Metropolitan French poetics refuses to acknowledge its Relation to colonized others

Evidence

Our aim here is to advance the notion that, within the limited framework of one language-French-competing to discover the world and dominate it, literary production is partly determined by this discovery, which also transforrns numerous aspects of its poetics; but that there persists, at least as far as French is concerned, a stubborn resistance to anyatternpt at clarifying the matter. … Everythingjust goes along as if, at the moment it entered into the poetics of worldwide Relation, ready to replace the former hegemony, collective thought working within the language chose to cover up its expressive relationship with the other, rather than admit any participation that would not be one of preeminence. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 173

Categorization

• XREF: This aligns with Glissant’s broader thesis of opacity and Relation, and parallels Foucault’s identification of silenced counter-histories within a dominant discourse. — connects to: Structural linguistic asymmetry makes the third-world text unknowable to metropolitan theorists — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 376
• QUESTION: Is French-language colonial literature outside the metropole precisely where Resistance to covering up Relation occurs — the creolizing literatures of the Caribbean?

Broader Connections

• Structural linguistic asymmetry makes the third-world text unknowable to metropolitan theorists #expands (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 376