Colonial education imposed spurious French ancestry that buried real lineage in nonhistory

Evidence

Brought at the age of ten to Fort-de-France, Glissant received the best of French colonial education at the Lycée Schoelcher, where Aimé Césaire was the “prof” of modern languages. Like other children in the colonies dependent on France, he too had to learn about “nos ancêtres les gaulois”-those spurious ancestors who had somehow buried the genetic ancestors in nonhistory. He also read the same “classics” of Western literature, probably encountering what he describes as the great book of Mediterranean intelligence, the Odyssey, at precisely the same moment in his development as every French schoolboy in the Métropole. And, like other intellectually promising youths in the 1940s, prepared to become “more French than the French,” his own odyssey, his errantry, took him from Martinique to pursue education to its farthest reaches-the level of the doctomt d’état-in Paris. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 46

Categorization

• XREF: The imposition of ‘nos ancêtres les gaulois’ is a canonical colonial erasure-of-history case that grounds the reader’s anti-essentialist lineage tracing in concrete biographical material. — connects to: French colonial policy aimed to assimilate colonial peoples into French identity — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2195; Cultural imposition forces colonized subjects to identify against their own ancestry; Colonial schooling forced Glissant to learn spurious French ancestors. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 46
• SEED: A concrete essay angle: how an imposed ‘spurious ancestry’ curriculum in colonies created the very ironic/estranged relation to heritage that later powered creolization theory.

Broader Connections

• Cultural imposition forces colonized subjects to identify against their own ancestry #corroborates (0.85)
• French colonial policy aimed to assimilate colonial peoples into French identity #corroborates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2195