whiteness is quite extraordinary in its presumptuousness and in the obliviousness these writers manifest of the contradiction this presents to their concept of humanity, universal beauty, or brotherhood. It is notable that the fortification of the French race comes through a contact of culture that is not read as a contamination of whiteness, and it is the basis for the “new” man.
The uncomfortable coexistence of progressive ideas of universalism with the overt or covert reliance on racial hierarchies in which white Europeans were superior to the people of the cultures and regions they dominated might find traces in other forms of contradiction or ambiguity in contemporary radical thought in postcolonial, African, and cultural studies. The more successful cases of transcendence of these hierarchies occur when there is a direct engagement and willingness to grapple with these genealogies. It is thus no surprise that the work of Victor Segalen has always been important to Edouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, and even, perhaps less evidently, Frantz Fanon. The enigmatic Segalen, whom we might call a true “exoticist,” embraced the experience of otherness as a way of life and thought. Segalen is often cited as one of the first French writers to use the colonial structure in which he encountered others (his expeditions in China) to actually internalize and represent the perspective of those he embraced. While he is lauded for his poetry (Stèles) or his posthumous novel, René Leys, Segalen, from his early writing, was fascinated by the notion of encounter. Before his romance with China, Segalen went to Tahiti as a doctor in the navy. His novel Les Immémoriaux (The Immemorials, 1907) is notable in the way it manages to estrange Europeans, missionaries, and the entirety of the colonial apparatus in order to embrace the perspective that his nation was intent on erasing. The protagonist, Terii, a native “Maori,” as he calls him, is exiled from his island and, upon his return, confronts a world that has been transformed by the missionaries who brainwash his people: “Sabbath” (sabbat) and “lord” (seigneur) become strange, imposed concepts that his people struggle to incorporate, though they are imposed (Segalen 1921, 27) by these “strangers” (étrangers) with their narrow gestures and crude language (gestes étroits et la rudesse de leur langage) (1921, 35). This early critique by Segalen oriented his resolute departure from the bulk of French exoticist writers, such as Baudelaire, Loti, or Chateaubriand, and was based in his true curiosity about the other, a curiosity that was open to self‐transformation through its encounter with the other.5 Through this romance with the “East,” Segalen quite consciously sought to modify an entire literary trope: that of exoticism. Stèles (1912) testifies to his study of Chinese characters whilst, already in Les Immémoriaux, his attention to Polynesian language and his interest in its nuances to the extent he could postulate them are remarkable. Also remarkable is Segalen’s invention of a rhythm and register of the French language estranged to itself, in his embracing of a Polynesian world view. More generally, white colonial ideology as it is identifiable in the novel of the time was also about self‐transformation, but the ultimate aim was to become a sort of Übermensch, a superior being, one that did not yet exist and was to be brought into being. In Segalen, transformation is sought through openness, an open‐endedness devoid of the specific aims that the genre of the colonial novel established as its essence. The totality of the encounter (and its effects) was, for Segalen, in and of itself the end. The kernel of Edouard Glissant’s (1990) theory of Relation, his concept of Diversity, and the importance of “shock,” in the intellectual encounter as well as a more intractable notion of difference, are all already to be found in Segalen. Drawing attention to Segalen and linking his thought to Glissant’s allows us to bring into relief a different lineage that coexists with the tendencies of the colonial novel and its hierarchies, of exoticism and its underlying inability to transcend the European male subject’s dominating perspective. These colonial structures transfer to the present when we encounter a vague and unconvincing notion of hybridity, where probing reveals that race is often elided via vociferous expression of ethnicity, and where ethnicity also obscures the functioning of class. In colonial hybridity, exemplified by the colonial novel, racial hierarchies were reiterated within a notion of mixing that was always couched in the vocabulary of “culture” (and in academic parlance, “ethnicity”). Our interest in postcolonial versions of hybridity can get beyond the colonial version when we pose the question of genealogy, which would lead to colonial exploitation, slavery, and other forms of subjugation; rape, and the racially inflected hybridity of human beings whose identity questioned the hierarchical categories that made the colony coherent. When hybridity elides these issues to adopt the language of culture alone, it links more directly to colonial hybridity, which has a vested interest in difference to consolidate the colonist’s superiority. It is for these reasons that some anthropological or cultural understandings of hybridity have come under severe critique for toying with pernicious ideas about race, gender, and class without exposing and touching upon the constitutive role of colonial hierarchies and of colonialism itself. Hybridity in a less rigorous version that focuses on “mixing” inadvertently gives new life to tendencies that undergird the version that affirmed and validated colonial culture and the colonial project.
Fluid Hybridities in the Twentieth and Twenty‐First Centuries
The Réunionese writer Monique Boyer’s autobiographical novel Métisse fearlessly probes questions of class and race as they constituted her own family. Boyer gives us a brutal moment in her narrative, which occurs when her mother, on the verge of divorcing her father, calls him a bloody nigger (espèce de nègre) (Boyer 1992, 128). While the mother came from a family of poor whites, the father had a Chinese grandfather and a black grandmother. Boyer is able to extricate herself from the more obvious ways of thinking about this insult. Instead, she understands that these: “[…] n’étaient pas les siens: ils étaient ceux des femmes, des hommes, de tout ce que notre terre avait porté” [“these were not her [mother’s] words: they were those of the women and men, of all that our land had borne”] (Boyer 1992, 28). The narrator’s mother achieves middle‐class status from being a poor white woman through her marriage to the upwardly mobile black fonctionnaire (government servant). The bitter white woman sees her ex‐husband as a “nigger”; she thus endorses colonial hierarchy in which the black man is monstrous. The narrator understands that her mother, Marcelle, had to resort to marrying a black man for her ascent in society: she would not be able to marry above her station in the white community. But although her father Lucien is presented as a victim in the horrific insult her mother throws at him, the narrator shows that her father too was equally restricted by the very same colonial mentality that allowed his wife to insult him. They are seen as participating, and even supporting, colonial culture in their mutual disgust by blackness. When Lucien comes to visit his daughter, he avoids going into the house when there are guests so his daughter need not introduce him: “Je ne voulais pas te faire honte! …. Personne ne saura que ton père est un cafre!” [“I did not want to humiliate you …. Nobody will know that your father is a nigger”] (Boyer 1992, 30). The divorcing parents in the novel show how the different usages of “cafre” by each of the parents disrupt the possibility to separate what the postcolonial critic, Homi Bhabha, terms “the general conditions of language” from “the specific implication” of an utterance (Bhabha 1994, 36). The institutional and performative strategy of Bhabha's hybrid Third Space is collapsed. “The only implication, [the term’s] only coherence, for both the white mother and the black father was the general colonial signification of the uncivilized negro, slave in history, who is culturally and developmentally inferior to the French settler” (Prabhu 2007, 44). The brutality of the moment when the term “nigger” is uttered chases away ambiguity and crashes backward into history to reinstate the concept as the product of colonial domination. This is a reminder that it is not possible to quickly transpose hybridity (or any concept) as it was born as a concept of coloniality into a liberated, utopian hybridity “after” colonialism. While of course the term is not magical and will not recreate the circumstances of colonialism by its simple pronouncement, its coherence, indeed its intelligibility, assures that the discursive structure in which Lucien can be a nègre envelops the speakers through their common understanding of it. Experiencing the effects of the same colonial ordering in the Caribbean,
