories being misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted? How have they come to be so unrecognizable? What has been the role, the function, of such appropriations that have rendered them so “foreign to themselves” in the Western or colonial context? These are questions that I seek to explore in light of this Caribbean and, more specifically, Haitian horizon, the vantage point from which my reflections draw their critical value. It is thus not so much a new reading that I propose but a Haitian literary perspective that I consider important to advance, since I believe it has the potential to restore these imaginaries and reflections to themselves, not in the sense of a certain orthodoxy which would be inappropriate to apply here but rather in the sense of repatriating these ideas towards their spirit, so to speak, as much as to their letter.⁶

It is striking that the entire history of the Caribbean as it exists in the Western imaginary is based on a certain ignorance or series of misunderstandings. Gordon K. Lewis, in his renowned Main Currents in Caribbean Thought, opens with a reflection on Christopher Columbus’s error upon landing in the Caribbean in the fifteenth century, believing he had arrived in India.⁷ It is an incident as well known as it is, in a certain sense, emblematic. It has been established that all colonial discourse regarding the Americas was predicated on a sort of fabrication that decivilized the territories and created races, therefore, on a violent, lethal ideology.⁸ This suggests that colonial discourse is also rooted in an initially accidental, and then increasingly deliberate, falsehood. My aim here is certainly not to absolve the authors of all these harmful reappropriations but rather to examine such misconceptions—enacted with dire consequences and violently upheld for centuries—a bit more closely. The invention of this absolute other, beyond civilization, what Laënnec Hurbon terms “le barbare imaginaire” (the imaginary barbarian), was required to mask a greater barbary, untenable and concrete—colonial barbarianism, executed on the body that has been subjugated, enslaved, or razed by genocidal violence.⁹ I wish to take a closer look at this particular fallacy as it functions not merely against but through the anticolonial or postcolonial theories purported to dismantle it. It is a troubling, yet highly revealing, phenomenon that occurs in the adaptation of these theorists’ work.

(1) An initial observation: Long before the latest problematic articles by contemporary commentators citing, for instance, Fanon’s work to admonish Black youth in Montréal-Nord, or the frequent reprisal of the same Fanon, along with Glissant, to critique the “racialization” of the so-called decolonial left, I had noticed a considerable trend of appropriating anticolonial thinkers for purposes that consistently diverted their ideas from their original purposes. This most often involved the work of French Caribbean authors, perhaps more widely known and accessible. I found it odd to see Fanon referenced by a right-wing columnist, or even by more serious figures, to critique a pseudo-racial essentialism produced by racialized youth; Césaire to justify the liberal use of the word nègre; and Glissant to critique what is commonly referred to as “identity politics.” To be clear: These appropriations are not all founded on total ignorance or falsehood. They do not simply emerge from nothing. There are indeed aspects of these theorists’ work that explain or justify these interpretations.

(1a) It is true that Fanon critiques essentialism, primarily in the context of the Negritude movement. Fanon was concerned that in the philosophical shift implied by Negritude, racial essentialism would be reinstated, in direct contrast with what he was trying to establish through his own intellectual framework. It is important to recall that his 1952 Black Skin, White Masks was written in reaction to primitive genetic (organogenesis) interpretations of mental illness, based on theories of racial “traits.” Fanon’s ontogenetic, or more precisely sociogenic, approach effectively opposes the attribution of deviant or nondeviant behavior to solely biological factors. (In his humanistic orientation, Fanon went on to write some rather vehement pages denouncing the processes of racialization, which have had the unfortunate merit of inspiring a number of problematic conflations.)

(1b) It is true that Césaire expressed a will to universalize, or resemantize (to use a term currently in vogue), the violent insult of nègre to evoke an elevated, at times idealized, vision of Africa or to invoke the possibility of a Pan-African Black diaspora. We know, for instance, that Césaire was not really opposed—a bit amused, but not opposed—to the White Quebecer Pierre Vallières’s precarious appropriation of the term.

