BONGIE, Chris, Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press (Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines), 2008, 352 p.
ISBN 9781846311420
RÉSUMÉ
In this timely contribution to debates about the future ofpostcolonial theory groundbreaking scholar Chris Bongie explores thetroubled relationship between postcolonial theory and ‘politics', bothin the sense of a radical, revolutionary politics associated withanti-colonial struggle, and the almost inevitable implication ofliterary writers in institutional discourses of power. The book buildsdirectly on Bongie's Islands and Exiles (Stanford UP, 1998),which was described by the eminent Caribbeanist Peter Hulme as a bookthat “may well be the greatest single contribution yet to expanding thefield of postcolonial studies.”
Bongie explores thecommemoration and commodification of the post/colonial using earlynineteenth-century Caribbean texts alongside contemporary works. TakingHaiti as a key example he writes lucidly of the processes by whichHaiti's world-historical revolution has been commemorated both in thecolonial era and in our own postcolonial age—an age in which it isincreasingly difficult to separate the reality of memories ofanti-colonial resistance from the processes of commodification throughwhich alone those memories can now be thought.
Never less than stimulating and frequently controversial, Friends and Enemiesis likely to provoke new debates among scholars of postcolonial theory,Caribbean studies, francophone literature and culture, and nineteenthcentury French studies.