Destination, Destiny, and Paracolonial Aesthetics in le Clézio’s Révolutions

Abstract

The intimate and multifaceted relation between colonial destination and the concept of historical destiny in J.M.G. Le Clézio's 2003 novel Révolutions (Paris: Gallimard, 2003) reveals the interconnectedness of seemingly opposing worldviews, such as anthropocentric and ecocentric, or colonial and postcolonial. This complex relation is indicative of a dual phenomenon I call paracolonial aesthetics. On the one hand, it refers to the revival, resurgence, and remanence of the colonial, while, on the other hand, it addresses its re-imagining, revisiting, and reassessment. Both of these gestures are fraught simultaneously with danger and opportunity since they entail the custodial task of maintaining and even rehabilitating colonial memory in the material, sensorial, and emotional sense, as well as the responsibility to cast a critical gaze upon the re(-)membered past.

Keywords:

• Colonial Destination
• Historical Destiny
• Paracolonial Aesthetics

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Notes on contributors

Oana Panaïté

Oana Panaïté is Associate Professor of French at Indiana University—Bloomington. She is the author of Des littératures-mondes en français. Écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine (Rodopi, 2012) and the editor of a special issue of the journal L’Esprit créateur on the topic “La Pensée littéraire/The Idea of Literature.” She is currently working on a monograph on narratives of colonial fortune in contemporary fiction and editing two volumes on the pedagogical and theoretical connections between canonical French and contemporary Francophone texts.