(1c) It is also true that Glissant’s notions of trembling and trace thought challenged static conceptions of identity. As a Martiniquan professor in an American context, Glissant was often, as François Noudelmann puts it, at odds with the genealogical and identity-based approaches of his African American colleagues, quick to reject their premises.¹⁰

(1d) These are all positions—if we set aside Fanon for the moment—that at times inspired the infinite gratitude or largely unsolicited applause of White “universalists” or right-wing pundits in the francophone Western context.

(2) Though I was aware of the existence of these critical moments, points that would ultimately be exploited as “cracks” in these writers’ thinking, I have continuously wondered why it is only these instances of critical oscillation that have been highlighted in these colonial settings. 

(2a) Why the Fanon who critiques Negritude rather than he who grows virulent in evoking the violence of colonialism or what is necessary, in turn, to decolonize the “wretched of the Earth”? Let us recall these passages:

“At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence.”¹¹

“Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History. It infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of [people], with a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is truly the creation of new [people]. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power: The ‘thing’ colonized becomes [human] through the very process of liberation.”¹²

(2b) Why the Césaire who supports Vallières (in all likelihood, a result of a lack of awareness of the Canadian or Québécois context or of the Black condition in these societies) rather than he who knew full well that the reappropriation of the “N-word” in societies still marked by colonialism could only be incomplete; he who wrote, “Le nègre vous emmerde” (the nègre tells you to go to Hell), in the full sense of the insult.¹³

“What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.

“Colonization: bridgehead in a campaign to civilize barbarism, from which there may emerge at any moment, the negation of civilization, pure and simple.”¹⁴

(2c) Why the Glissant who perceived a fixedness to identity in contradiction with his theory of creolization rather than he who, far more radical, wrote that the chaos- world, above all, refutes the “Western claim to universality”?¹⁵

(2d) What if the aspects of these theorists’ work that interest the authors of these brazen distortions most are precisely those that least threaten coloniality or indirectly allow it to persist? Those that, to the contrary, absolve the colonial order, elevating it to a state of neutrality or universality? That ultimately defuse the revolutionary drive or efforts of perpetually colonized subjects?

(3) What is striking is that these misappropriations exclude precisely the ideas that made these thinkers appealing and readable to my university peers and me, as young Haitians, existing through this “location of our culture” in the quintessential space that had transcended colonial systems definitively: Haïti.¹⁶ So definitively that, even having access to films or narratives portraying the Black condition in the United States, even possessing an awareness of the racial dynamics that existed in the West, we could hardly imagine—by which I mean these dynamics were rightfully beyond our imagination—that the colonial violence we had read about in books still persisted to such an extent in other parts of the world, in spaces that had not known a true rupture with colonization. In other words—these appropriations omit the elements that indicate the “after” or “beyond” coloniality, what makes these thinkers intellectuals of liberation.

(4) For us, as Haitian students, the critical moments I have highlighted did not contradict the essence of their philosophies. The moments were not turning points, meaning, they did not imply a conceptual failure nor a vulnerability to distortion. They were simply evidence of breadth, rigor, and complexity. They warned us, in our decolonized space, of the perils and dangers of ever-imperfect elaborations rooted in the premises of colonial orders. I can assure you that it would therefore never have crossed our minds that descendants of the colonizing group or those speaking on its behalf could hijack these critical moments to perform an execution, a silencing, or repossession of power over Black populations appealing for freedom and dignity. Or that, in a more “banal” sense, these liberating philosophies could be used to reassure the dominant group of their “freedom of thought or expression,” their intellectual superiority (still) or their incontestable centrality to every discussion on every subject!¹⁷

(5) This is why, time and again, these appropriations have shocked and infuriated me. But because shock and disbelief are not particularly productive in the long term, a bit of reflection was in order.

(6) On examining the foundations of these uses, which I would ultimately qualify as racist, of anticolonial, thought, I am beginning to identify a series of operations that I would like to take the time to render explicit here. Through repeated observation, these operations began to feel familiar, since I was compelled to reflect on issues of appropriation in the art world a few years ago, and the commonalities are striking.¹⁸ There are four fundamental operations at play when these exploitative appropriations occur; they are not always all present at once:

(6a) A process of isolation/decontextualization: These are two contiguous, yet distinct, phenomena. A single idea is separated from the work or worldview of the intellectual in question as a whole, only to be cited in a repetitive, isolated manner. As a result, the original context and the “host” context of the idea are erased.

