The nineteenth-century Francophone literatures of Haiti and Louisiana are often dismissed as pale imitations of literary trends in metropolitan France. This study revisits these literatures and explores how Creole writers used borrowed ideas and imitated styles to assemble "relational" Creole identities. Two interrelated spiritual practices-the mid-century craze for "table turning" commonly known as modern Spiritualism, and the syncretistic New World religion Vodou-structured these writers' mimetic methods, enabling them to speak as, and thereby subvert the hegemony of, their cultural forebears.
In France, the mid-century interest in Spiritualism provided French fantastic literature with a useful system for producing the many "revenants" that populate fantastic fiction. These tales also reveal Spiritualism's larger role as a model for trans-Atlantic cultural production, and demonstrate metropolitan anxiety about the exotic colonial Other. In a similar way, Victor Hugo, confronted by the destabilizing possibility of a polyvocal au-delà, found it necessary to defend his singular visionary genius from the polluting voices of the spirits.
In Louisiana, Spiritualism gave free-black poets a tool to channel and challenge the voices of their literary heroes in France. In the mouths of these Creole copyists, the singular Romantic subjectivity that Hugo sought to defend became splintered and distorted, allowing them to construct a hybrid identity by adopting calqued literary voices.
In a similar way the Haitian Vodou adept served as a vessel for the diverse deities that displaced his or her personality. Haiti's mimetic literature plays on the Vodou ritual practice of possession as it copies European models. Thus what Jean Price-Mars famously described as Haiti's literary Bovarism is better understood as a nascent literary hybridity.
The Spiritualist séance and the Vodou ceremony enabled adepts to harness the power and authority of the great figures of Western culture by exploiting the portability of their voices. In this way, the nineteenth-century literatures of Francophone Haiti and Louisiana are not pale imitations of Hugo and other French models; they are failed imitations--copies that deviate from their models in order to open up a space for a provisional, relational Creole identity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-11152006-152550 |
| Date | 17 November 2006 |
| Creators | Duplantier, Jean-Marc Allard |
| Contributors | Pius Ngandu, Jim Borck, John Protevi, Jack Yeager, Nathaniel Wing |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-11152006-152550/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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