Experiments with empire : anthropology and fiction in the French Atlantic
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Experiments with empire : anthropology and fiction in the French Atlantic
(Theory in forms / edited by Nancy Rose Hunt and Achille Mbembe)
Duke University Press, 2019
- : hardcover
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [257]-271) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Experiments with Empire Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of knowing the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods and modes of thought, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire's political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris and filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampate Ba, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, and others, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. It also, Izzo contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Ethnographic Fictions in the French Atlantic 1
1. Ethnographic Didacticism and Africanist Melancholy: Leiris, Hampate Ba, and the Epistemology of Style 17
2. The Director of Modern Life: Jean Rouch's Ethnofiction 55
3. Folkore, Fiction, and Ethnographic Nation Building: Price-Mars, Alexis, Depestre, Laferriere 98
4. Creole Novels and the Ethnographic Production of Literary History: Glissant, Chamoiseau, Confiant 134
5. Speculative Cityscapes and Premillennial Policing: Ethnographies of the Present in Jean-Claude Izzo's Crime Trilogy 169
Conclusion: Empire, Democracy, and Nonsovereign Knowledges 203
Notes 217
Bibliography 257
Index 273
by "Nielsen BookData"