(6b) A “misconception” emerges, which is then meticulously maintained: This operation relies on a misinterpretation or the effects of semantic proximity, such as paronomasias (creoleness/creolization; nègre/négritude, etc.) or ignorance of the breadth of the author’s ideas.

(6c) And perhaps the most important point, A major deviation from the target audience of the original work: These are texts that often accompanied, even functioned as catalysts for, the consciousness-raising of their authors in their own processes of personal emancipation, who then channeled this insight to address oppressed peoples, beginning with their own. In this case, however, the ideas are repurposed to primarily address the White/Western majorities of these locations. When the audience changes, so too does the message.

(6d) A radical shift in or even reversal of objective: The most caricaturing, the most scandalous (but alas, also the most common) being those cases when texts intended to provoke thought and promote the liberation of massively oppressed populations are used to perpetuate, through various strategies, this oppression or to reject movements of anger or revolt.

(7) There is clearly a sort of carefully crafted confusion that robs these texts of themselves and plainly distorts their meaning and purposes. Just as certain cultural symbols are appropriated and trivialized as fashion accessories, just as the letter opposes the spirit.¹⁹

(8) I believe that what enables these unsettling appropriations of Caribbean or Black intellectual traditions is the very structure of sites of expression of dominant discourse (such as the written press) or the very structure of centers of knowledge such as universities. These are settings that are still haunted by colonialism and White supremacy, and they fully intend to continue exercising power, even through the pacification of anticolonial thought. It is striking that in terms of enunciation, of the performativity of language, the pursued objective is always to suppress the aspirations or claims—at times clumsy, at times unintellectual—of the dominated groups. Clumsy and unintellectual precisely because these groups have been systematically excluded from sites of power or “knowledge,” even when their readings of such appropriations are often both visceral and absolutely correct.

(9) Yet these “new barbarians” who haunt the Ivory Tower bear something else: the experiential knowledge of their bodies, relentlessly racialized by Western society, the same knowledge, more or less the same experience, that drove Fanon to write Black Skin, White Masks, Césaire to write Notebook of a Return to My Native Country, Glissant to write Caribbean Discourse or “Chaos-World, Oral and Written.”²⁰ The essential knowledge of the Black body in Western societies that led Fanon to conclude his brilliant essay by charging this same body with the following pledge: “My final prayer: O my body, always make me a man who questions!”²¹ 

(10) Further reflection is needed to interrogate the manner in which colonial ideology manages to perpetuate itself even through the (distorted) voice of the major Caribbean anticolonial texts. As though it possessed the ability to appraise their contradictions and cracks, identifying a foothold from which to invert them like a glove. As though all we retained of Fanon were his enthusiasm for electroshock therapy or his misogyny, of Césaire, only his apparent submission to the colonial order through the departmentalization of the Overseas Territories, rather than these theorists’ most radical, trailblazing achievements, what is most central to their legacies, most revolutionary.

(11) As though, through these operations, which Haitian scholars have largely evaded for profound reasons that I will address elsewhere, there has been a concerted effort to introduce “White thought” to the conversation, to sneak it into the gaps left open by these theories’ critical moments in order to restore the colonial order, gleaming and intact, to reinforce forms of universalism that are nothing more than smoke and mirrors and “claims to Sameness.”²² It is true that the production of colonialist discourse, as a dominant ideology, must be constant, its semantic turbulence frenetic, in order to exert a violence that nothing can justify. Colonial discourse, as Fanon once said, is nothing but violence. It relies on an ongoing process of erasure and denial.

(12) We must therefore constantly assess the cost of disseminating or displacing these sumptuous, courageous ideas, both in their words and in their aims, in academic spaces in order for them to be preserved and not invert themselves or crystallize, pillars of salt in the Western context, profoundly divorced from their objects and aims through a separation of intention from letter, structure from function. 

