International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2002

This article uses the postcolonial focus on the situated spaces from which we all read our being, fixed for the moment by the coordinates of gender, race, religion, class, national and ethnic origin and language as a hermeneutic for interrogating tropes of the desert as culturally-situated, thus inevitably limited and partial. Three questions structure this investigation into the cultural and political investments revealed as land becomes landscape. First, how has the desert been constructed historically in diverse ways by not only Christians and Jews, but also by those who lived in the desert, most generally polytheistic and then Muslim nomads? Second, in what ways did this difference in interpretation get played out in the encounter between the colonizer and the people of North Africa? And third, how do these differences continue to structure, at a deeply embedded cultural level, competing postcolonial readings of the desert in North African texts?

The importance of Cixous and Clment to French feminism remains uncontested; however, their use of India in fictional texts, specifically the historical event of decolonization by the British, has hitherto been overlooked. The present article will address this omission. Through the exploration of postcolonial and feminist theory (a central tenet of both being the problematic of the representation of those previously absent from history) the notion of the literary representation of 1947 India within francophone literature will be examined. Accordingly, feminist, historical and postcolonial discourse will be engaged with in order to analyse both writers' use of India. The article will conclude by demonstrating that despite the techniques of criture fminine and postcolonial representations which eschew the binary opposition of the East's other to the West's self, there is a continuity evident in Western literary representations of India (both anglophone and francophone) that transcends the event of political decolonization.

This article analyses the concept of territory in Aim Csaire's poetry specifically in his late books Cadastre and Ferrements. By definition, the concept of territory implies the ideas of identity and nation which are essential for a Caribbean poet. Aim Csaire always combined political conscience with poetical conscience. By invoking the four elements, he invented a real cosmogony with flora and fauna. He also created a new poetical territory where images are subversive and political. This territory is not only re-created geographically but also linguistically. Aim Csaire did not only reshape his own country, the island of Martinique, he also reshaped his adoptive language, metropolitan French. Therefore the poet disorientates the occidental reader with his exotic subversion of French, and he succeeds in appropriating his country and his actual identity.

The identity quest, an abiding motif of francophone literature, is one that takes on a particular urgency in writing from the French Caribbean, both because of the status of the constituent islands as politically dependent Dpartements d'Outre-Mer, and more particularly because of the cultural dependence resulting from their particular history. The slave trade and the colonial history of the region have endowed it with a population that is severed from its origins and has been defined in relation to a dominant, alien regime or, more recently, a lost homeland. The identity question the islands face is intimately bound up with the question of historical perspective. In effect, the choice of cultural allegiance dictates the historical narrative into which the island identity is inscribed and the role of the islands in that narrative. The temptation for the islands to define themselves as liminal, the lost children of the African continent, or taking a walk-on part in the drama of the French republic, has been all the stronger in the absence of a coherent indigenous historical discourse. While the islands are now becoming increasingly aware of the inadequacy of such definitions, for many thinkers and writers from the area the difficulty of finding a viable way forward to political independence springs in no small part from this lack of a unifying historical identity. The role of the creative artist in revealing and establishing an indigenous culture is thus one of vital political importance.