(13) I believe care must be taken to ensure these ideas are not reduced to mere lines of reasoning, to rhetorical exercises disassociated from the conditions of their production. We must consistently contextualize these theories, modernize them, and exercise critical vigilance in regard to the sites of enunciation where they are reproduced. Let us recall that these ideas aimed first and foremost to restore humanity to subjects who had been deemed inhuman. Only then will it be possible to reconcile these theories with their roots and their vitality, by identifying within them the emancipatory forces to restore their meaning and objectives.

(14) It is therefore necessary to reflect on the complexities and the paradoxes of their dual purposes, as they were all written in contexts of domination. To continually assess their fundamental goals and methods.

(15) Only then will we succeed in restoring them to their full liberatory potential, recognizing that their value resides far more in their capacity to disrupt than that to extend, at times inadvertently. We can, at the very least, appreciate the scandal it would be to obscure this essential point, through which they “stand up for the first time to say they believe in their humanity”; standing in fixed, opaque, impossible subjects, in which they find, to conclude with a famous poem by Césaire, not their debasement, “comical and ugly,” but their unpacified language, their establishment of true political, poetic subjects, restored to their full humanity, the upward movement that guides them toward their providential “revolvolution.”²³

Postface

In reality, the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed. The task of obtaining redress (by vengeance or by forgiveness) will be taken over by forgetting. No one will redress the wrongs that have been done, but all wrongs will be forgotten. 

—Milan Kundera, The Joke 

This essay, which I have intentionally left unfinished, could conclude with the sublime ascension suggested by Césaire at the end of Notebook of a Return to My Native Country. I would, however, like to acknowledge the psychological hazards, the elements of silence and fatigue where this writing almost failed. It is the fatigue of witnessing the same circumstances of intellectual appropriation and distortion repeat themselves time and again, to absolve some and divert the eternal others from the narrow path that leads them to themselves. In this process, the desire for White innocence becomes all-important, more important than life itself.

The American writer James Baldwin is currently the object of one such violent appropriation in the francophone Western context, particularly in Quebec. And once again, we must resist, but what a tedious burden. It would be useful to explain, for instance, that Baldwin’s support for his Confederate writer friend happened to come at a time when extreme fatigue drove the African-American essayist to seek refuge with his peer.²⁴ The fatigue to the point of exhaustion that shapes discourse and those who produce it is likely also one of the turning points of these liberating philosophies, to which no one is immune. Perhaps one day I too will find myself exhausted. Perhaps then I will say that it’s nobody’s fault, that there’s nothing to be done. I too will believe that a cursory review, a flimsy textual reinterpretation, is enough to settle matters. Perhaps one day, despite everything, my picture will grace the backs of books I never would have written; perhaps my heritage, at its point of fatigue, will be parodied onstage, the better to distract us from our shared humanity.

So it is probably best to make a wish: May my writing firmly assert my resistance, when my body ultimately concedes to fatigue, to pain, to friendship, to hope; may it resist and be solid enough to hold its ground, scavenging the impossible, when faced with the limitations of my humanity; may it reach this liberating space of Black thought, in its diversalité and all its paradoxes, where even unmoored it will be better than me.

Note

The author of this essay has very deliberately chosen not to reference specific cases of intellectual appropriation in order to avoid drawing further attention to them and, most important, to broaden the discussion to several possible configurations.

A codirector of the VersUS Transcultural Laboratory (University of Sherbrooke) and the literary director of the “Martiales” collection, which she founded at les Éditions du Remue-Ménage, Stéphane Martelly is a professor in the Department of Arts, Languages, and Literatures at the University of Sherbrooke. Also an established artist, a translator, and a poet, she holds three specialties in Caribbean literature (Haïti), research-creation, and oral history, specialties in which she has developed numerous courses and seminars. Her most recent publications include the poetry collection Inventaires (Triptyque, 2016); Les Jeux du dissemblable: Folie, marge et féminin en littérature haïtienne contemporaine, a work of Haitian literary criticism and research-creation (Nota Bene, 2016); the fable L’enfant gazelle (Éditions du remue-ménage, 2018), translated by Katia Grubisic as Little Girl Gazelle (Linda Leith, 2020); and the fable Comme un trait / Le fil d’or et d’argent (artist’s book, 2022), which resulted in a multidisciplinary research-creation project. She recently translated Kaie Kellough’s award-winning poetry collection Magnetic Equator, published under the title Équateur magnétique (Triptyque, 2023), for which she won the Cole Foundation Translator Prize, Quebec Writers’ Federation, 2024. Martelly is also a Core member of the Centre for Oral History (COHDS) at Concordia University. Her most recent research-creation project is titled “Mourir est beau: Vie et morts des poètes afrodescendant·es de Amériques” (SSHRC, 2021–23); her latest publication is the poetry collection Mourir est beau (Le Noroît, 2025).

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[1] Kaie Kellough, “kaieteur falls,” in Magnetic Equator (Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2019, 7. On thoughts in migration, see Robert Berrouët-Oriol and Robert Fournier, “L’émergence des écritures migrantes et métisses au Québec,” Québec Studies 14 (1992), 7–22.

[2] On racial issues and antiracist activism in the West, see Norman Ajari, La dignité ou la mort: Éthique et politique de la race (Paris: Découverte, 2019).

[3] See Stéphane Martelly, Les jeux du dissemblable: Folie, marge et féminin en littérature haïtienne contemporaine (Montreal: Nota Bene, 2016).

[4] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 16.

[5] On critical inquiry, see Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 16; on trace thought, see Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 83.

[6] See the Bible (Paul de Tarse ou Saint-Paul Apôtre), Lettre aux Corinthiens 2, verses 3, 6.

[7] See Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thoughts: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492–1900 (1983: repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 1.

[8] See Elsa Dorlin, La matrice de la race (2006; repr., Paris: Découverte, 2009), 14–16.

[9] See Laënnec Hurbon, Le barbare imaginaire (Paris: Cerf, 1988), 1–18.

[10] See Édouard Glissant and François Noudelmann, L’entretien du monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2018), 6.

[11] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (2004; repr., New York: Grove, 2021), 192. Originally published as Les damnés de la terre in 1961.

[12] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 2 (changes and emphasis ours).

[13] Aimé Césaire, as told by Claude Ribbe, Le nègre vous emmerde! Pour Césaire (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2008); and Christian Tortel, “Près de la place d’Italie: ‘Le petit nègre t’emmerde!,’” 1: Le portail des Outre-mer, https://la1ere.francetvinfo.fr/pres-place-italie-petit-negre-t-emmerde- pariscesaire-579407.html.

[14] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review, 2000), 39–40. Originally published as Discours sur le colonialisme in 1955.

[15] Édouard Glissant, “Le chaos-monde, l’oral et l’écrit [The chaos-world, the oral and the written word],” in Ralph Ludwig et al., eds., Écrire la parole de nuit: La nouvelle littérature antillaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 112.

[16] See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994; repr., New York: Routledge, 2004).

[17] On the banal, see Hannah Arendt, Eichmann à Jérusalem: Rapport sur la banalité du mal, trans. A. Guérin (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); originally published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963.

[18] See Johanne Lamoureux, Stéphane Martelly, Caroline Monnet, and Jean-Philippe Uzel, “Appropriation: Table ronde / Appropriation: Panel Discussion,” esse arts + opinions, no. 97 (Autumn 2019): 58–65. 

[19] See St. Augustine, De spiritu et littera, ed. J. D. Burger (Neuchâtel: H. Messeiller, 1951).

[20] Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Country, trans. Mireille Rosello (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2020); originally published as Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in 1939. Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989); originally published as Le discours antillais in 1981.

[21] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2008), 354; Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), 229.

[22] See Glissant, “Le chaos-monde, l’oral et l’écrit.”

[23] Césaire, Notebook, 220, 275, 350.

[24] I speak of Walter Styron.